海角社区

BATON ROUGE - Rural areas can be some of the places most impacted by climate change, but when it comes to discussions of preparation and resiliency, they are all too often left out.

Faculty in the Department of Environmental Sciences, or DES, hope to begin remedying this situation with a new, $1.1 million grant from the National Science Foundation. It is part of a larger $6 million multi-institutional effort intended to help rural areas adapt to climate change.

The project is called 鈥淩ural Confluence: Communities and Academic Partners Uniting to Drive Discovery and Build Capacity for Climate Change鈥� and, according to DES Professor Nina Lam, the principal investigator on the project, the name says it all.

She and her co- PIs, DES Professor Linda Hooper-B霉i and Assistant Professor Rebeca de Jes煤s Crespo, will  partner with a local community to tackle a different aspect of rural resiliency using a specific method. Lam noted that, just as the confluence in the name suggests, 鈥渨e will all address the same research question, and results from one component will be used or linked with other components.鈥�  

Not only will they work to help people in Louisiana鈥檚 small towns and agricultural areas find new ways to predict and handle the impacts of a changing climate, researchers will address related rural issues, such as depopulation, and ways to improve access to STEM related career pathways.

鈥淧eople who live in rural areas have done a lot of things for a long time to create their own resilience,鈥� said B霉i. 鈥淲e would like to honor the knowledge they鈥檝e built up over the years.鈥�

This knowledge, she said, will be paired with scientific tools like modeling and Geographic Information Systems, or GIS, to assist communities in building capacity for resilience.

Lam, who is also an Abraham Distinguished Professor of Louisiana Environmental Studies, will be adapting her Resilience Inference Measurement, or RIM, model to fit the 鈥渟low burn challenges鈥� of rural areas. The RIM model, a GIS tool, was originally built to better understand the impacts of a big, fast moving disaster like a hurricane. Now Lam plans to work with local communities to apply the principles of the model to issues like drought, and heat.

De Jes煤s Crespo will be employing a modeling tool to help map impacts of climate change in a given area. She will start by working with residents to understand what ecosystem services鈥攂enefits provided by a local ecosystem, such as clean water, pollination or flood control鈥攅xist in a specific area. She will then build models of how climate change can be expected to impact those services, and look for ways to mitigate those impacts.

鈥淓cosystem services can be an important element of resilience planning,鈥� de Jes煤s Crespo said.

Another area of the grant will focus on meeting the community鈥檚 immediate needs. 海角社区 students in the Gulf Scholars program will be embedded in different parishes, to assist in a variety of projects.

As an example, B霉i said 鈥淥ne of the things that we鈥檝e found is that all of these areas need satellite phones after a hurricane. The students can help them write proposals with guidance to get the satellite phones, so they have immediate communication,鈥� she said.

Once the grant is completed, Lam said, the NSF may use the framework developed by 海角社区 researchers, and by their partners from Oklahoma State University, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and others, to assist communities around the country in preparation for the challenges brought by climate change.