The project, supported by the National Science Foundation, will focus on creating a set of tools and convening experts to address climate change related challenges faced by communities along the New England coast.
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] - A new federal grant will enable a team of researchers led by a Brown University scientist to bring together experts and stakeholders in an effort to create a coastal resilience research hub aimed at addressing climate change related challenges faced by low-lying communities in New England.
The National Science Foundation grant is expected to total approximately $6 million over five years.
The team will include eight faculty members from Brown as well as 21 researchers from University of Rhode Island, Rhode Island College, University of New Hampshire, Gulf of Maine Research Institute and Northeastern Regional Association of Coastal Ocean Observing Systems. The group will be led by Emanuele Di Lorenzo, a professor in the Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences at Brown, and Sarah Lummis, a researcher at the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society and executive director of the new hub.
The team plans to initially work with four coastal communities in New England - one industrial port and one commercial fishing port in both Rhode Island and Maine - but eventually they hope to bring solutions from these pilot communities to the entire New England coast and beyond. The goal is to create a set of systems and establish a network of experts that members of these communities can turn to for help developing strategies to become more resilient to climate change, including tools for data collection and predicting rising water levels.
"The concept of the hub stems from the fact that in the past, a lot of coastal communities, sometimes in connection with the research institutions, have been addressing solution strategies for resilience on their own," Di Lorenzo said. "This has led in general to a fragmented approach to coastal resilience where individual communities are trying to develop their own strategies. A hub can help communities share data, tools and human infrastructure to essentially accelerate the process, especially for places that wouldn't necessarily have the expertise to be able to define what tools and strategies they need in the first place."
The project will be known as 3CRS - Community-driven Coastal Climate Research and Solutions. The work will be part of NSF's Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) program, which aims to strengthen states' research competitiveness and fund workforce development initiatives.
The pilot communities the researchers will work with are the Port of Providence, the Port of Galilee in Narragansett, Rhode Island, as well as ports in Rockland and Bath, Maine. Each is part of a larger municipality and includes people and groups whose livelihood, property or business connect them with the coast.
