SRS RN: Integrated Food, Energy, Water Units for Disaster Resilient Sustainable Regional Systems

Repeated national and state emergencies from natural disasters have created unprecedented disruptions in human lives in the United States. Typical process development tends to focus on individual scientific discovery towards technology commercialization. Varying needs of regional rural-urban interconnected systems under disaster conditions require a convergence of scientific and evidence-based co-production of knowledge with societal and ecological considerations to create resilient technological interventions to the disaster cycle.

This SRS-RN planning grant aims to build toward a research program that will develop a new class of multi-faceted resilient systems to facilitate rural-urban connected communities in sustainably managing their basic needs of food, energy, and water (FEW) while enhancing ecological and community resilience to disasters. The planning grant will bring together a diverse group of experts from academic and non-academic institutions and relevant stakeholder groups for developing the specific co-produced research questions, convergence approach, and meaningful team formation with intensive stakeholder engagement activities.

The regional system for this planning grant is geographically comprised of disaster-prone and disaster-impacted areas including combinations of urbanized areas, urban clusters, and/or rural areas for the states of Texas (TX), Louisiana (LA) and Mississippi (MS). Communities, municipalities, local, regional, state, and federal governments, social capital organizations, educational and research institutions, technology providers, and ecological advocacy groups will be considered as components of regional systems.

Disasters to be considered include hurricane-related impacts (flooding and storm surge) and long-term climate-related impacts. Food, energy, and water networks, with a focus on combined FEW needs, and social networks will be the networks of study. The team for this planning grant has representation from three public university systems in the Gulf Coast (TX, LA and MS) to engage the geographically relevant stakeholders in vulnerable and critical ecological regions.

Non-academic partners include the AIChE RAPID Manufacturing Institute, The Nature Conservancy, Argonne National Laboratory, and an international partner, Observer Research Foundation. The team has expertise in technology, economics, governance, and policy domains for sustainability and resilience. Specific focus areas include process systems, FEW Nexus, regional bioproducts, ecological systems, development economics, and urban planning.

Three jointly planned and executed workshops, road-mapping activities, in-person stakeholder meetings, surveys, webinars, and outreach will be held during the next year. Activities from this phase are targeted to support detailed concept development for 1) enhanced methodologies for design of disaster-resilient integrated technological systems in the area of food, energy, and water, 2) strategies and methods of adaptation, restoration, implementation, informing governance and policy makers, protection of human and environmental health, and economic robustness in times of national emergencies/crises, and 3) education and development of culturally diverse and inclusive communities (and workforce) for disaster-resilient sustainable regional systems.

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.