Global Centers Track 2: Heat Adaptation

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Extreme heat is an urgent threat to global health and prosperity. Growing challenges around heat exposure require enhanced adaptive capacity, monitoring, and cross-disciplinary training to minimize risks. Heat adaptation involves behavior, infrastructure, technology, and physiologic changes to protect people from heat, reduce vulnerability, and improve well-being to prosper and thrive in an increasingly warming world. However, fundamental knowledge gaps exist surrounding 1) types of heat adaptation that are essential for health and safety and 2) transdisciplinary training and education. This Global Centers Design award on heat adaptation and will lay the foundations for a future Global Center that will strengthen society's ability to manage and adapt to extreme heat and train the next generation of transdisciplinary researchers and practitioners. Data will be collected using the HeatSuite, a remote platform gathering information on heat exposure and behavioral and physiological changes during everyday activities. A week-long Global School on Heat Adaptation will engage students, researchers, and stakeholders in experiential learning and cross-disciplinary teaching. This project addresses the goals of the Global Centers Program by working internationally, including in understudied regions, and weaving together diverse expertise––from atmospheric science, social and behavioral sciences, and thermal physiology to data sciences and engineering. Use-inspired research will produce real-world solutions to yield sustainable, effective cooling practices supporting clean energy in a changing climate. Broader impacts are expected to improve the well-being of heat-vulnerable people by empowering communities, healthcare practitioners, government officials, and tomorrow's academics with new knowledge of heat adaptation strategies. To strengthen society's ability to manage and adapt to extreme heat across countries, climates, and cultures, this project will 1) coordinate and integrate knowledge across disciplines, sectors, and communities, 2) create the first Global School on Heat Adaptation, and 3) launch a pilot field study in five global locations to monitor heat exposure and adaptive strategies, including behavior change, social capital, and physiological responses. Data will be gathered through the HeatSuite remote data acquisition platform, a scalable, comprehensive, cutting-edge tool with cloud infrastructure and complete data governance. The project’s scientific contributions include 1) developing heat adaptation concepts and frameworks arising from disparate disciplines based on transdisciplinary collaboration (beyond academia) and ecologically valid data and 2) an innovative, economical, and scalable approach (HeatSuite) to remotely observe natural behavioral and physiological responses in vulnerable populations during extreme heat. The contributions will resolve underlying mechanisms that drive heat risk and vulnerability, behavior, and adaptations that can interrupt the causal pathways that lead to illness, death, and other adverse outcomes.This award is funded by the Global Centers program, an innovative program that supports use-inspired research addressing global challenges related to climate change and/or clean energy. Track 2 design awards support U.S.-based researchers to bring together international teams to develop research questions and partnerships, conduct landscape analyses, synthesize data, and/or build multi-stakeholder networks to advance their use-inspired research at larger scale in the future.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.