ISCIENCES LLC — Department of Defense STTR Phase I: A17A-T021

Description

Environmental stresses such as droughts, floods, storms, earthquakes, wildfires, pest infestations, volcanic eruptions, and infectious disease vectors are often key contributing factors to defense interventions, including humanitarian response, counter insurgency, and border control. As a result, early phase military planning activities need to incorporate systematic monitoring and forecasting of environmental stress and their impacts on security outcomes. We propose to develop data driven methodology and a multi-stressor framework for vulnerability assessment to provide effective and actionable early warning of disruptive environment-security events for Phase 0 and Phase 1 military planning. This work will: build on earlier work by ISciences and CIESIN/Columbia University to refine and demonstrate an analytical framework for tracing multiple environmental stressors through their impact on human activity and key security outcomes; acquire and integrate multiple classes of data about environmental stressors, socio-economic and political stressors, human geography, and social capacity; demonstrate the ability to forecast major disruptions in agricultural production and electricity generation; and, identify where these sectoral disruptions will lead to larger scale instability such as migration pulses, economic downturns, or political instability. Assuming, sufficient progress to warrant Phase II funding, the additional funding will be used to deploy these capabilities as web-based shared community resource.