SRS-RN: Planning for a Network to Address Pressures, Responses and Sustainability Intersections across a Growing, Innovative, and Dry State

Colorado State University, Fort Collins CO

Investigators

Abstract

Colorado, like many dry states in the western U.S., faces significant sustainability challenges from population growth, technological innovation, climate change, and competing development preferences and priorities. These challenges span the connected urban and rural areas within the region. While many researchers, practitioners, and communities in Colorado are working to understand and address these challenges, efforts are fragmented. Solving regional sustainability challenges requires an approach that understands regions as nested layers of natural, built, social, public, and government networks. The aim of this planning grant is to improve the ability to share knowledge, resources, and data across the public, private, and non-profit sectors in all phases of the research, leading to a more sustainable and regional system in Colorado. A strong, connected, and coordinated cross-sector (university, government, industry, non-profit), and transdisciplinary network is needed to improve the capacity of groups already working on sustainability challenges in Colorado. During the twelve-month planning period, the network will use a survey instrument to better understand the connectivity, collaboration, diversity, inclusivity, perceived opportunities, barriers, and the range of sustainability work being done across Colorado in the existing network. The second step will be to host workshops focused on understanding past and current sustainability activities, identifying which pressures are most important to different communities, and how these issues define relationships at various spatial scales. The cross-sector, interdisciplinary workshops aims to 1) expand existing network ties to include additional communities and minority serving institutions; 2) build knowledge and trust across diverse stakeholders; and 3) formulate a set of research objectives, methods, and scope for the development of a Track 1 Sustainable Regional Systems Research Networks (SRS-RN) proposal. Finally, researchers will conduct network and economic analyses designed to assess broad inequalities in resources and connections across the state to better understand barriers and inequities across various communities. Network analyses will also examine how connections across disciplines, or lack thereof, are impeding development of a transdisciplinary research agenda The workshops and analyses will focus scientific researchers and communities in conversations meant to identify the necessary social and technical platforms needed to break through these barriers, and to strengthen and empower the network. 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.