Projects

The RaSC Frameworks Study analyzes the proliferating landscape of frameworks that guide communities in building resilience and sustainability—such as ISET’s Climate Resilience Framework, UN’s Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, IFRC’s Community Resilience Framework, and TNC’s Community Resilience Building Workshop—to understand the commonalities and unique features, and the contexts in which each is most suited. Study outcomes will inform C-RASC’s efforts to develop the Collaborative Community Resilience Implementation Template, enabling scholars to draw lessons across a range of diverse community-driven case studies. The project database is a first step toward developing a knowledge base that supports both scholarly research on resilience and sustainability practices, and communities seeking advice on frameworks suited to their specific goals and contexts.

The RaSC Policies & Pathways Study investigates whether and how resilience and sustainability are defined as public problems, gain agenda status, and are integrated into public policies and practices in communities thought to have high adaptive capacity: three counties in the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC. The findings of this qualitative analysis will establish foundational understanding of the pathways for building Resilient and Sustainable Communities (RaSCs) despite long-term governance challenges. Factors of particular interest include the influence of extreme weather events, the spread of innovative ideas in the policy community, and the combined impact of shifts in public opinion and electoral turnover.

C-RASC is developing a prototype system to fuse sensor data with hydrogeological knowledge to identify optimal locations for Ethiopian small farmers to drill shallow boreholes for sustainable crop irrigation. If successful, the methodology will assist local communities in drought-prone areas to access water sources without depleting regional water tables. The project represents a collaboration between GMU, Arba Minch University in Ethiopia, and Global MapAid, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to capture data on maps to identify local needs and focus development aid in ways that build community resilience through job creation and poverty reduction.