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Research Priorities
Hazard assessments must be comprehensive, reflecting multiple hazards and their impacts
on diverse economic, social, and ecosystem sectors. Physical processes must first be
assessed and then coupled with improved understanding of the role of social systems and
human behavior in increasing vulnerability or enhancing resilience. This effort will be enhanced
by investigations of ecosystem health (e.g., in response to resource and land use),
impacts of climate change (e.g., sea-level rise, storm intensification and/or concentration),
and direct and indirect risks to public health that broadly influence hazard resilience.
Assessment of hazard impacts and risk that incorporate improved hazard understanding,
effective research translation, communication, and education, are integral for developing a
“risk-wise” population, supporting cost-effective strategies designed to increase resistance,
enhancing resilience to hazards, and promoting avoidance.
Research Priority 5: Understand how hazard events initiate and evolve,
and apply that understanding to improve forecasts of hazard events.
Quantifying future hazard potential requires understanding hazard generation (e.g.,
storms, submarine and coastal landslides, tsunamis, flooding) and past hazard occurrence.
Enhanced hazard forecasts, particularly of storm formation, track, intensity, and associated
waves, surge, and flooding, will support more effective responses to developing hazard
events. Research in this area should focus on process studies and development and validation
of models of hazard generation (e.g., tsunami-source modeling, seafloor-stability
modeling, storm formation) and evolution (e.g., tsunami propagation, storm and inundation
modeling). Probabilistic models and assessments of hazard potential should include
effects of land subsidence and future climate change (e.g., changes in storm intensity or
frequency, sea-level rise, landscape change) on hazard potential and vulnerability.
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Research Priority 6: Understand the response of coastal and marine
systems to natural hazards and apply that understanding to assessments
of future vulnerability to natural hazards.
Natural hazards impact infrastructure directly through alterations to the underlying
landscape and through secondary processes (e.g., slope failures, shoreline change, inlet
formation, coastal erosion, sediment transport, flooding). Natural hazards have significant
impacts on coastal features, such as shorelines, as well as cascading and nonlinear impacts
throughout ecosystems, during and after the hazard event. Natural systems, such as
wetlands and reefs, play a significant role in coastal resilience. Understanding the capacity
of these systems to mitigate the effects of natural hazards, how altering the system (i.e.,
through physical destruction, sediment diversion) affects this capacity, and understanding