PIRE: Developing Low-Carbon Cities in the US, China, and India Through Integration Across Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Social Sciences, and Public Health

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This Partnership for International Research and Education (PIRE) award supports a five-year project that brings researchers and students from six U.S. institutions together with five partner institutions in India and three in China to conduct transformative research that will contribute to the development of low-carbon, sustainable cities in the U.S., India, and China. There is a need for cities to have science-based tools to model present-day greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions associated with cities, and to project future GHG emissions reductions resulting from a combination of technology and policy strategies. This research effort is two-pronged, focusing on reducing greenhouse gas emissions in selected cities and also addressing broader sustainability goals such as economic development, water scarcity, environmental pollution, climate change, and public health. Principal Investigator Anu Ramaswami, University of Minnesota and colleagues from Yale University (Marian Chertow), Georgia Institute of Technology (Armistead Russell), National Center for Atmospheric Research (Patricia Romero-Lankao), University of Colorado Denver (Christopher Weible), and the National Academy of Engineering Center for Engineering, Ethics & Society (Rachelle Hollander) will collaborate with partners at TERI University, the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, Tongji University, Tsinghua University, the Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute for the Urban Environment, and several Non-Governmental Organizations in India and China. PIRE research explores transformations needed in coupled technological, infrastructural, and social sub-systems that can help urban areas realize low-carbon, resource-efficient outcomes leading to sustainable cities. This project targets Asian cities in transition. These are small rapidly industrializing cities in Asia with populations less than 1M that are expected to dominate future urbanization. The investigators will compare their development trajectories with those of megacities having populations greater than 10M and smaller service-economy cities in the U.S., thus providing a road-map for sustainable development in different city types worldwide. The research team will evaluate unique infrastructure interventions in smaller Asian cities --urban industrial symbiosis, early transportation planning incorporating bus rapid transit, and electric power sector planning under water-scarcity conditions-- that can achieve the multiple sustainability goals listed above. Social science research will explore the extent to which local water-supply and public health concerns can motivate the adoption of low-carbon infrastructures, and will identify the most effective political and institutional interventions that could facilitate their adoption in different city types. The interactions between infrastructures, social actors and sustainability outcomes will be evaluated together using a novel inter-disciplinary Social-Ecological-Infrastructural Systems (SEIS) framework.PIRE education will develop a first-of-its-kind International Summer School and MS Program on Sustainable Infrastructure-Sustainable Cities for graduate students in three nations drawn from six major disciplines: Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Industrial Ecology, Urban Planning, Public Affairs and Public Health. Curriculum and fieldwork will nurture multiple competencies addressing: inter-cultural learning, inter-disciplinary skills, sustainability knowledge, systems-integration, community-based practices, and awareness of ethics in global discussions of sustainability.The intellectual merit of this project is that it integrates for the first time six diverse disciplines both in research and education using a science-based systems framework. Cross-disciplinary integration, urban-to-global linkages, integration of urban infrastructures with public health and governance, and international cross-city comparisons, taken together will advance the science of low-carbon cities. As to broader impacts, this PIRE will directly affect close to 100 students across three nations, benefit residents in the fieldwork cities, and create long-term capacity to translate research to sustainability in communities and potentially worldwide. Partnerships with the U.S. National Academy of Engineering Center for Engineering, Ethics & Society and the Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute for the Urban Environment enable the dissemination of research and education outputs, while work with NGOs such as ICLEI-Local Governments for Sustainability (South Asia), Urban Health Resource Centre (UHRC), and Resource Optimization Initiative (ROI) will help translate research into action in communities. The project is funded by NSF's Office of International Science and Engineering (OISE) through the PIRE.