The University of Virginia’s Institute for Environmental Negotiation is partnering with the William & Mary Virginia Coastal Policy Center and Old Dominion University to initiate a multi-university, inter-disciplinary academic partnership to create an assessment and response decision framework to assist coastal communities in evaluating risks to coastal flooding, prioritizing action to increase resilience, and identifying sources of technical assistance and funding. With funding from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation (NFWF), the partnership will pilot The RAFT in 2017 with three coastal communities.
The RAFT will begin by developing and testing a comprehensive community resilience scorecard. While most existing scorecards address environmental resilience, The RAFT will assess environmental, social, and economic resilience. In addition to local and state government advisors and Wetlands Watch, an impressive interdisciplinary academic team will advise the project, including six faculties from the UVA School of Architecture and Department of Environmental Sciences, two from Virginia Tech, and two from William & Mary’s Virginia Institute for Marine Science.
On Monday June 26 from 9:00 to 3:00 a research team from the University of Virginia, Old Dominion University, and the College of William and Mary will be holding a community stakeholders workshop at the Cape Charles Civic Center to demonstrate and receive input on their RAFT resilience planning tool.
The ANPDC provided the team with 19 communities to contact and Cape Charles was selected to participate as one of three pilot communities, one each of a county, a city, and a town.
According to Town Planner Larry DiRe, he has completed the assessment tool, as has the research team.
The meeting on June 26 is to share the RAFT results and provide the community information about the assessment tool and process. The research team is also interested in gathering more community input on various areas of assessment.
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