Sea Level rise will significantly impact the livelihoods of coastal communities in the coming century. However, disadvantaged communities may not have the resources to apply for federal funding to build the necessary coastal resilience. My thesis aims to investigate the gap between disadvantaged communities and resilience-focused grant programs. My thesis analyses the demographics of sub-applicants to the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) FY2020 grant cycle using data from the Climate and Environmental Justice Screening Tool (CEJST). My first finding is 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 motivated a qualitative case study on the Washington Coastal Resilience Action Demonstration Project (RAD), where I identified five barriers that may cause or exacerbate the low number of sub-applications from disadvantaged communities: grant information, technical, capacity, financial, and community engagement barrier. My second finding is 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 means that programs like BRIC is starting to have a more holistic selection process. Based on these two findings, I evaluate existing policy recommendations and propose recommendations to address the five barriers that prevents disadvantaged communities from applying to coastal resilience funding.

Calif Chen, UG '23: www.linkedin.com/in/calif-c-835322114