Global Center Track 2: Climate Risk and Resilience: Southeast Asia as a Living Lab (SEALL)

This Global Centers Track 2 Design award undertakes activities aiming to assess the risk, evaluate impacts, design adaptation and mitigation strategies, and build resilience for communities living in coastal low-land regions in Southeast Asia. Southeast Asia (SEA) is a critical manufacturing hub in the global supply chain supporting a large and culturally and ethnically diverse population in densely populated urban areas in vulnerable coastal regions and deltas.

A team of experts from six U.S. universities working in collaboration with researchers from universities in Vietnam, Thailand and Singapore plans to design a global center with Southeast Asia as a Living Lab (SEALL) to develop mitigation and adaptation strategies for vulnerable communities in the changing climate. The project seeks to build resilience to a changing climate using strategies that range from basic research to technological advancement, education, outreach, and workforce development and adopting approaches that are use-inspired and interdisciplinary.

The SEALL center will develop community-centered and science-based adaptation and mitigation policies for low-lying regions. SEALL will transform the specialized education of engineers, computer scientists, biologists, and social scientists through an integrated approach to better prepare for such disasters, thus mitigating the human and financial costs and disrupting the global supply chain.

Lessons learned from building resilience to climate change in SEA will be valuable for other regions with extensive coastlines, large rivers, low-lying land, and tropical weather, such as India, Bangladesh, and the American Southeast.

This project has three research and education themes: Theme 1, carbon-neutral sustainable urban development; Theme 2, low-impact and resilient agriculture; and Theme 3, health impacts of climate change and adaptation. This planning grant will complete the following activities: 1) a workshop in Hanoi that brings together researchers, policymakers, industry experts, students, and communities from the US and SEA to share knowledge and develop further collaboration on climate risks and building resilience; 2) three exploratory projects over 18 months to further develop the partnerships built at the workshop; 3) a design plan for a center-scale collaboration that would allow participants to apply the lessons learned from the SEA living lab, one of the most vulnerable regions to climate change, to other coastal regions.

The outcome of this design stage is to build capacity for future research, education, and implementation of mitigation and adaptation strategies for coastal communities in the changing climate. A global center on climate change and clean energy with SEA as a living lab would have potentially profound impacts on building intellectual, educational, and implementation capacities on climate change mitigation, adaptation, and resilience.

U.S. students from diverse backgrounds and with limited international travel and education resources will be recruited for this project.

This award is funded by the Global Centers program, an innovative program that supports use-inspired research addressing global challenges related to climate change and/or clean energy. Track 2 design awards support U.S.-based researchers to bring together international teams to develop research questions and partnerships, conduct landscape analyses, synthesize data, and/or build multi-stakeholder networks to advance their use-inspired research at larger scale in the future.

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.