CAREER: Investigating Iterative Interrelations in Socio-Environmental Processes to Improve Climate Change Attribution Research

This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) project supports research on integrating social science perspectives into the study of climate change-attributed storms through an iterative interrelationships framework unifying public policies, resident perceptions and actions, and socio-demographics. Climate change attribution estimates if and to what extent anthropogenic climate change plays a role in supercharging extreme weather events.

While this emergent research has made important, headline-grabbing advances in physical sciences, it is minimally applied in conjunction with social sciences. Systematically measuring the impacts of flooding to humans and the built environment, as an example, enables the accounting of not only the toll that climate change is already taking on our society but also the inequalities in those impacts. Consequently, this new knowledge will be used to inform policies to reverse the trend.

This CAREER project includes research that intends to form a conceptual and theoretical framework based on iterative and interrelated socio-environmental processes that occur long before and cascade after climatic disasters. Three pivotal processes being examined pertain to: (1) public policy, (2) resident perceptions and actions, and (3) place-based socio-demographic change.

The project takes advantage of transdisciplinary, longitudinal, and mixed methodological data to uncover these processes in south Louisiana. REsearch activities are coupled with an education plan with high school, undergraduate, and graduate students to train the next generation of scientist and engineers working in climate change attribution.

This project is jointly funded by Humans, Disasters, and the Built Environment (HDBE), and the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR).

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.