Hurricanes severely disrupt the food supply for island communities by destroying domestic agricultural production capacity and crippling the infrastructure for food importation, transportation, and cold storage. This can decimate the livelihood of local farmers and greatly complicate the logistics and expense of providing fresh produce to residents in the immediate aftermath of the crisis, and to the important tourism industry in the longer term. Microgrid-supported hydroponic crop cultivation (MSHCC) may be able to mitigate this threat to food security for island communities. The investigators for this proposal have built an MSHCC prototype and seek to show proof-in-principle of efficacy in the Bahamas in response to Hurricane Dorian.
The goals of this project are: i) to determine how MSHCC can foster climate resilience through sustainable agriculture and energy solutions in small island communities, and ii) determine how these social enterprises can build economic opportunity by equipping residents with the tools they need to supply emergency food providers and the tourism industry with locally grown food. This project brings rigorous scholarship to the humanitarian engineering application of HCC in the case of hurricane resilient food supplies and livelihoods in small island communities, using the hurricane-damaged country of the Bahamas as a case study.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
