PROVIDENCE – Rhode Island researchers have been awarded $6 million in federal funding for a new data hub study climate change and coastal resiliency, U.S. Sens. Jack Reed and Sheldon Whitehouse announced Monday.
The funding, through the National Science Foundation’s Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research, will support a five-year project dubbed the Community-Driven Coastal Climate Research and Solutions for the Resilience of New England Coastal Populations.
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The project, Community-driven Coastal Climate Research and Solutions, 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. It is is intended to develop strategies to enhance coastal resilience, particularly during floods.
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 project aims develop a hub for knowledge, data, modeling and a “human network infrastructure” that will gather data to answer important questions and develop strategies to enhance coastal resilience, particularly during floods. 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.
“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 $6 million grant for Rhode Island is one of 11 projects that will receive a total of $56 million in EPSCOR funding.
“This is a promising project that can help decision makers effectively strengthen resiliency in vulnerable coastal areas,” said Reed, D-R.I.
Funding includes:
- Brown University: $2.9 million
- University of Rhode Island: $700,761
- Rhode Island College: $539,871
- Rhode Island Hospital: $173,195
- University of New Hampshire: $456,941
- NERACOOS: $400,000
- Gulf of Maine Research Institute: $786,568
“Rhode Islanders are seeing the effects of the climate crisis all around us – from rising sea levels to extreme weather events,” said Whitehouse, D-R.I. “As we race to lead the planet to safety from climate change, we must address the urgent challenges facing coastal communities. This federal funding will allow Rhode Island’s world-class research institutions to collaborate on boosting resiliency in the Ocean State for generations.”
(Update: more information about project added in 3rd through 6th paragraphs.)
