The community special project, blue tech initiative will catalyze the development of strong, interconnected climate resilience consortium at the university of rhode island (URI) that includes…

The University of Rhode Island (URI) was awarded a $2,250,000 Cooperative Agreement from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) under the Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS) Federal Grant Program (CFDA 11.012). The purpose of this four-year project is to catalyze the development of a strong, interconnected climate resilience consortium at URI that includes expertise across multiple disciplines. The project will provide an essential management structure to facilitate collaboration between URI's academic departments, extension services, and community partners to improve Rhode Island's resilience to climate change. Key activities include establishing climate response demonstration sites as testbeds for studying climate impacts and resilience, developing landscape visualization tools to inform community-level decision making, and training a climate-ready workforce. The project aims to synergize interdisciplinary collaboration, cultivate lasting capacity in Rhode Island, and serve as a national exemplar for other coastal states in addressing climate change challenges.

The community special project, blue tech initiative will catalyze the development of strong, interconnected climate resilience consortium at the university of rhode island (URI) that includes expertise across disciplinary domains to develop, foster and coordinate activities with community partners to improve rhode island?S resiliency to climate change. This project will provide essential management structure to facilitate interconnectedness between expertise in academic disciplines, extension and community engagement. This project is catalytic in nature as IT provides human resources to build and strengthen linkages within URI in a consortium that will facilitate deep and lasting connections with communities and underserved populations in rhode island. A centerpiece of this initiative is the use of climate response demonstration sites established by URI?S coastal institute as test beds for looking at the impacts of climate change across a gradient of coastal development. These sites include undeveloped natural areas, mixed use sites in populated communities threatened by storm surge and sea level rise and densely populated and industrialized urban ports facing the same threats. Landscape visualizations of storm surge and sea level rise will be used to inform community-level decision making processes for enhancing their climate resilience. In addition, these sites will be used as educational testbeds for bringing communities across the state together to learn about the relationship of landscape to climate impacts and resilience. The landscape visualization data from the climate response demonstration sites will be interwoven with data simulation and hydrodynamic modeling efforts to advance technical methods for predicting climate resilience and response to change and for training a climate-ready workforce. Primary objectives of the proposed research are to 1) synergize collaboration across disciplines, 2) establish a center of climate resilience knowledge, 3) use project-based modeling for prediction of resilience responses, 4) broadly promote equitable resilience, 5) cultivate lasting capacity at URI and in RI and to 6) disseminate tool kits for best practices in climate resilience to 7) train a workforce with skills and literacy in climate resilience and to 8) serve as a national exemplar to other coastal states. Fulfillment of these objects will result in a platform upon which to build larger scaled projects, a skilled workforce, lasting diverse partnerships centered in a network of learning and broadly trained communities across demographics in RI.