Building Equitable Outcomes, BRIC by BRIC: Investigating Barriers to Coastal Resilience Funding Faced by Disadvantaged Communities

Abstract

Climate change is and will continue to be one of the biggest challenges that human society faces this century. Regardless of how much we mitigate greenhouse gas emissions in the short term, sea levels will continue to rise due to past greenhouse gas emissions. These impacts will significantly impact the lives and livelihoods of coastal communities. One of the methods for coastal communities to build resilience is by applying for federal coastal resilience funding. These grant application processes can be long, tedious, and require a technical background. However, disadvantaged communities may not have the resources or capacity to apply for funding to build necessary coastal resilience. My thesis aims to investigate the gap between disadvantaged communities and resilience-focused grant programs. There are four parts to my thesis. Part 1, my literature review, found that disadvantaged communities are disproportionately bearing climate impacts and that there is a lack of literature that studies resilience-focused grant programs in relation to the demographic of its applicants. This motivated Part 2 of my thesis, where I analyzed the demographics of sub-applicants to the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) grant program, using data from the federal Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool (CEJST). My two research questions were: 1) is there a relationship between the demographics of sub-applications’ recipient communities and their likelihood of applying to a resilience-focused grant program? 2) Is there a relationship between the demographics of sub-applications recipient communities and their final sub-application status? There were two findings from this set of questions. Part 2’s first finding focused on the number of sub-applications to FEMA BRIC in relation to their demographic data. I found that there are significantly fewer FEMA BRIC sub-applicants from disadvantaged communities and that the number of sub-applicants from disadvantaged communities decreases as the disadvantage percentage increases. This finding led to Part 3 of my thesis, where I conducted a qualitative case study on the Washington Coastal Resilience Action Demonstration Project (RAD) and identified 5 barriers that may cause or exacerbate the low number of sub-applications from disadvantaged communities. From there, in Part 4, I proposed for states to implement an inter-agency program that fully addresses the 5 barriers identified in Part 3. This policy proposal aims to increase the number of applicants from disadvantaged communities to coastal resilience grant programs. Part 2’s second finding focused on the selection process of resilience-focused grants. From examining the demographic of sub-applicants to the FEMA BRIC, I found that there was a slightly higher percentage of sub-applications from disadvantaged communities that moved forward to“identified for further review” and “selected” in the BRIC selection process. This finding’s implication is that grant application programs like FEMA BRIC are starting to have a more holistic selection process that slightly favors disadvantaged communities. However, slight favor may not be enough to ensure equitable selection outcomes. From this implication, I made my second policy recommendation to push for a grant application selection process that strongly favors sub-applications from disadvantaged communities to compensate for their low number of applications.