Global Centers Track 2: Center for Household Energy and Thermal Resilience (HEaTR)

气候变化的许多最明显的健康、经济和社会影响都是通过住房经历的。在脆弱社区，能否获得有效的能源可以决定生死存亡，但家庭能源的可持续利用仍然是一项重大的全球挑战。只有清楚地了解生活在最容易受到极端高温和寒冷影响的地方的人们如何与能源系统、热能技术和住房本身互动，可持续能源战略才会有效。这个设计全球家庭能源和热弹性中心(HEATR)的奖项将开发可扩展的、社区驱动的解决方案，以解决如何将住房从边缘群体经历气候脆弱的空间转换为他们可以确保气候弹性的空间这一令人头疼的问题。虽然穷人和边缘化人群将更大比例的收入花在家庭能源上，但这些人已经为能源挑战制定了创造性的解决方案，从使用当地来源的材料的低成本制冷和隔热，到利用社会网络保护最弱势群体的供暖和制冷行动计划。该奖项支持关于家庭如何使用能源、社区驱动的住宅建筑和维修实践如何节省能源以及地区和全球能源和住房市场动态如何实现或阻碍净零生活的多学科研究。HEATR将在美国和四个国际地点(加纳、印度、新加坡和英国)召集研究团队，开发一种家庭层面的气候变化缓解方法，突出最容易受到极端气候影响的社区的视角、习语、材料和社会经济现实。这些团队将培养一种自下而上的方法来应对气候变化和保护个人和社区的技术。HEATR汇集了人类学、地理学、空间数据科学、劳工研究和建筑学的研究人员，分析家庭能源使用的社会动态。这项研究将开发可转移、可适应的可持续和公平行为模式，以培养家庭层面的气候适应能力。它将采用比较、定性的方法来分析影响人们如何使用能源来取暖和制冷的社会力量，以及家庭能源使用在亲属制度、性别分工以及乡土建筑和气候控制实践中的位置。它将把这种定性方法与住房和气候风险分布的定量和空间分析结合起来。通过这种方式，HEatr的研究将引导人们对建造和维护住房的过程--从个人实践到社区行动再到长期城市规划--可能如何有助于应对气候变化的新的、强有力的理解。HEATR将产生一个多模式平台(文本、计算机模型、数据集)，侧重于解决供暖和制冷挑战的最佳做法。该奖项由全球中心计划资助，这是一项创新计划，旨在支持受使用启发的研究，以应对与气候变化和/或清洁能源相关的全球挑战。Track 2设计奖支持美国的研究人员将国际团队聚集在一起，开发研究问题和合作伙伴关系，进行景观分析，合成数据，和/或建立多方利益相关者网络，以推动他们未来更大规模的应用启发研究。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Many of the most glaring health, economic, and social effects of climate change are experienced through housing. Access to efficient sources of energy can make the difference between life and death in vulnerable communities, but sustainable household energy use remains a major global challenge. Sustainable energy strategies will only be effective if there is a clear understanding of how people who live in the places most vulnerable to extreme heat and cold interact with energy systems, thermal technologies, and housing itself. This award to design a global center for Household Energy and Thermal Resilience (HEaTR) will develop scalable, community-driven solutions to the vexing question of how housing can be converted from a space where marginalized groups experience climate vulnerability to one where they can ensure climate resilience. While poor and marginalized people spend a greater proportion of income on household energy, those same people have developed creative solutions to energy challenges, from low-cost cooling and insulation using locally-sourced materials, to heat and cold action plans that leverage social networks to protect the most vulnerable. The award supports multidisciplinary research on how households use energy, how community-driven home building and repair practices can save energy, and how regional and global energy and housing market dynamics enable or impede net-zero living. HEaTR will assemble research teams in the US and four international locations (Ghana, India, Singapore and United Kingdom) to develop an approach to household-level climate change mitigation that foregrounds the perspectives, idioms, materials, and socio-economic realities of the communities that are most vulnerable to climate extremes. The teams will foster a bottom-up approach to climate change and to the technologies that work to protect individuals and communities. HEaTR brings together researchers from anthropology, geography, spatial data science, labor studies, and architecture to analyze the social dynamics of household energy use. The research will develop transferable, adaptable models of sustainable and equitable behaviors that foster household-level climate resilience. It will deploy comparative, qualitative methods to analyze the social forces that shape how people use energy to heat and cool their homes, as well as how household energy use is situated in systems of kinship, gendered divisions of labor, and vernacular architectural and climate control practices. It will integrate this qualitative approach with quantitative and spatial analysis of the distributions of housing and climate risk. In this way, HEaTR’s research will lead to novel and robust understandings of how the process of constructing and maintaining housing, from individual practices to community action to long-range urban planning, might contribute to climate resilience. HEaTR will result in a multimodal platform (texts, computer models, data sets) focused on best practices for addressing heating and cooling challenges. 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.