SRS RN: Integrating Land and Sea: Building Coastal Resilience and Ecosystem Services for Sustainable Urban-Rural Systems

Connections between coastal resources and local economies are often overlooked when making planning and management decisions across rural and urban communities, even though marine and near-shore ecosystems are important parts of the economy and cultural identity of coastal communities. This Sustainable Regional Systems Research Networks (SRS RN) project will bring an interdisciplinary group of researchers and community stakeholders together through a series of participatory workshops to collaboratively build solutions to socio-environmental challenges in Massachusetts that explicitly include connections between people and coastal environments, helping to foster a kind of “coastal literacy” and building a collaborative research network to co-create solutions.

Examples of relevant stakeholder sectors within Massachusetts coastal communities include fishing and offshore renewable energy. This project will also create a community of professional learning for K-12 teachers to develop curriculum associated with coastal literacy as it relates to community-relevant issues in Massachusetts, providing a more inclusive approach to possible solutions for a sustainable future.

The research network will explore how a diverse perspective, systems thinking and ways of knowing can contribute to coastal sustainability, and will engage with coastal stakeholders who do not normally have a voice in solutions and decisions. An important outcome of the research network will be a model that can be generalized to other coastal areas, showing how to leverage environmental data to integrate with complex social data to empower communities with the literacy and agency to derive actionable outcomes.

The goal of this project is to build an inclusive Sustainable Regional Systems Research Networks Research Network (SRS RN) to collaboratively address socio-environmental challenges among urban and rural communities in Massachusetts. This RN will leverage linkages between human systems and coastal environments, acknowledging the inherent uncertainty and tradeoffs across environmental, social, and economic interests.

It will bring together a diverse and interdisciplinary group of researchers, educators, policymakers and community stakeholders through a sequence of participatory modeling workshops to surface local knowledge and needs, identify research questions, and outline methodologies that will be used for an eventual RN Track 1 proposal. The plan is to integrate the development of the network with the creation of a learning community to foster coastal literacy and systems thinking, and to enable place-based socio-environmental problem-solving as it relates to community-relevant issues.

This diverse learning community will come from across the blue and green economy to jointly develop processes and pathways for social learning that couples human and natural coastal systems toward effective and impactful decision-making. The RN will explore how a systems approach to community coastal literacy and an ecosystem services approach to connecting coastal, rural, and urban communities can contribute to sustainability-focused governance and decision-making that promotes resilience and robustness in the face of community-relevant change.

It will explore how different scales of governance and decision space affect the ability to improve the sustainability and resilience of natural-human systems. It is anticipated that the process of advancing coastal literacy through participatory model building will result in open tools, systemic educational resources and processes, a model framework to guide convergence among disciplines in social, environmental, and economic research, and design of resources.

Assets developed through this process will serve the needs of communities facing the complex environmental and governance issues that emerge from the confluence of land use, economic and demographic trends, gaps in cultural funds of knowledge, and inadequate access to education and social services.

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.