Focused CoPe: Supporting Environmental Justice in Connected Coastal Communities through a Regional Approach to Collaborative Community Science

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The project will strengthen coastal resilience in communities along the Albemarle-Pamlico Estuary system of coastal North Carolina. This area has been impacted by poor water quality that threatens ecosystems and economic activities important to coastal communities. The team of researchers will measure how contaminants flow throughout the natural and built environment over time to understand processes that control their distribution and their impact on the watershed. A key goal of the Hub is to integrate a broad coalition of academic, community, NGO and government stakeholders to develop mitigation strategies and understand tradeoffs in adaptation and management plans. The Hub’s Coastal Environmental Justice Institute will serve as the central coordinating unit to catalyze connections within the community, coordinate internships (high school and college students) embedded with partners and communicate with community stakeholders. Manhattan College, a primarily undergraduate institution, will also serve to integrate STEM with non-STEM fields (business and management) to better prepare and inform the next generation of decision makers in the community. Does engaging diverse communities in regional science partnerships make them more resilient to coastal hazards and less susceptible to environmental injustices? This project will investigate how the co-production of scientific knowledge between community members, regional stakeholders, and academic researchers contributes to understanding socioenvironmental drivers that impact resilience to coastal hazards and the adoption of solutions to overcome them, particularly for marginalized populations that are being disproportionately affected by poor water quality, hurricanes, floods, droughts, and sea level rise. Divergent economic interests, significant racial inequities, and differing degrees of flood and water quality risk for communities throughout the region around North Carolina’s Pamlico Sound, along with the ecologic and economic importance of these coastal waters, make this estuary an ideal study area for a CoPe hub. Stakeholders in the project represent fishers, farmers, local and state government, tourists, and residents at multiple nested scales of decision making reflecting different social contexts built on environmental attitudes, economic incentives and inequities, and propensities for social cooperation. These contexts are themselves dependent on individual perceptions of identity, trust, norms, and control over the environmental system. Our team of academic researchers takes a transdisciplinary approach to understanding this complex system by pursuing four objectives: (1) mapping key natural, built, and socioeconomic resources and interdependencies that define the regional socio-engineered- environmental system (SEES); (2) understanding how coastal hazards enhance vulnerabilities in the region; (3) identifying opportunities for locally appropriate adaptation and mitigation strategies to build community and regional resilience; and (4) establishing a Coastal Environmental Justice Institute as a long-term mechanism to promote and support collaboration among stakeholder groups from diverse communities throughout the region and beyond.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.