Excellence in Research: Building Adaptive Communities via Interdisciplinary Research and Training

Frequent extreme weather events or natural disasters are posing significant threats to lives and livelihoods. Previous research suggests that the historically underserved, minority communities often face disproportionate vulnerabilities to climate uncertainty due to various socio-economic, and environmental factors. Therefore, a multipronged approach equipped with interdisciplinary research and training is needed to mitigate the challenges posed by climate uncertainty.

To this end, an interdisciplinary training of students from underserved regions, a workshop for faculty members, and a study of community stakeholders’ preferences for economic and entrepreneurial development will strengthen adaptive, resilient communities. The training of students from the underserved regions and communities will improve their interdisciplinary learning and knowledge base which will embolden their adaptation skills, resiliency, and entrepreneurial acumen to tackle with environmental challenges.

The workshop for faculty members will foster both intra-institutional and inter-institutional research collaboration among peers. These multipronged activities will enhance underserved communities’ environmental awareness, research skills, and economic and entrepreneurship development capacities. Building of such adaptive and resilient communities to better cope with and bounce back from setbacks induced by adverse events or natural disasters will strengthen the overall socio-economic resilience for all Americans.

The programmatic focus of this project is to strengthen adaptability to climate uncertainty of underserved communities that lag in socio-economic and demographic indicators. The training of the minority students from underserved counties will prepare cohorts of adaptive, diverse workforce to meet the needs of future workplaces. A panel of subject matter experts will train students on climate change adaptation and resiliency from the perspectives of social science, natural science, entrepreneurial economics, food security, and health.

The training of young students will yield long-term benefits as the trainees will serve the local and U.S. workforce for decades to come. The focus of the faculty research collaboration workshop is to study climate uncertainty adaptation and resilience options and to explore environmentally sustainable economic development strategies for historically underserved regions.

This collaboration workshop will also facilitate leveraging inter-institutional sharing of human capital, infrastructures, and other resources for climate uncertainty research. The stakeholder survey will capture local innovative ideas regarding public-private partnerships and collaborations to foster environmentally sustainable economic development initiatives.

The survey results will encapsulate the local ingenuity of residents, business owners/managers and officials from local public agencies and non-profit community development organizations from sample economically distressed census tracts. Deliverables from implementation of this project may also help develop a course on interdisciplinary approach to environmental sustainability.

Also, the community at large will benefit from public dissemination of the empirical insights from this project in the form of conference presentations, journal publications, and provision for user access to the data to be generated due to implementation of this project.

This project is jointly funded by Build and Broaden and the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR).

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.