SRS RN: Regional Transition to Sustainability Beginning with Food and Water

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This Sustainable Regional Systems Research Network Planning Grant project focuses on developing an action-oriented network of academic, industrial, governmental, and non-governmental organizations with the reach and expertise to define and parameterize a transition to a sustainable future and to outfit that network with the tools it needs to measure and manage that transition. Beginning with a focus on food and water subsystems (FWSS)—but eventually expanding to other basic needs—the research agenda involves three major steps: (1) Creating a shared understanding of the FWSS needs and challenges facing the multitude of regional stakeholders, (2) creating a shared vision of a future where these FWSS basic needs are met in a more sustainable and equitable way, and (3) engineering the tools and processes needed to make that future vision a reality. Any improvements to create better, more sustainable food and water systems requires working regionally among different jurisdictions and collaborating across state lines and all along the urban-rural continuum. Any lasting improvements to create more sustainable systems will require agreement on a regional agenda. The Washington, DC, region, given its size and complexity and position within the Chesapeake Bay watershed, provides the ideal case study for a research network to examine the complexities and promise of a sustainable regional systems approach focused on food and water. This project meets the mission of the National Science Foundation by providing actionable research to enhance the national health and prosperity in an equitable fashion.This planning grant project focuses on understanding how multiple stakeholders can achieve equitable regional sustainability and how entities can measure and manage food and water sustainability across complex systems at regional scales from a multiple stakeholder perspective. The project leverages existing partnerships to lay the groundwork for the creation of such an ensemble of adaptive interventions by (1) mapping the problems from multiple stakeholder perspectives, (2) envisioning the solutions and getting buy-in from those stakeholders, and (3) enlarging the network to account for gaps in representation and to ensure the capacity to eventually develop and deploy such an ensemble. The project will make the methodology that emerges from these planning phases extensible to additional basic needs subsystems and is transferable to other regions.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.