Coastal Sustainability: Clean, Safe, Smart, and Equitable Communities

This project will organize and host a virtual workshop to identify the parameters for a potential future convergence accelerator track on nature-based solutions to support coastal sustainability.

Human communities and economies are concentrated along the world’s coastlines. Yet ongoing changes in climate continue to drive complex interactions between geophysical and social-ecological systems that amplify environmental threats facing coastal communities and their economies. Sustaining human coastal communities has become an urgent societal priority.

The Coastal Sustainability workshop will leverage nature-based solutions and develop a framework that identifies the interactions and "friction points" to determine what suite of nature-based solutions are best suited for a given coastal community and what the barriers are to their implementation. The workshop organizers intend to support an inclusive process that considers the existing inequities in the hidden coast – non-oceanfront regions where rural, minority, and/or impoverished communities reside.

The goal is to shape the co-development of convergent research that is stakeholder-driven, inclusive, and focused on implementation of sustainability solutions that promote clean, safe, smart, and equitable coastal communities.

The framework that the workshop seeks to create will be shaped by substantial stakeholder engagement during collaborative discussion and analysis of factors (including Ecological and Geophysical, Cognitive and Social, Technological, and Economic). The goal is to identify and create opportunities within a landscape of uncertainty: in management practice, in scientific and societal understanding, and in cognition of threats and opportunities.

The workshop will collaboratively identify the basis of uncertainties around development and implementation of nature-based coastal sustainability solutions as well as mechanisms for overcoming them. This process will facilitate the identification, assessment, and optimization of viable and implementable sustainability solutions across a variety of coastal communities.

The synthesis report that will result from the workshop will provide a blueprint that outlines the specific inflection points where investment in convergent research will be most effective in accelerating sustainable outcomes for communities.

Nature-based solutions are most likely to be effective when communities co-create them in collaboration with expert practitioners, ensuring that the solutions are tailored to meet specific community needs. This workshop plans to actively engage with diverse community organizations, government officials, and broad range of technical experts across many disciplines to ensure that the resulting framework is inclusive of all necessary voices.

Diverse groups have been shown to outperform homogeneous groups in problem solving and assembling diverse stakeholders is expected to improve the creativity of the solutions explored and create new avenues for scientific collaboration. By bringing together individuals and organizations from around the country that do not typically interact directly, this workshop seeks to facilitate relationship-building and partnerships that has the potential to extend beyond the Convergence Accelerator topic ideation process, helping to also advance the science and practice of coastal sustainability.

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.