RAFT Mission & Goals

The Goal of The RAFT

The goal of the RAFT is to help Virginia’s localities and tribal nations increase their ability to respond to acute and chronic hazards and stressors while also strengthening their economic and social viability. These challenges include flooding, increasing storm hazards, heat, and other emerging issues. Communities in Virginia face daunting challenges affecting individuals, businesses, agriculture, forestry, national security facilities, public health, infrastructure, and economic development.

A critical gap in Virginia is an easy and accessible way to define and measure community resilience. The RAFT attempts to fill this gap.  While it draws ideas for indicators from many other resilience and sustainability report cards to cover environmental, economic, and social resilience, The RAFT does not rely on a community's ability to conduct a self-assessment but instead offers the opportunity for an independent, objective assessment.

The RAFT aims to make the scorecard tool available throughout Virginia to address a variety of new challenges that create new risks for community members, the environment, and local economies.

This website, Task # 92.03 was funded by the Virginia Coastal Zone Management Program at the Department of Environmental Quality through Grant # NA17NOS4190152 
of the U.S. Department of Commerce, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, under the Coastal Zone Management Act of 1972, as amended. The views expressed
herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the U.S. Department of Commerce, NOAA, or any of its subagencies.

This project is currently a partnership between the Institute for Engagement & Negotiation at the University of Virginia, the Institute for Coastal Adaptation and Resilience at Old Dominion University, and the Center for Coastal Studies at Virginia Tech. The former Virginia Coastal Policy Center at the William & Mary Law School participated in this partnership from 2015 until June 2023.

 

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