CAREER: Building long-term climate resilience in 21st-century regional urban land systems through integrated data-driven research and education

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Increasing environmental variability and urban expansion during the 21st century have the potential to exacerbate the impacts of climate extremes on future generations. Understanding the long-term, large-scale effects of human-environment interactions is necessary for building urban climate resilience. Conventional human-environment research on urban climate resilience is often limited to short time horizons and/or highly localized geographic scope. This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) project investigates the dynamic interactions among demographic patters, urban land use, and climate variability across the continental U.S. By 2100, many new urban centers will have been built, and existing ones renovated. Actionable scientific knowledge that informs policies to embed long-term climate resilience in strategic urban land planning can help moderate, or at least not significantly amplify, future population exposures to climate extremes. This project develops machine-intelligence models for the actionable science and establishes educational activities to promote multidisciplinary approaches to thinking and communicating long-term, large-scale urban climate challenges through workforce development (college education and postgraduate training) and public engagement (science communication).This project (a) identifies regional-scale spatial characteristics of urban land that can moderate future U.S. population exposures to 21st-century climate extremes, (b) establishes a model-aided framework for designing regional urban land systems with embedded long-term climate resilience, and (c) develops FAIR cyberinfrastructures (data and codes) for long-term large-scale spatiotemporal modeling of socioeconomic processes as well as integrative analyses of social, human-built, and the earth systems. Leveraging knowledge from and integrating methods from human dimensions, climate and data science, this project contributes new insights, cyberinfrastructure, and learning opportunities about long-term, large-scale challenges to current and future urban communities. Findings can inform decision-makers on land use policy interventions to minimize future population exposures to climate extremes.This project is jointly funded by Human-Environment and Geographic Sciences (HEGS), the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR), and Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (OAC), Humans, Disasters, and the Built Environment (HDBE).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.