Collaborative Research: RII Track-2 FEC: Where We Live: Local and Place Based Adaptation to Climate Change in Underserved Rural Communities

Adaptation consists of a set of behaviors and activities that occur from individual to institutional scales. Such adaptation results in the ability to remain healthy, effective and prosperous, despite changes that occur in the biophysical environment. Adaptation is also predicated on accurate perception of change, a set of abilities embedded in human cognition.

Perception has been extensively studied in the context of risk and acute climate events such as flooding and wildfire, but data show that perceiving risk does not lead to successful adaptation which is critical for everything from human health to national security. Current approaches of hazard, vulnerability and risk mapping are ineffective; they do not accelerate adaptation and data show that they may even drive maladaptive behaviors.

Rural communities constitute nearly 84% of the United States (US) land area and are home to 14% of the population. These areas serve as critical sources of food, freshwater, habitat, and energy as well as supporting carbon sequestration, education, recreation, and tourism but have been effectively left out of climate dialogues. Moreover, they are models for settlements in other parts of the world.

Despite the rapid progress of technologies that can facilitate adaptation to climate change, widespread actions remain elusive. The need to understand the gap between knowing and experiencing the effects of a rapidly changing earth system and the behaviors that successfully respond to them has never been greater. When perception varies significantly from real world dynamics, it refers to a large gap (or difference), which may be associated with maladaptive behavior.

The project hypothesize that the size of this gap is a key measure that determines both adaptive capacity, i.e., the potential to take actions that minimize the negative effects of climate change and adaptation. This project's research team will use participatory socio-environmental systems mapping, engaging the residents of rural communities as well as advanced computational modeling to project futures under different scenarios of change and responses to it.

This project will lead to precise understanding of the mechanisms between perceptions, cultures and adaptation which will enable both better planning by increasing the diversity of knowledge as well as lead to more successful implementation in areas and regions that are central to our Nation’s sustainability, security and thrivability.

The RII Track-2: Where We Live (W2L) Local and Place Based Adaptation to Climate Change in Underserved Rural Communities project builds national research competitiveness and capacity to addressing the critical national need of proactively addressing climate change in underserved rural communities. The W2L project advances research, education, workforce development, and partnerships among the Idaho, Nevada, and South Carolina EPSCoR jurisdictions.

W2L leverages and enhances linkages in community engagement, computational modeling, engineering, physical sciences, and social sciences. The goal of W2L is to build the needed capacity to achieve adaptation mapping—the ability to leverage agent-based models to determine how small adaptation actions produce community-scale resilience, a novel contribution to tackling the climate challenge.

The scope of the project involves communities and landscapes experiencing drought, heat, and wildfires in Idaho, Nevada, and South Carolina, areas of growing local and national concern. The project advances novel science and training by working collaboratively with underserved rural communities to advance understanding of how perceptions, values, and knowledge promote or impede adaptation to chronic (slow) and acute (fast) climate-induced changes.

The project uses integrative approaches that bring together climate science, social science, computational modeling, and stakeholder engagement. Methods include development of community data oversight groups in each jurisdiction; and use of a structured workshop called the quadrant-enabled Delphi method to support co-development of knowledge by community members and researchers.

Quantification of the delta between perceptions of change and instrumented measures of climate change will use data mining of historical climate data and categorical data analysis from the structured workshops. The identification of adaptation pathways with communities will involve a set of iteratively developed scenarios for each type of climate-induced change supported by climate projections that are looked at by communities though a dialogues of change activity.

Dialogues of change are used to support adaptation mapping for drought, heat, and wildfire. The W2L project emphasizes community engagement and the co-production of knowledge and implements multiple initiatives to increase the participation of members of underserved rural communities in research and in STEM. W2L will support workforce development, early-career advancement, and student training through high-context, community-engaged interdisciplinary science, co-created with community members.

The potential contributions of W2L are to build convergence-science through collaborative approaches with community groups; to quantify and analyze the convergence and/or divergence between perceptions of climate-induced changes and instrument measured changes in those changes; and to build pathways for adaptive capacity and adaptation options in rural underserved communities.

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.