RII Track-2 FEC: Community-Driven Coastal Climate Research & Solutions for the Resilience of New England Coastal Populations

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The "Community-Driven Coastal Climate Research & Solutions (3CRS)" project is a significant and timely initiative that addresses the pressing issue of climate change in low-lying, working waterfront communities in New England. These communities, which are deeply intertwined with ocean resources, are disproportionately vulnerable to the adverse impacts of climate change. With large parts of these communities, including critical infrastructure, projected to be increasingly impacted by nuisance flooding and potentially permanently underwater by the end of the century, the need for climate adaptation strategies is urgent. The project's importance lies in its focus on developing a scalable and transferable framework for such strategies, thereby enhancing coastal resilience. Specifically, the project aims at developing the knowledge, data, modeling, and human network infrastructure to support a New England Hub for coastal climate resilience that is community-driven. This aligns directly with the NSF's mission to promote the progress of science to advance national health, prosperity, and welfare. The 3CRS Hub seeks to address and explore solutions for the intersect of fundamental issues of poverty, limited healthcare access, inadequate infrastructure, and limited climate change adaptation capacity in waterfront communities. Beyond addressing these immediate challenges, the project also holds potential for broader societal benefits. It aims to advance the field of climate resilience, support education and diversity through the mentorship of early career scientists, and benefit society by increasing the resilience of communities that play a crucial role in the nation's economy and cultural heritage.The 3CRS project is designed to tackle three key research challenges for climate resilience planning. The first challenge is to identify and measure dynamic changes in human health, wellbeing, habitability, environment, and other climate vulnerabilities. This involves a comprehensive understanding of the complex interplay between climate change and various socio-economic factors that influence community resilience. The second challenge is to downscale climate models outputs and information to the community level and project the impacts of climate resilience for planners. This requires sophisticated modeling techniques (e.g. dynamical and AI-based) that can translate large-scale climate models projections into actionable information at the community level. The third challenge is to expand the capacity to incorporate data, knowledge, and expert networks into community resilience planning processes. This involves building robust systems for data collection, analysis, and dissemination, as well as fostering strong relationships with expert networks. To address these challenges, the project will develop a Community Knowledge Collective, which will co-produce three primary knowledge streams: observational data, community-driven metrics of resilience, and climate adaptation narratives. A novel tool, the New England-wide Coastal Hazards Analysis Modeling and Prediction System (NE-CHAMP), will be deployed to enable communities to visualize and analyze the impacts of present and future climate on critical infrastructure, health, socio-economic, and other community-driven resilience metrics. In the final phase of the project, a series of shared resilience roadmaps will be produced that digitally document the transferable processes for developing coastal adaptation strategies, thereby providing a blueprint for other communities facing similar challenges.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.