PIRE: Co-Creating Research and Education Capacities to Understand, Visualize and Mitigate Climate-Change Impact Cascades and Inequities in Central Mexico

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The news brings more and more reports of the growing impacts of climate change around the world: shrinking water reservoirs, severe drought, flooding, forest fires and dangerous heat waves, to name a few. These impacts are beyond human experience, catching us off-guard and therefore are causing catastrophic losses to lives, livelihoods, and properties. To make matters worse, one impact often has a domino effect or "impact cascade". It is becoming clear that, while climate change will impact us all, some of us are more at risk than others. Those living of the ‘edges’ of society, under social and economic stress, will suffer the most and are the least prepared. This project mobilizes diverse partners and social groups in the U.S. and Mexico to understand, visualize, and address the myriad impacts of climate change on water resources, ecosystems, food and agriculture, health, and livelihoods - in and around Mexico City. It also reveals how these impacts vary across populations and landscapes. The researchers integrate diverse data - including rainfall, temperature, population, land use/land cover - and tools to anticipate future impacts. The overarching goal is to create new ways to simulate and virtually inhabit future climate change/impact scenarios to be used by communities and policy makers to implement mitigation measures. This project, thus, re-imagines the way research, policy, community action, and education can join forces to address climate change and social justice. Its outcomes will be applicable not only in the U.S. and Mexico, but globally. The project also supports the training of graduate students at Clark University, notably from underrepresented groups in science, and outreach to the public. How do diverse social groups co-create a shared understanding of complex climate-change impact cascades to water, ecosystems, food, health, livelihoods? How do we map and model impact inequities? How do we transform governance and social learning to chart sustainable, socially just, climate-resilient pathways? Here, the team works in a setting powerfully emblematic of this global climate and sustainability challenge: Mexico-Lerma-Cutzamala Hydrological Region, that includes Mexico City. To respond, for the first time, their approach combines four components in synergy: C1) Co-creation with partners (including pilot communities) of an open-source GIS/Remote Sensing-based Regional Climate-Change Atlas to map and spatially analyze social, climate and environmental conditions; C2) Co-creation of a System Dynamics Model informed by GIS, representing interactions/impacts among climate change, water, population, urbanization, land-use/land cover change, ecosystems, food, health, and livelihoods – and revealing of impact inequities and injustice; C3) Piloting of eXtended Reality (XR) decision analysis, simulating climate-change/development scenarios diverse stakeholders can inhabit virtually and interact with in groups, informed by C1 and C2; C4) Integration of research and education such that they reinforce each other, including the co-creation of courses and field research that U.S. students and their peers in Mexico can experience together as learning teams.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.