Collaborative Research: RII Track-2 FEC: Rural Confluence: Communities and Academic Partners Uniting to Drive Discovery and Build Capacity for Climate Resilience

Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge LA

Investigators

Abstract

Climate change threatens rural communities across the US due to their strong dependence on natural resources and higher poverty rates and lower resilience capacity than urban areas. Thus climate change may disproportionally impact rural communities, but the majority of climate resilience research to date focuses on urban areas. Furthermore, rural residents are underrepresented across all areas of science, which may contribute to skepticism about climate change science and hinder collective action. Therefore, there is a pressing need to advance the science of rural climate resilience and to reduce climate change vulnerabilities in rural communities. This project seeks to meet that important need through the confluence of knowledge, skills, and perspectives from diverse but connected communities, disciplines, and institutions within the Mississippi River basin. The project is significant because it will engage rural communities to create shared frameworks for rural climate resilience, project rural climate change impacts and community resilience scenarios, expand social and economic opportunities for rural communities, and broaden STEM workforce opportunities. Through the collaborations between faculty and students at Oklahoma State University (OSU), University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL), Louisiana State University (LSU), Western Oklahoma State College, and Northern Oklahoma College, this project will substantially advance rural climate resilience research and generate lasting improvements in rural STEM opportunities. These collaborations will lay the foundation for long-term partnerships between the Rural Renewal Initiative (OSU), Rural Prosperity Nebraska (UNL), and the Gulf Scholars Program (LSU). The project aims to touch the lives of thousands of people and translate to economic impacts in rural communities by identifying potential solutions to expected climate change-driven losses. Focusing climate resilience research on rural communities creates the potential to bridge the divide between rural and scientific communities, while creating frameworks and civic engagement strategies that may be applied in other rural communities around the world. This project is centered around epistemological inclusivity, which allows rural perspectives to help guide the investigations. Researchers will work with community members to co-create socially robust knowledge, which can build social capital for climate resilience. The specific aims of this project are to: 1) Co-develop with communities a shared conceptual framework for rural climate resilience research and action informed by rural perceptions and priorities; 2) Project rural climate change impacts and community resilience scenarios using improved simulation methods accounting for slow-burn processes such as population decline; 3) Expand social and economic opportunities for disproportionately affected rural communities by helping them identify and pursue locally-relevant climate resilience strategies; and 4) Broaden STEM workforce participation by developing diverse career pathways from K16 to early-career faculty. The project will create diversified rural STEM pathways using a braided river approach. The project will also support the development of Early-Career Faculty. Impacts of this project will be sustained through investments in STEM students and Early-Career Faculty; by creation of open-access publications, curriculum, and models; and by development of community resilience action plans. Approaches will be tested, evaluated, and refined through 2-year cycles of engagement with six focus communities, leading to the creation of a replicable model. Simulations will incorporate state-of-the-art climate projections into a suite of interconnected open-source models to estimate hazard exposure, damages, and long-term community recovery or decline with and without locally-prioritized adaptation measures. Simulation results will be shared with the communities, contributing to the development of local resilience action plans. This project is expected to expand and accelerate community resilience modeling, being among the first to develop simulation methods accounting for the paired, simultaneous slow-burn disturbances of climate change and rural depopulation. 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.