International partnerships for accelerating climate-ready, sustainable, and clean urban transportation

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This multi-institutional and multidisciplinary PIRE use-inspired project will develop an integrated coupled infrastructure framework across multiple cities in India with high potential to scale our design framework for South Asian and global cities facing similar air quality issues and considering a path to investments in clean transportation. This project will create a Transportation-Air Quality Coupled Infrastructure System (TAQCIS) – a roadmap to facilitate informed accelerated decision-making as cities plan to adopt clean transportation options. The project will integrate (i) physical sciences for high-resolution fully coupled urban-chemistry-weather-climate model outputs for air quality and clean transportation scenarios; (ii) transportation and human systems for behavioral reactions to travel demand management (TDM) strategies impacting congestion, air pollution, safety, and effectiveness of clean (electric) transportation; (iii) social sciences to assess robustness and resilience of clean transportation interventions; and (iv) education to inform public, train the trainers, and teach students and scholars from the U.S. and India. The project will engage international partners around climate change and urban sustainability to fill in knowledge gaps about how urbanization, population growth, and vehicular traffic will impact cities, especially as they develop clean transportation technologies. It will empower many global cities that face similar climate change challenges and urban transportation problems, including acute pollution. Overall, this project will enhance the resilience and sustainability of urban communities, contribute to identifying strategic investments in clean transportation based on vulnerability analyses and surveys, and perform international student exchange and training and postdoctoral mentoring. Assessment of short-term environmental benefits and an improved understanding of clean transportation interventions will increase decision makers' ability to reduce acute episodes of air pollution in cities, improve the efficacy of air quality alerts, and empower individuals to make informed health-related decisions. The PIRE team will share project updates with a global audience through public webinars, social media outlets, and presenting in multidisciplinary conferences, including the social sciences discipline. The project will train 3 Ph.D. students and a postdoctoral fellow in the U.S. in addition to 18 international student/scholar exchanges over a three-year period. This project will result in a deeper understanding of TAQCIS through a convergence urban sustainability research lens. Specifically, the project will generate new knowledge for multiple cities in India, specifically for Delhi, Pune, and Bhubaneswar, with the potential to scale to other South Asian cities and global cities. The objectives of the project are: (i) assess how early adoption of clean transportation coupled with a graded response action plan (GRAP) can reduce emissions as compared to projected stagnant trends until 2040; (ii) assess human behavior and their choices concerning clean transportation options now and in future; (iii) evaluate social inequity regarding transportation choices and clean transportation options while improving public health outcomes; and (iv) identify the resiliency of the current coupled infrastructure system (CIS) for transportation and identifying any changes in feedback systems in the transition to a new regime of clean transportation. State-of-the-art urban-weather-chemistry-climate modeling will evaluate the effectiveness of clean transportation and GRAP interventions for air quality, map traffic intensity and environmental vulnerability, and conduct surveys to gauge public perceptions of vulnerability to air pollution and climate change. A mathematical model combined with a social sciences lens will be developed for analyzing TAQCIS for current and future climate change scenarios. The project will advance education by using novel ‘science gateways,’ a virtual platform for integrating transdisciplinary knowledge and exchanging knowledge across global institutions. With this use-inspired PIRE project, Discovery Partners Institute in Chicago will establish center-level activities that foster international partnerships for urban convergence research and education, as well as enhance awareness, diversity, and inclusion.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.