INFEWS/T1: Climate-induced Extremes on the Food, Energy, Water Nexus (C-FEWS) and the Role of Engineered and Natural Infrastructure

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Understanding, mitigating, and adapting to physical climate change and extreme weather have become a strategic imperative across the U.S. Owing to the interwoven nature of the food-energy-water systems (FEWS), climate vulnerabilities are likely to express themselves as major risks to the environment and society well into the century. This study focuses on two strategically important regions of the U.S., the Northeast and Midwest, which together account for nearly half of the U.S. population and GDP. In these regions, landscapes are intensively managed and transformed; and, major decisions affecting global food production, biofuels, energy security and pollution abatement require critical scientific support. To help meet these challenges, this project will create a multi-regional analysis framework designed to identify and evaluate response options to extreme weather in the context of engineered (EI) and natural infrastructure (NI). The framework enables a systematic assessment of future policy options that will define the capacity of the regional FEWS to adapt to changing climate extremes and other environmental stressors from present-day to 2100. The work unites an interdisciplinary research team from academia and government that will link a set of existing models to simulate climate dynamics, biogeochemistry, engineered systems, and economics. The work is driven by a growing consensus on the limits of traditional engineering to sustainably deliver food, energy, and water, a situation that could potentially be improved by incorporating nature-based solutions. Comprehensive frameworks are essential to reveal such opportunities, especially in light of future climate extremes and their interaction with other environmental stressors.Two hypotheses guide this research. The first is diagnostic and the second prognostic. Both address the issue of climate trends and extremes and how these reverberate through the FEWS. Hypothesis-1is retrospective (1950-present) and generates knowledge about how the FEWS is "wired together" and how its sensitivity to climate shocks evolves out of shorter-term events and longer-term trends. The prognostic work under hypothesis-2 assesses potential interventions and climate adaptation strategies, including alternate technology deployments, NI management, and economic and regulatory policies over the next several decades. The work unites an interdisciplinary team whose unique combination of existing models and data sets will enable rapid progress in hypotheses testing, identifying causal links and making projections into the future. This project is designed to quantify FEWS thresholds, feedbacks and emergent properties as the system responds to climate change and its extremes, to environmental stressors, and to shifting economics, technologies and policy forcings. The project also analyzes short-term and legacy effects over time scales from sub-annual to century and will integrate FEWS dynamics across multiple disciplines as it considers physical, engineered, food security and economic sub-systems. These multi-dimensional studies will be executed using a customized version of an existing computational framework. While the initial focus is on the Northeast and the Midwest, pilot modeling experiments and workshops will develop a strategy to generalize this regional work to the national scale.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.