Planning Grant: Engineering Research Center for the Arctic 2050: Preparing for Human Displacement at the Climate Change Frontline

University Of Alaska Fairbanks Campus, Fairbanks AK

Investigators

Abstract

The Planning Grants for Engineering Research Centers competition was run as a pilot solicitation within the ERC program. Planning grants are not required as part of the full ERC competition, but intended to build capacity among teams to plan for convergent, center-scale engineering research. The intended planning grant for the Engineering Research Center for the Arctic 2050 (ERCA2050) will develop the workforce, processes, and technologies necessary to plan, build, and maintain resilient communities for Arctic peoples displaced by climate change. This planning effort will develop a structure for ERCA2050 by connecting research partners across the world, developing workforce development pathways with Alaska?s homegrown students as well as those outside Alaska, incorporating diverse perspectives, and exploring opportunities for innovation toward marketable engineering solutions, testbeds for these products, and aggregated and accessible data. This planning effort is aligned with NSF?s new vision for ERCs: it features a strong social impact as described above, incorporates convergence by drawing from across a wide array of disciplines, features a diverse stakeholder community advisory committee to ensure broad engagement, and incorporates specific expertise in team science organization and science communication. This project also aligns with two of NSF's Grand Challenges: Navigating the New Arctic and Growing Convergent Research. Key components and deliverables include a dedicated fellow to coordinate planning activities, two community innovation festivals, and a year-long seminar series to enhance stakeholder connections. The community festivals will explore questions around convergence, stakeholder community, team formation and effective leadership and management, and societal impact. Information from these discussions will be synthesized into different levels of maps and spatial representations, which will be overlaid to find connections, gaps, and needs. These conceptual maps will be constructed for local resource availability, landscape parameters, social livability factors, educational and innovation pathways, and global impacts, factors that will ultimately form the components of ERCA2050. This planning project will seek to design an ERC that will engage students in research at all levels, with recruiting efforts targeting students from Alaska?s rural communities, and students from communities in similar contexts. The effort will broaden participation by Alaska Native populations by including them as key stakeholders in our process, both in planning our ERC roadmap and in their active role as participants in resilience efforts. Project personnel reflect NSF's commitment to gender and racial diversity. The creation and regular involvement of the stakeholder advisory committee will enhance partnerships between academia, communities, government, and industry. 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.