Flooding associated with climate-change-related sea-level rise poses a serious threat to Oregon's coastal communities. The level of threat increases for those communities located on flood plains or near estuaries.
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) data, sea levels along the Oregon coast may rise as much as 2.4 meters by 2100 under the most extreme conditions. Scenarios such as this could result in devastating flooding for coastal communities.
To mitigate the threat of flooding associated with sea-level rise, communities will need to partner with federal and state agencies to develop, plan and implement natural and engineered solutions to reduce the risk to life and property from floods. That means working together. And working together requires trust.
According to Melissa Haeffner, there is much we don't know about how an individual community member's trust in the federal, tribal, state and local agencies charged with facilitating flood mitigation measures influences decisions on whether to support those efforts. Haeffner is an assistant professor of Environmental Science & Management at Portland State University. Her research combines social and natural sciences to investigate issues related to water and environmental justice more broadly.
Haeffner, Dissanayake, Williams, and McLain recently received a two-year, $299,605 grant from NOAA to study the role of trust in community acceptance of coastal flood mitigation in two municipalities along the Oregon coast: Tillamook and Coos Bay. Haeffner's research team includes co-investigators Sahan Dissanayake and Forest Williams, both economics professors, and Rebecca McLain, director of research at PSU's National Policy Consensus Center.
The study will combine community surveys in Tillamook and Coos Bay, focus groups and game-theory-based experiments to measure how trust in institutions (from federal to local) affects decision-making related to the acceptance of proposed projects and policies intended to mitigate coastal flooding and other factors.
"Federal and state agencies use climate and hydrological models to assess the level of risk coastal communities face from sea-level rise," Haeffner said. "And these communities are people, and we know their thoughts, opinions and actions matter. So, we need to understand human behavior and how people's decision-making processes affect the things we can do to understand and reduce the risks associated with flooding from sea-level rise."
Haeffner anticipates that the data collected will illustrate the complex processes and lived experiences that inform people's decision-making and trust in officials when considering the costs and benefits of supporting flood mitigation proposals.
"The practitioners--people that work for FEMA, the US Geological Survey, and other agencies know that trust is an issue," Haeffner said. "We don't know if that distrust varies between federal, state, or local officials and if we can do anything to change that. This study can provide insights into those challenges."
According to Haeffner, the study could also help scholars, scientists, and practitioners better understand whether issues related to trust and disaster mitigation efforts are transferable to other regions or other disasters. If such is the case, the research team's data and analysis could begin to inform a broader discussion around the relationship between trust and how people make decisions related to disaster preparedness here in Oregon and elsewhere, which could prove vital as federal and state government agencies work with communities to address the threats posed by climate change