Research Proposal

Jiarui Qi

Word count:1802

Of all times in human history, humankind coexisted with different natural disasters and tried to deal with them. Sometimes, disasters played the role of an important catalyst of human history. In ancient times, people defined natural disasters as “anger of the gods” or “signs of bad luck” and usually offered sacrifices and prayed in order to avoid disasters. Although they seldom succeeded and the times with rituals didn’t last so long, their attaching importance to natural hazards never changed.

As time went by, as the populations grew and civilizations of the world gradually began to contact each other, coastal areas had become important transportation centers and developed to economy and cultural centers. As a result, coastal populations became larger and larger, which inevitably increased the vulnerability of disasters. In modern times, natural coastal disasters like floods and extreme rainfalls can lead to huge amounts of deaths, economic losses, and serious effects on human development. Luckily, as technology improves, people are now able to manage disasters and, to a large extent, can lower the negative effects of them.

I have read some articles and did some research about one of the regions with the most frequent disasters: South and Southeast Asia. Various kinds of data science methods were used to analyze two coastal areas properly: The Tamil Nadu Coast in southeast India and eastern coast of Bangladesh. However, in my opinion, in order to manage natural disasters better, it is not enough to only figure coastal situations nowadays. It is also necessary to study the history of these two areas, aiming to find the patterns of developments as human and human history develop. This new target can lead to lots of new questions. For example, what changes did the growth of population bring? Did natural disasters all happen because of natural reasons? Besides taking actions to study the environmental solutions using geospatial data, can we focus on ourselves and find how to preserve the environment instead? It is very difficult to get conclusions and answers of these questions instantly because human activities exerted innumerable influences on the environment, but I guess that the negative effects have larger numbers. Therefore, a three-year-long research is necessary. For the first year, I plan to study some documents about historical disasters in the region of south and southeast Asia and learn about the former natural environment. Also some important geographic information can be found in the rocks and sands on the coastline that can show how disasters changed over time, so I plan to take a field trip to India and Bangladesh. To get sufficient information, my team and I will visit different places on the coast of India and Bangladesh. During the field trip, we plan to interview some local experts on history and meteorology and work with them. If the process goes smoothly, we can get information of former disasters like the frequency of disasters, the severity, and tendency. For the second year, I plan to sort out the data of the old times including important historic events that may affect the environment such as wars and population migrations and information about frequencies of disasters into different categories. Useless data will be abandoned and precious data of certain times will be marked and studied emphatically. For example: war time data, data during population outbreak, data during technological revolutions. Based on the information I collected in the first two years, I can assess the disaster vulnerability and roughly judge the overall impacts of human activities to the environment many years before using data science methods like Landsat-8 and CVI maps. For the third year, I plan to compare the geospatial data nowadays and the historical information. Through comparison of the coastal vulnerabilities and geographic information of different times, we can find some patterns about changes of these geospatial data. After that, we can combine these data to the change of human’s activities, population, technology developments and introductions of policies about the environment. At last, we can successfully acquire detailed information about the connections between disaster patterns and human activities.

The major goal of my research is to develop a comprehensive recognition towards coastal disasters. If people only used technological ways to deal with natural disasters and find every reason for disasters in the environment instead of sometimes doing self-examination, they can never find potential problems of themselves that can be harmful to the environment. There might be some reasons that our ancestors see nature as gods, for natural disasters can sometimes be seen as punishments of nature because of some of the humans’ misbehaviors. The lesson ancient people told us was that we should respect nature. I believe that our research results can remind society to decrease the destruction of nature and adopt sustainable ways of development. We may meet some difficulties in the process: some historical documents might be hard to acquire and the data might not be very precise. However, once we finish this study, the benefits are global because we will learn the patterns of how nature reacts to human activities. Although the research will be held in the coastal areas in south Asia, its result can be extended to other coastal areas with similar climates. What’s more, the study of human activities has a stronger universality to all areas in the world because the environment of everywhere in the world was affected by human activities no matter what level it is. Through this study, people will be aware of the importance of combining development and preservation of nature and might move to a new phase of development.

Compared to previous studies and articles I read, my research focused on a wider range of fields besides only on data science and geospatial fields. It is a proposal with various kinds of focuses including the balance of environment protection and development, disaster management and prediction, etc. Also, it can be seen as a supplement of previous studies because it replenishes the lack of humans’ influences on disasters. With a clearer and more comprehensive understanding, many organizations can be benefitted. For example, with a clearer integral image of the disaster, the government can introduce useful policies to manage them properly, lowering the risk of lives of people who live near the coast. Scientists can make disaster predictions to prevent more people from being harmed. Companies can make their investments more wisely based on vulnerabilities in coastal areas like real estates and railways, earning huge amounts of profits. Also, under the pressure of environment protection organizations, the government is very likely to introduce environmental friendly policies to improve the ecological environment in the long run. Last but not least, being aware of the damage that uncontrolled human activities can deal to the environment, coastal residents will form awareness of environmental protection, which will likely be spread to the whole society. In these ways, lots of money can be saved and many potential economic losses and deaths can be avoided. To sum up, since there are such great social benefits, this research is totally worth funding.

Opponents may say that this research focuses on different areas but doesn’t make intensive and thorough study into its topic. However, this study mainly aims to work on historical records about disasters and human activities and then combine them with data science achievements of previous studies. It actually has further studies in human activities and its history, which forms an integrated picture of disaster management of different times together with articles of my literature review and methodological investigation. Someone will mention that this research is not representative enough because it only focuses on disasters on coasts of south and southeast Asia. It is true that disasters all around the world are not identical, but they have lots of similarities. Take coastal hazards as an example, through studying places in south and southeast Asia with tropical monsoon climate, we can make reasonable inferences about disasters on the coast of east Asia, Caribbean regions, America, and Africa, in which locate most of the important ports in the world. What’s more, since places in the world became closely connected with each other after the Age of Exploration, many important historic events actually happened synchronously, especially in the nearest 20th century. In this time period, the population of all areas grew fast, people experienced industrial revolutions and world wars. Therefore, my research has important reference value to other areas. Besides scientific similarities, the core value of my research is to protect the environment. It is the same in all places in the world. I believe that besides coastal areas, all inhabited areas are affected by human activities. Some effects like global warming and extinctions are closely related to human activities and the whole world suffers from it. In other words, my research is just a starting point of disaster studies all over the world. The fact my research reveals will give rise to many similar studies, starting a benign circle, which will raise awareness to protect the environment of more and more people. Having such great benefits, those counterarguments are no longer tenable undoubtedly.

When it comes to the funding part, I expect a budget of about 3 million dollars. First, it is important to hire a professional team. About 5 fieldworkers are needed to measure geographic statistics and collect samples for analysis. 3 Analysts are needed to analyze and compare statistics and geospatial data using models and data science methods. 2 people are needed to arrange the research schedule including transportation, accommodation and food. A team leader is needed to make detailed plans of the research to help the process go more smoothly. A researcher is needed to collect data online about the research topic and choose good article resources for reference. Of all the 12 members, everyone has a wage of eighty thousand dollars per year. Therefore, 2 million and 880 dollars are needed for wages. Of the other costs like living expenses in a foreign and airplane tickets, it takes roughly 1 million dollars. For other potential costs, 120 thousand dollars will be enough. Having such a promising future, our research deserves this amount of funding. Making fully use of the money, our team will take every step of the study seriously, guaranteeing no mistakes on important procedures and obtaining the most accurate results.

In conclusion, at the time when environmental issues happen frequently, we shall never find reasons only from nature. Instead, humans are indeed the ones to be blamed for some significant environmental changes. My research towards the connection between coastal disaster vulnerabilities and changes of human activities has a very organized and rigid plan, a very promising future in many fields, and great benefits to society. Considering these advantages and innovations, it is very wise to fund this research for it is the investment of people’s better future.