Planning: CHIRRP: Building Collaborations and Capacity to Address Climate Hazards in the Southeast U.S.

This project will build collaborations to align academic research with community needs to prepare for Earth system hazards and a changing climate. The project will bring together stakeholders in South Carolina to build capacity for addressing the varied Earth system hazards that the Southeast experiences. These hazards include heat stress in urban and rural settings; flooding from both extreme events and everyday fair-weather periods, where changing tides and rising sea levels amplify the hazard; and pollutant exposures from water and air owing to the rapid residential and industrial growth in the region.

To advance Earth system hazard knowledge and risk mitigation across these hazards and in a variety of communities, this project will conduct a coordinated and systematic study to understand these hazards across the region. This project will facilitate meetings to bring communities and academics together and will result in a large-scale proposal to address the hazard concerns that communities identify.

Having the community engaged in the process will build trust and literacy in potential solutions and science. The project will build capacity by educating communities during public meetings, training graduate students to collaborate with community and public agency stakeholders and to communicate engineering and scientific information to the public, and incorporating project outcomes into research- and project-based college courses.

This project will form community partnerships that will lead to advances in knowledge of hazards, impacts, and risks in the Earth system and actionable solutions that communities can employ to increase their resilience to these hazards. The communities and organizations that will contribute to this project are already addressing Earth system and climate hazards locally; this project will bring disparate communities together to coordinate efforts on a larger scale.

The project will allow academics to engage communities at public meetings, synthesize hazard data in response to the outcomes of those meetings, and co-develop, with community input, actionable solutions to those hazards. This project will coordinate across microclimates, such as the coastal region influenced by the sea breeze circulation, rising sea levels, and extreme weather; the midlands region with long, hot, and humid summers and an increased risk of wildfires under a changing climate; and the upstate region near the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains where it can be more moderate in the summer but has winter season hazards often forgotten.

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.