With climate change amplifying weather extremes, Tufts collaborates with two under-resourced communities at high risk of environmental hazards

Farshid Vahedifard, a professor and the Louis Berger Chair in Civil and Environmental Engineering, is principal investigator on a NASA-funded project that recognizes the importance of prioritizing adaptation strategies for communities "at a clear disadvantage when it comes to the serious impact of climate change.” Photo: Michael Last
Aquinnah, the center of the Wampanoag culture on Martha’s Vineyard, and East Boston may seem to have little in common at first glance. But they share a common concern: How to prepare for the intensifying impact of climate change. Both communities are considered disproportionally at risk from natural hazards and extreme weather—known as geohazards—associated with a warming planet.
What geohazards look like in real time for both communities is dramatic and profoundly disruptive. On Martha’s Vineyard, rising sea levels have flooded cranberry bogs with salt water and battered the colorful cliffs of Aquinnah, sacred to the Wampanoag people.
East Boston, home to a large and diverse immigrant population, has multiple climate concerns. As a low-lying waterfront neighborhood, rising sea levels and storm surges are among them. King tides lap over waterfront barriers and storm surges have pushed around newer waterfront housing and a major shopping plaza. A warming planet also puts East Boston, with the lowest tree cover in Boston, at risk of being an urban heat island as temperatures continue to rise.
Now a NASA-funded initiative that Tufts is co-piloting in collaboration with both communities aims to bring their challenges—and prospective solutions—into sharper focus. The goal is to offer sound science that will help inform action and decision-making to ensure the resilience of these communities to growing risk of geohazards in the face of climate change while promoting equity and environmental justice.
The research team will actively involve local partners in the design of tools used to better understand the problems the communities face and ensure that the solutions are driven by—and respond to—local priorities and interests.

Manlio Mendez, Senior Community Organizer with Neighborhood of Affordable Housing (NOAH), presents an environmental overview of East Boston to the NOAH-Tufts research team at a recent planning meeting. Photo: Philip Giffee
A variety of Earth-imagining technologies will be used to visualize and assess geohazards including land subsidence, landslides, coastal erosion, and flooding, and will be incorporated with a variety of socioeconomic and infrastructure data to help devise solutions.
Tufts will partner with the Wampanoag Tribe on Martha’s Vineyard which stewards and protects that landscape with combined environmental and cultural heritage perspectives., and with East Boston’s nonprofit NOAH, Neighborhood of Affordable Housing, which collaborates with other groups on air pollution reduction measures.
“Communities have different climate-related risk thresholds and different adaptive capacities,” said Farshid Vahedifard, a professor and the Louis Berger Chair in Civil and Environmental Engineering at the School of Engineering and principal investigator on the project.
“We know that if you are a poor community, you will have a lower risk threshold and you struggle to have the resources to recover from environmental and climatic devastation,” he said. “This project recognizes that it’s important to prioritize adaptation strategies for those communities with socioeconomic attributes that put them at a clear disadvantage when it comes to the serious impact of climate change.”
There is a long history of inequity in our infrastructure systems, he said. “Resources and funding typically go to places that have stronger voices than communities that have been historically underserved or are socially vulnerable.”
Philip Giffee, executive director of NOAH, said East Boston is already taking measures to monitor address air pollution generated by nearby Logan Airport, Boston’s largest source of carbon emissions, and from intense car and truck traffic through three major tunnels across the Chelsea Street Bridge. He welcomes the insights and expertise that Tufts can offer.
“We appreciate anybody reaching out to us and on climate issues and trying to help think of what would help or benefit our community,” he said. Sea level rise is indeed a top concern, but he adds that hurricanes are not out of the question.
“We know that what has happened in Florida can happen here,” he said, citing when Hurricane Carol slammed into Providence, Rhode Island, in 1954.
“Any of these impacts of climate change we see in the south can move north,” he said. “We look forward working with Tufts to come up with a model that will help us figure out what we can add to what we’re already doing and provide some sense of predictability.”
Using Community Knowledge
Elaine Donnelly, director of Tufts’ Tisch College Community Research Center, will bring to the project her expertise on community participation strategies that inform outreach, training, and ongoing iterative learning, while also incorporating effective climate-related strategies already in place in each community, such as sea grass planting to protect dunes from erosion.
“Centering community knowledge is critical, so that we can ask the right questions, build our analysis framework, and ultimately develop tools that will be effective long after the project is over,” she said.
One of the interesting things about this project, she added, is how it knits together sophisticated satellite data with place-based knowledge—how people use space, how they think and feel about where they live, their infrastructure needs, and a wide range of economic and social variables.
“It’s exciting to be part of a project that bridges these two sources of information data, to create solutions that will be useful for communities as they face their climate scenarios,” she said.
The project also benefits from complementary strengths of the research team.
Vahedifard, a geotechnical engineer, and Donnelly are joined on the project by Laurie Baise, professor and chair of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and lead investigator in Tufts’ Geohazards Research Lab; Paul Kirshen, a Tufts visiting professor who is an expert in mapping the impact of sea-level rise on coastal communities; and Manoochehr Shirzaei, a Virginia Tech geophysicist who specializes in satellite modeling.
The project, “Integrating Earth Observations Toward Advancing Equitable Resilience to Geohazards in a Changing Climate,” is one of 10 NASA-funded equity and environmental projects that combine geospatial tools with Earth science and socio-economic information to cocreate solutions with community partners.
The Tufts project will use various Earth observations, including synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery from NASA’s NISAR mission, to be launched this year to observe Earth’s land and ice-covered surfaces, as well as satellite imagery from the Maxar satellite and the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-1.
Researchers will then integrate that data with things like bridges, roads, and housing to map geohazards and integrate socioeconomic attributes, infrastructure system information, and geohazards susceptibility modeling. The final product involves developing near real-time geospatial tools that seamlessly integrate state-of-the-art NASA Earth observations, geohazards modeling, and socioeconomic attributes. The proposed framework coins a novel metric, Equitable Vulnerability of Communities and Infrastructure to Geohazards Index (E-VOCIG), to inform action and decision-making to advance equitable resilience.
Connect Science with People
Vahedifard, who is also affiliated with the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH) and is a member of the American Society of Civil Engineers’ Committee on America’s Infrastructure (CAI), noted that the project comes at a time when national attention is being paid to equity and justice issues.
In an unprecedented move, the federal government has invested $2 trillion in national infrastructure, a commitment that includes equitable distribution of funds through the Justice40 Initiative.
Still, Vahedifard said, there is the practical problem of how to ensure funding gets where it is intended to go. “You need some methodology, you need robust tools, to be able to provide disadvantaged communities with equal access to funding and the opportunities that it provides,” he said.
“That is what we are hoping to do with this project: to establish sound methodology built on science,” he said. “It’s why I like to frame our climate work as ‘science-informed, community driven.’ We’re pushing state-of-the-art engineering and science at the same time we’re bringing forward the voices that need to be heard.”
Indeed, only by integrating engineering with those perspectives, can researchers find solutions “that resonate with the unique needs of these communities.”
“Every time that I go to the community, I learn more than I do from years of research,” he said. “In academia, we tend to have a screwdriver and then try to find something to open. To me, the process should be the opposite. The process should be to work with people to identify the most dominant problems that they have and then try to develop a research plan to address them.
“No matter how sophisticated our engineering tools are, at the end of the day, if we cannot connect them to communities, there won’t be any impact. If we want to make an impact, we have to connect science with people.”