Examples and Tools for Planning

Planning Strategically for Adaptive and Resilient Infrastructure Driven by Social Equity (ARISE) in Kansas

In August 2022, ARISE team members embarked on a comprehensive and collaborative process to develop a shared understanding of its strategic vision, mission, and plans for building an interested party-informed resilience-focused research community. The process included an extensive review of the community-based indicators informing the need for such an initiative. Such indicators include disaster and extreme events response in Kansas that currently do not consider resilience preparation and relief efforts through an equity-based lens, whereby historically marginalized communities have fared worse than others. Thus, ARISE aims to address the current disparities by using local communities spanning population and climate gradients to demonstrate case studies in the transportation, energy, and water sectors advancing infrastructure improvement, research and development, and science and technology growth in Kansas.

The vision of ARISE is simple – to “build research capacity in Kansas by creating a new social equity-driven paradigm for resilience analysis that, through a pipeline of community leaders and decision-makers, will transform how communities invest in and manage human and physical infrastructure.” This purpose aligns with the efforts of several partnering stakeholders in the state of Kansas, including alignment with Kansas’ science and technology plan – Smart Infrastructure and Resilience, Precision Agriculture, and Digital Transformation and Automation (pdf) and the Kansas academic research and education infrastructure as driven by the Kansas Board of Regent‘s strategic plan.

The ARISE strategic plan is informed by input from its statewide partners of 17 universities and colleges. ARISE’s strategic plan blueprint is divided into four major themes:

  • Theme 1 – Socially Equitable Interdependent Infrastructure for Resilience Analysis
  • Theme 2 – Scalable Holistic Resilience Evaluation
  • Theme 3 – Infrastructure Enhancement and Decision Levers: Case Studies
  • Theme 4 – Decision-Support Structure. Additionally, team members are involved in sub-theme areas, including Education and Workforce Development, Partnerships and Collaboration, Communication and Dissemination, Sustainability Management, Evaluation, and Assessment.

 

Below are some selected strategies that are identified for supported community engagement activities in this toolkit:

  • Measuring social equity
  • Holistic resilience metric development spanning community capitals
  • Institutional decision-making
  • Transportation management and recovery planning
  • Resilient, safe drinking water delivery
  • Resilient wastewater and stormwater collection
  • Distributed energy resources
  • Understanding and nudging decision-makers
  • Decision-support tool implementation
  • Develop an interdisciplinary data science consortium
  • Train the next generation of ARISE scientists
  • Engage youth and families through educational programming
  • Implement a network of community-engaged research

 

Tools and Resources

 

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