"Hurricanes 2017" - Disaster, Risk and Resilience

Last August and September 2017 was marked with unprecedented extreme weather events made of a succession of extreme power hurricanes especially in the Lesser Antilles and the Gulf of Mexico (Irma, Jose, Maria, Harvey). In the face of these sadly extra-ordinary events, the French Ministry for Higher Education, Research and Innovation has decided to commit and launch, with the National Research Agency (ANR), a call for research projects on these phenomena and their environmental and social consequences.

The challenge is to mobilize a scientific community towards disaster issues so that scientific knowledge, expertise and know-how can be usefully associated with public decision-making, with feedback from experience, with improvement of anticipation and management methods for reconstruction. Under such consideration, ANR launches on December 19th a call for research projects called "Hurricanes 2017: Disaster, Risk and Resilience" and will use an accelerated procedure allowing fast implementation of the selected projects. The call is fully part of the climate actions promoted by the "One Planet Summit", held on December 12th, 2017 in Paris, and by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

A call for projects to improve knowledge on extreme natural disasters

The call "Hurricanes 2017: Disaster, Risk and Resilience" is calling for pre-operational projects aimed at contributing to the reconstruction, restoration and adaptation of ecological, economic and social systems to extreme weather hazards with a view to sustainability and resilience. Proposals can cover a broad spectrum including human and social sciences, engineering sciences, life and earth sciences, etc. and focus on the ecological as well as the social, environmental or hydro-climatic dimensions of the event, with a view to understanding the impacts and dynamic interactions, and to concrete proposals for action. The notion of risk must here be considered under its "vulnerability" dimension, not that of the hazard.

The scope of the projects will be limited to the territories of the large region of the West Indies and the Gulf of Mexico, which were devastated by this extra-ordinary weather episode. Preference will be given to projects based on fields presenting highly contrasting geographical, institutional and social situations. Such contrasting contexts should help understand how the forms of organization and functioning affect vulnerability, adaptation and resilience processes to extreme weather hazards (from this point of view the three islands of St. Martin, St. Barthelemy and Dominica form a fairly emblematic ensemble).

Project proposals should be applied and based on the unprecedented "ground truth" of these extreme climate events (ecological and biological, psychological, economic and social, environmental, etc. assessment) and they should be involved (mobilizing the humanities and social sciences in research-actions, research-interventions, participating observations, etc.). Such pre-operational focus is an important selective aspect of the projects.

Candidates' attention is drawn to the fact that a researcher may be at most i) once a coordinator and twice the scientific leader of a partner, or ii) three times involved as the scientific leader of a partner (PRCI included) . All calls of the 2018 Action Plan are concerned. Thus, in the event of submitting to the present call, any coordinator involved in one application or any scientific leader involved in three applications for the year 2018 will have to withdraw from their call to apply to this one.

A device adapted to meet an urgent need for research

An accelerated procedure was especially implemented in order to hasten the project selection and funding (approximately 4 months) without departing from competition and peer evaluation principles that are the basis of ANR’s missions. This is made possible, thanks to a one-step submission and a peer review selection handled by a single ad hoc committee, without the need for external expertise. The purpose of such tool is to mobilize French scientific expertise in the service of extreme problems allowing the acquisition of information and data rare and impossible to acquire in usual situations. It also aims at promoting the production of new scientific results in connection with events which magnitude and frequency are exceptional.