Core Support for the Geographical Sciences Committee: Using Geographical Sciences to Support Research for Decision-Making

National Academy Of Sciences, Washington DC

Investigators

Abstract

This award will provide continued core support for the Geographical Sciences Committee (GSC) of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM). This support will permit the committee to address how the geographical sciences contribute to societal well-being, security, and prosperity by highlighting issues that connect communities with geography, such as natural and human-induced hazards, population growth and change, and changes in physical and social infrastructure. Geographical science research can help address the interactions and feedbacks between humans and the physical environment for more informed decision-making and can contribute to strategies developed together with urban or rural planners, natural resource managers, and policy makers to address individual and community vulnerabilities in the places where people live. Support for the GSC will provide an immediate access point for federal agencies to engage with the geographical science community of practice and will provide the geographical sciences community with a direct interface to inform government and policy. The Geographical Sciences Committee brings emerging and relevant research to the forefront of decision-making, amplifying the intellectual merit of individual topics in a range of issues to increase societal impact. This award brings together different generations of researchers, including students and early-career professionals, for constructive dialogue at the interface of geographical science and policy. As extreme weather events, hazards such as wildfires, and economic and population changes displace people from their homes and cause people to make critical decisions about where and how to live, challenges will exist to satisfy human health, energy, water, transportation, infrastructure, and other needs in ways that are safe and economically and environmentally viable. The core activities of this award will develop and oversee new activities to address human vulnerability to natural and human-induced hazards (such as wildland fire, particularly at the wildland-urban interface); to address questions related to changes in physical infrastructure and communities (such as coastal development and flood risk or energy transitions in rural regions); and to examine emerging fields of interest to the geographical sciences (such as access to volunteered geographic information or advances in geospatial data for commercial applications). This award will address these questions by bringing a geographic perspective to these problems; by fostering cooperation among government, academia, industry, and other stakeholders; and by helping to ensure that the geographical sciences remain an important area of growth for the nation. Support for the GSC will enable the use of modes and methods of knowledge generation that converge around convening information and input from different constituencies. The activities of the award will generate new knowledge on the basis of dialogue, information exchange, and consensus. The award will also ensure that the information is shared with government, academic, non-governmental, industry, and public audiences. 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.