Scalable Water Resilience | W81EWF 23 SOI 0026

Opportunity Information: Apply for W81EWF 23 SOI 0026

Scalable Water Resilience is a Department of Defense opportunity administered through the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Engineer Research and Development Center (USACE/ERDC) to advance practical, measurable approaches for improving water and watershed resilience, with a specific emphasis on underserved, low-capacity communities in the U.S. Southeast that face recurring flooding and coastal storm impacts. The program treats resilience as a system-level capability: how well communities and the watershed systems they depend on can prepare for disruption, absorb impacts, recover essential functions, and adapt afterward. The underlying motivation is that many widely used resilience frameworks and planning tools exist at national and international levels, but they are not always tailored to the realities of smaller or under-resourced communities that often have the greatest need and the least ability to compete for complex funding or navigate demanding program requirements.

A central theme of the opportunity is correcting the mismatch between top-down funding and planning models and the day-to-day constraints of low-capacity communities. The solicitation highlights three persistent barriers that keep these communities from benefiting from resilience investments: first, program rules and application requirements that inadvertently limit access; second, too little sustained technical assistance at local and regional levels; and third, difficulty building the partnerships and collaborative project structures that many competitive grants implicitly require. In response, the program is designed to strengthen both the technical side of resilience quantification (the methods and metrics used to measure resilience) and the human side (how community engagement is conducted so that local priorities and on-the-ground conditions actually shape the analysis and the resulting decisions).

The work scope pushes beyond one-off, community-by-community projects toward watershed and regional approaches, recognizing that hazards and infrastructure interdependencies do not stop at municipal boundaries. Rather than evaluating a single threat acting on a single vulnerability, the program explicitly calls for methods that can handle multiple, compounding threats across a watershed scale. In practice, that means accounting for how cascading failures or disruptions in one area or sector can ripple through critical functions elsewhere in the basin, and how limited resources should be allocated when uncertainty is high and tradeoffs are unavoidable.

The effort is organized around two main objectives tied to the Savannah River Basin. Objective 1 is to contribute to a stakeholder-driven Resilience Assessment for the basin, with early work focused on assembling and organizing existing information. Key activities include identifying all critical functions in the Savannah River Basin, reviewing relevant literature to define meaningful metrics for each critical function, and producing a comprehensive, clearly defined list of those metrics. This assessment is intended to build on existing ERDC resilience publications and methods, especially the Resilience Matrix framework, which structures analysis around four phases of resilience (prepare, absorb, recover, adapt) across four domains (physical, information, cognitive, social). This framing is meant to ensure that the assessment does not narrowly focus on physical infrastructure alone, but also considers information flows, decision-making capacity, and social systems that influence outcomes during and after disruptive events.

Objective 2 focuses on strengthening top-down resilience planning by connecting community-driven initiatives with watershed-scale management strategies. The idea is to integrate community-defined goals into how watershed assets and projects are prioritized, operated, and maintained, especially when resources are constrained and events are uncertain. The solicitation signals a need for decision-support methods and tools that can optimize choices and evaluate tradeoffs, ultimately producing practical deliverables that help decision-makers prioritize actions across the watershed to enhance resilience. This is framed not only as a public benefit but also as a form of mission assurance for projects and functions that depend on the basin, reinforcing the importance of keeping critical services working through disruptive events.

Administratively, the opportunity is a discretionary cooperative agreement under CFDA 12.630, categorized under Science and Technology and other Research and Development. It uses a two-phase submission process: a Statement of Interest (SOI) due August 7, 2023, followed by a full proposal due August 23, 2023. The funding opportunity number is W81EWF 23 SOI 0026. The expected number of awards is one, with an award ceiling of $200,000. Eligibility is listed as "Others" with additional eligibility details referenced in the full announcement. Overall, the program is aimed at producing actionable resilience assessment components and planning-support tools that are grounded in stakeholder input, compatible with established resilience frameworks, and usable at watershed scale with explicit attention to the needs and limitations of low-capacity communities.

• The Department of Defense, Engineer Research and Development Center in the science and technology and other research and development sector is offering a public funding opportunity titled "Scalable Water Resilience" and is now available to receive applicants.
• Interested and eligible applicants and submit their applications by referencing the CFDA number(s): 12.630.
• This funding opportunity was created on Jul 06, 2023.
• Applicants must submit their applications by Aug 23, 2023. (Agency may still review applications by suitable applicants for the remaining/unused allocated funding in 2026.)
• Each selected applicant is eligible to receive up to $200,000.00 in funding.
• The number of recipients for this funding is limited to 1 candidate(s).
• Eligible applicants include: Others (see text field entitled Additional Information on Eligibility for clarification).

Apply for W81EWF 23 SOI 0026

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