Building Capacity in Barrio Carite Puerto Rico while battling Climate Change: Creating an open ecosystem In order to enhance resilience using satellite data, AI, and Internet literacy to predict disaster and save lives

Kevin W Shockey

Funding Area: Capacity building / Construcción de capacidad

Problem Statement: Citizens in rural communities in Puerto Rico disproportionately suffer loss of life and livelihood from climate change. Supercharged extreme weather events lead to flooding and landslides. Excessive runoff washes away roads and bridges leaving residents stranded. Through political isolation these rural communities have suffered through decades of de-investment. Area citizens are far behind technologically. They likely are unaware of advances in new satellite maps and artificial intelligence. These advances can predict which rivers are most likely to flood and mountain sides are most likely to suffer a mudslide. School dropout rates are extremely high in the region and, according to the EPA’s Environmental Justice Screen, places them in the 95th percentile for Population with Less than High School Education. Literacy is a major hurdle for citizens of these communities. It is common for native Spanish speakers to be unable to read Spanish. They struggle with overall English literacy in general. With an overall poverty rate of 49% for Guayama county, the divide between residents and life saving information, in English on the Internet, is immense. In research about rural community resilience, having citizens that are knowledgeable, organized and participative leads to a greater chance of surviving a disaster. Therefore, wholesale investment in increasing capacity around technology, Internet, and media literacy will lead to positive outcomes.

Proposed Activities: Since entering the fight for environmental justice our previous open source efforts lead us to believe that FLOSS could help people survive disasters and seek justice for decades of neglect and de-investment. We propose the following activities to deliver an open infrastructure around the needs of Barrio Carite: a) We need to conduct a review of tools and knowledge that best serve the community. There is limited knowledge of FLOSS projects that help in disaster risk reduction or post-disaster recovery. This will involve knowledge and experience with software and open source repositories; b) We will conduct a survey of technical capabilities & climate change knowledge within the project area. Not much is known about rural capacity. It will be helpful to understand Internet, PC, Smartphone adoption rates for the area. We also wish to validate our perception that a lack of climate and environmental justice information in Spanish places these predominantly native Spanish speakers at risk. c) Following the publication of our survey results, we will conduct online and in-person listening sessions. The listening sessions will provide the project an opportunity to share the survey results and collect feedback around their needs. d) Leveraging online video platforms and in-person meetings, the project will conduct a series of preliminary education activities connectedness and resilience. The training will emphasize the importance of technology in staying safe in a boiling world. It will build on any capacity within the community to improve capacity. It will build bridges for owners of smartphones to better use their devices to keep them safe. e) With the valuable input of our stakeholders, we will design an open infrastructure around the needs of Barrio Carite. The design will reflect the needs of a representative board. Working with intellectual property lawyers, Ahora will design a method to make research and subsequent artifacts generated from the project available through an open infrastructure. f) The project will then begin generating new knowledge-based products aimed at attracting our target community. We will launch a web repository to host documents, training, live-streams aimed at raising capacity. Pulling content from the project website, we will launch mobile project(s) to make the content more accessible to residents and business owners. g) To complete the project Ahora will conduct training sessions on the new disaster risk reduction (DRR) platform. The training will be available in both online and in-person formats. We will repeat the survey from earlier in the project to determine progress. We will publish our results from the DRR Collective IQ in a leading science journal. h) Finally, the project will ensure, as is stated in our openness statement, a mature release of our efforts suitable that any community can fork our efforts and adapt the platform to their individual needs.

Openness: Amongst rural folk, openness usually means friendliness and empathetic to one's neighbors. We need to expand their understanding to include embracing new technology. A general lack of capacity in Barrio Carite prohibits them from being able to organize and raise their voices for assistance. It is critical we establish an open infrastructure for the project. Our vision is a federated series of technologies that provide access to the issues confronting Barrio Carite. We will establish governance to ensure that leadership involves the stakeholder community, builds confidence in decisions; and has a policy of non-discrimination welcoming all potential stakeholders. There is a wealth of research available online to guide our effort, we can learn from Open Source practices. We must bake into our infrastructure the ability for communities to take control if necessary. The community should be able to replicate the entire system without the support of stakeholders. In 2015 Bilder and Lin J documented their “Principles for Open Scholarly Infrastructure.” They describe the following principles to ensure project sustainability: Open source – All software required should be available through open licensing; Open data (within constraints of privacy laws) – Being able to replicate all relevant data and follow best practices in making data legally available; making data available data – It is not enough that the data be made “open,” there must be a practical way to actually obtain it.

Challenges: Risks to the successful completion of the project come from being unable to: build community or develop engagement, making complex technologies and concepts accessible, and being unable to attract additional funding. Below we address each risk and our mitigation plans. Since the population is not online, to build community and develop engagement we will use old-school marketing via banners, public meetings, and word of mouth. We will rely on community leaders to assist our efforts. Our first priority is to reach residents with smartphones that do not take advantage of their advances. We also hope to reach isolated residents through outreach online to technology literate family members. Making the human computer interface for the project simple and effective are our goals. We will invest in graphic design work to create a clean interface and a set of standards for open source data and software. We will enlist core stakeholders to iterate through our process methodology, rapidly failing and improving with each cycle. To facilitate our fundraising efforts, we organize our proposal creation efforts around our internal Collective IQ. Features that assist us are a library of past proposals and projects that allows us to share snippets that are common. Through our membership in the Anthropocene Alliance we also have grant writing support.

Neglectedness: There are currently huge sums of money being thrown at improving community resilience. Currently, there are funds available for distributed renewable power micro-grids, improved rural transportation, sewage and water distribution, and high-speed broadband Internet. Barrio Carite needs investments in each of the funding areas mentioned above. While infrastructure is a critical table leg in establishing resilience in rural communities, it will not meet the technology demands of climate change. We need to provide citizen scientists the tools and knowledge needed for the community to confront the impacts of a boiling world. Ahora has two proposals pending that are related. The first is a multi-partner project to implement 10 nature-based solutions in the area. The project will conduct public outreach & educational events meant to improve community capacity around nature-based solutions and empower the community to seek assistance. The second is to the Hispanic Federation for support inline with the requests in this proposal. The proposal asks for support to develop online and offline capacity within the Barrio Carite community. Finally, as part of the March 2003 cohort of the Thriving Earth Exchange, Ahora is conducting a citizen science project. The project is studying the prolonged impacts of extreme weather on the Carite State Park and the Carite Lake. We anticipate working industry scientists to provide climatology, hydrology, and geology expertise to the community.

Success: Success looks like Barrio Carite being able to stand against extreme weather events. It looks like a community that becomes more sustainable through climate change adaptation. It looks like an economic engine providing area residents with more opportunities that bring laborers with fair and just compensation. Finally, it looks like a process to develop capacity and generate new jobs, building a climate workforce ready for tomorrow. Visualizing the impact for the area starts with a community that knows where to access accurate information concerning the threats from natural disasters and climate change. Further it includes a community that organizes around their needs and, understanding the risks, enacts bold measures to secure the future of freshwater for the area. A community that commonly uses nature-based solutions to reduce the risk of erosion and mudslides. Specific metrics will include the number of visitors, shares, and likes on social media. Other metrics include monitoring community engagement for public facing activities such as attendance for orientations and training events. It will include the number of new members signed up for the Internet Society and the creation of a rural Puerto Rico chapter of the society. It will include the creation of a technology ecosystem architecture to support our various projects. Finally, it will include the deployment of the first version of that technology ecosystem.

Total Budget: $25,000

Affiliations: As mentioned this proposal is part of a multipartner effort to bring environmental justice to Barrio Carite. Our partners include the Anthropocene Alliance, the Environmental Protection Network, The Thriving Earth Exchange, the US Geological Society, the UPR Law Center Resiliency Center, and three community based organizations in Puerto Rico including Carite 3.0. Carite 3.0 is a family run agroecological farm offering education, chocolate, coffee, art, and agrotourism.

LMIE Carveout: Our pilot implementation will be in Barrio Carite in Guayama county Puerto Rico. Barrio Carite has a population that is 99% people of color and 49.1% are living below the poverty line. Beyond the pilot we believe our results apply to hundreds of other communities across the Central Cordilleras of Puerto Rico. Communities within this project’s scope have been historically marginalized. The EPA’s Environmental Justice Screen puts the community in the 97th percentile for Low Income and and are in the 95th percentile for Population with Less than High School Education. These overlooked and disinvested communities are also particularly vulnerable to coastal hazards – 25% of all properties in the municipality are at risk of being severely affected by flooding over the next 30 years.

Team Skills: Ahora is fortunate to have a broad coalition of partners that provide many of the areas of expertise for a successful project. As the lead organization, Ahora provides decades of previous software, database, and data analysis experience. In addition, Kevin Shockey has a long history of participation and advocacy supporting FLOSS. Through our invitation to submit a full proposal to the NFWF Coastal Resilience Grant, Ahora built an ever strengthening group of partners. These partners can provide legal, community organizing, public outreach, while at the same time being witnesses to the very same climate impacts we hope to protect our neighbors from. Unfortunately the impacts of the succession of hurricanes Irma, Maria, & Fiona has left few aspects of life unchanged. Our partners stand in resistance to these storms and their impacts on life on the island. Each of us brings our lived experiences of these hurricanes and dozens of unnamed storms that bring flooding and mudslides to the project area. Our collection of partners shares a set of capacity and skills in reaction to the regular flooding of communities around the world. Through our membership in the Anthropocene Alliance and their creation of our NFWF NCRF Grant, we have engaged partners interested in climate justice for Barrio Carite. Some are experts in disasters, disaster risk reduction, climate justice as well as fundraising and grant writing.

Submission Number: 157