Global Centers Track 1: Understanding Climate Change Impacts on Transboundary Waters

The Global Center for Climate Change Impacts on Transboundary Waters leads research focused on understanding and mitigating water crises in transboundary jurisdictions. Water resources around North America are under threat as climate change intensifies floods and droughts, worsens water quality, exacerbates shoreline erosion, and damages infrastructure and homes.

Communities must learn to adapt to increased extremes, but the tools and knowledge for adaptation are often non-existent or fragmented across jurisdictional boundaries. This problem is complicated in transboundary water systems which intersect multiple sovereign nations, including those of Indigenous Peoples. Managing water resources in multijurisdictional settings requires a diverse perspective on governance structures, stakeholder groups, and management strategies as well as dissemination of scientific resources, including data and models.

The Center studies water resources spanning U.S.-Canada geopolitical boundaries, leveraging U.S. and Canadian expertise. The Center aims to increase the resilience of vulnerable coastal communities by integrating research across three organizing clusters focused on 1) reliable projections of the expected frequency and intensity of climate change impacts; 2) understanding of climate change impacts on ecological and social systems and outcomes; and 3) building capacity for governance and management systems that increase disaster resilience in communities across multiple scales.

The Center is a partnership among University of Michigan, Cornell University, College of the Menominee Nation and Red Lake Nation together with McMaster University, Toronto Metropolitan University, and the Six Nations of the Grand River. It also trains graduate and undergraduate students and supports postdoctoral associates. The knowledge developed through the Center has international relevance and will be disseminated to benefit communities around the world.

The international team focuses on understanding and mitigating an intensifying water crisis by addressing regional needs for water resources management guidance and preparing communities and ecosystems within transboundary water systems for hazards accompanying climate change. The Center will apply a unique social science framework that emphasizes engagement with communities across transnational watershed boundaries to develop new insights into risk tolerance and management practices, climate change monitoring strategies, and community resilience.

The interdisciplinary Center will integrate knowledge from multiple fields to create a comprehensive understanding of the challenges facing communities accessing transnational waters. The Center's use of statistical modeling, state-of-the-art process models, and novel, data-driven observational studies allow for testing of hypotheses about future climate change trajectories, providing critical insights to our stakeholders.

This approach is designed to be flexible and responsive to community needs, ensuring that research outcomes are relevant and useful to the communities it serves and enabling for the development of a national model for transboundary watershed management in subsequent years. The scientific and community-engagement models developed by the Center will initially be focused on the Great Lakes region, and will be replicable and scalable, amplifying the Center’s impact across transboundary water systems and communities globally.

This award is funded by the Global Centers program, an innovative partnership with funding agencies in Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom, to jointly support use-inspired research addressing global challenges in climate change and clean energy. Partnerships with the Commonwealth Science and Innovation Research Organisation (CSIRO), Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) leverage resources to tackle challenges at a larger scale than would be possible for one funding agency alone.

This Center is jointly supported by NSF and SSHRC. The NSF award is co-funded by the Office of International Science and the Tribal Colleges and Universities Program in the Directorate for STEM Education.

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.