The NOAA Climate Program Office (CPO) Adaptation Sciences (AdSci) program is excited to announce eight new awards totalling $2,395,476 that will build the nation’s climate resilience.
Through these awards, universities, other research institutions, and agency partners across the United States will conduct newly-funded projects in partnership with NOAA programs, laboratories, research centers, and stakeholders. CPO is committed to funding these awards for two years, conditional on appropriations.
According to the latest figures from NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information, the U.S. has sustained 400 separate billion-dollar weather and climate disasters since 1980. This trend underscores the need for greater research that will help society build resilience and enhanced risk management into their planning and preparedness efforts. Substantial improvements are necessary in monitoring, evaluation, and assessment of effective adaptive actions, as well as the development of climate services to best support them.
In order to help meet this need, the AdSci program sought proposals in FY24 for evaluation and evaluation research that advances methods and approaches in order to support more transformative adaptation and resilience.
The eight new projects² funded by the AdSci program, which support work in regions across the United States, in FY24 are:
- Evaluating social, economic and environmental outcomes of community-based coastal adaptation engagements: An integrated economics and machine-learning framework
- Lead PI(s): Robert Johnston, Clark University; Klaus Moeltner, Virginia Tech; Adam Whelchel, The Nature Conservancy
- Award amount: $300,000
- Overview: This project will develop a novel analytical framework and quantitative approach—based on an integrated assessment of treatment effects via causal-forest (CF) machine learning (ML)—to evaluate and predict the extent to which heterogeneous engagement and capacity-building activities enhance communities’ capacity to progress towards transformative adaptation. The approach will be illustrated using an extensive dataset on ~600 coastal communities in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic US that have both completed and not completed community resilience building (CRB). These data will be integrated with a CF ML treatment-effect model to (i) estimate heterogeneous, causal treatment effects linked to CRB participation in a nonparametric framework, and (ii) predict, for any US coastal community, the extent to which similar engagements with given characteristics will induce particular social, economic, and biophysical adaptation outcomes. This approach allows for the likelihood that similar engagements may have different effects on different adaptation outcomes, and that these effects may vary depending on community characteristics. Results will be used in coordination with partners and stakeholders to provide guidance for effective engagement and capacity-building, targeted to community characteristics.
- Evaluating the impact of case studies in climate adaptation decision support
- Lead PI: Julie Vano, Aspen Global Change Institute
- Co-PI: Rebecca Rasch, Aspen Global Change Institute
- Award amount: $298,677
- Overview: The aim of this project is to increase the capacity of communities to develop, share, and learn from one another to implement climate change adaptation at speed and scale. Sharing adaptation case studies that show how to overcome challenges and achieve success are increasingly sought by and produced by adaptation practitioners across sectors (e.g., water, energy, transportation, agriculture). Yet, little is actually being done to understand the value case studies bring. The project team will design and implement an evaluation framework to help test, validate, and learn from the Water Utility Climate Alliance (WUCA), an alliance of 12 of the nation’s largest water providers, and similarly positioned utilities on how developing and sharing case studies has impacted their adaptation planning and implementation over the past decade. Building from a wealth of existing case studies created through recent projects supported by WUCA, the project team will (i) learn what more generally makes an adaptation case study impactful, (ii) investigate the case study development process – how it works, what is most valuable about the process, and in what ways it could better capture the full suite of societal impacts, and (iii) identify what case studies alone cannot achieve. The project team will also, simultaneously, support updating WUCA’s Leading Practices in Climate Adaptation, an existing resource built on utility-specific insights and case studies. The methods include content analysis, case study user research (focus groups and surveys), and facilitated discussions with case study producers.
- Expanding the evidence base for climate investments toward transformative pathways: A framework to understand climate change adaptation process-outcome linkages
- Lead PI: Rebecca Witinok-Huber, University of Wyoming
- Co-PI: Corrie Knapp, University of Wyoming
- Award amount: $298.301
- Overview: This project will refine, develop, and test an evaluation framework to explore links between climate services and transformative capacity. The goals of this project include expanding an existing framework, building the capacity of community-based organizations (COBs), implementing evaluation tools in a real-world setting, and planning for future collaborations. The project team anticipates this will result in useful indicators and evaluation tools, expanded networks for CBOs and climate services providers (CSPs), and deeper, more diverse discussions around transformation.
- Enabling heat adaptation by connecting local community evaluation capacity and federal support evaluation criteria
- Lead PI: V. Kelly Turner, University of California, Los Angeles
- Co-PI: C.J. Gabbe, Santa Clara University
- Award amount: $299,374
- Overview: Heat is one of the deadliest and inequitable consequences of climate change, but local adaptation as a response generally lags compared to other climate hazards. There are disconnects between (1) local communities’ capacities to evaluate the impacts of heat and (2) federal evaluative criteria for accessing resources. These disconnects may hinder the adoption of heat programming that supports local community heat resilience. Despite the proliferation of heat indicators and metrics, their deployment in program evaluation within the broader heat-governance landscape and effect on heat-programming has not yet been fully explored. In order to understand the role evaluation in proliferating critical disjunctures between federal support and local capacity to attain it, this project examines the experience of communities currently engaging in extreme heat planning and infrastructure investments through California’s new $105 million Extreme Heat and Community Resilience (EHCR) program, which supports ~40 communities annually and requires 3-15% of funding to be directed toward project evaluation. This project will analyze evaluation strategies across this emerging network to understand how a combination of (1) policies, (2) management between different levels of government, and (3) interagency coordination can reduce disconnects created by mismatches in local evaluation capacity and federal evaluation expectations.
- Increasing the actionability of co-produced decision-support tools in support of climate adaptation
- Lead PI: Gabrielle Wong-Parodi, Stanford University
- Co-PI: Maria Carmen Lemos, University of Michigan
- Award amount: $299,927
- Overview: Many small and mid-sized cities in the United States face urgent challenges on how to adapt meaningfully to climate change with limited available resources and capacity. Significant investment in co-produced actionable knowledge, including knowledge resulting in decision-support tools (DSTs), holds promise for increasing widespread adaptation. Yet, there is little information to know how DSTs, including the hundreds of planning tools found on the Climate Resilience Toolkit, are usable and actionable for practitioners in small cities making adaptation decisions. In this project, the project team will 1) Develop new knowledge about planning DSTs on the Climate Resilience Toolkit by developing a typology of planning tools and measuring tools by features that could make them usable; 2) Evaluate differences in DST use and adaptation planning within small and mid-sized U.S. cities by developing a “Tool Testbed”; and 3) Explore strategies to increase the adoption of planning DSTs in new markets of small and mid-sized cities to advance widespread adaptation. To meet these objectives, this project takes an interdisciplinary, mixed-methods approach centering on engagement with tool developers and city practitioners, including eight small and mid-sized U.S. cities in the West Coast, Great Lakes, and Gulf Coast regions.
- Creating a community-based framework to assess adaptation effectiveness in the U.S. Southwest
- Lead PI: Gigi Owen, University of Arizona
- Co-PI: Alison M. Meadow, University of Arizona
- Award amount: $299,678
- Overview: Effective adaptation strategies are vital to reducing harmful impacts of environmental risks and climate-related disasters. However, effectiveness is context-dependent and meaningful indicators and outcomes of adaptation effectiveness vary across communities and sectors that experience climate change risk and disasters. Furthermore, evidence of effective adaptation outcomes is lacking, especially from local and community perspectives, which is an issue of equity and justice regarding who benefits from adaptation initiatives and how. To address these issues, this project will develop an evaluation framework to document and assess the effectiveness of climate change adaptation strategies, informed by community-based representatives (in the U.S. Southwest) and decisionmakers. This framework will provide insight into transformative adaptation practices from local and community perspectives and help adaptation professionals, scientists, and funders support community-driven needs and priorities that lead to tangible beneficial changes for the environment and society.
- Initiative for gender and equality in local adaptation to climate change: Evaluating local technical agroclimatic committees in Guatemala and Mexico
- Lead PI: Walter Baethgen, Columbia University, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory
- Award amount: $299,729
- Overview: Climate information services (CIS) involve communicating various climate and weather forecasts, frequently accompanied by agricultural advisories, to assist farmers in making climate-informed agricultural decisions to support climate adaptation. Evidence suggests that food security and livelihoods can be improved when farmers utilize CIS to manage climate risks. However, local climate information is often not equally accessible to everyone, with particular challenges in access and use for more vulnerable groups such as women and Indigenous peoples and local communities (IPLCs). To enhance equitable access and use of climate services among vulnerable farming populations, this project proposes a mixed methods case study approach to examining participation in Local Technical Agroclimatic Committees (LTACs) and use of recommendations contained within agro-climatic bulletins (ACBs) among Mayan smallholders in Guatemala and Mexico to:
- Identify the unique climate information requirements/preferences of women and IPLCs, and examine the gendered factors affecting access to CIS;
- Evaluate how the composition of LTACs leads to access and use of ACBs among vulnerable populations;
- Produce evidence that uptake of climate-resilient strategies (i.e., ACB adoption) by vulnerable populations, such as women and indigenous farmers, leads to increased climate risk management/adaptive capacity and food system resilience at the farm-level (comparing ACB adopters to non-adopters); and
- Examine the impact of these strategies on women’s empowerment and other equity dimensions using a Reach-Benefit-Empower-Transform (RBET) framework.
- Evaluating Alaskan housing for climate adaptation
- Lead PI: Nicholas Rajkovich, University at Buffalo, State University of New York
- Co-PI: Mindy O’Neall, University at Buffalo, State University of New York
- Co-PI: Meghan Holtan, University at Buffalo, State University of New York
- Co-PI: Stacey Fritz, University at Buffalo, State University of New York
- Award amount: $299,790
- Overview: As the U.S.’s only Arctic state, Alaska is often used to demonstrate the widespread harm that comes from global climate change (Smith, 2021). But Alaska is also home to some of the country’s most innovative adaptation activities, intergovernmental negotiation, and resilient community-based organizations. Outreach with community partners confirms a distinct need for clear metrics and an accessible tool to facilitate the evaluation of housing for resilience to climate change impacts. Guided by a project advisory panel of Alaska regional tribal housing providers and the Alaska Housing Finance Corporation, this project will create a low-resource and flexible evaluation approach combining quantitative metrics and qualitative community-centered methods that can evaluate housing design and housing programs in a changing climate. The tools produced from this project are intended to (i) improve housing delivery, (ii) understand how climate adaptation intersects with long-standing challenges related to housing delivery, including governance, equity, and public infrastructure, and (iii) systematically analyze housing design to reflect the impacts of a rapidly changing climate.
CPO’s peer-reviewed competitive funding process ensures that proposals chosen to receive funding meet high standards of scientific rigor, quality, relevance to societal challenges, NOAA’s mission, and equity. Research inside and outside of NOAA is supported. Projects conducted by external partners expand the reach of NOAA’s mission, which is to understand and predict our changing environment, from the deep sea to outer space, and to manage and conserve America’s coastal and marine resources. While CPO funds new projects each fiscal year, CPO continues to support multi-year initiatives funded in previous years.
¹The funding will be distributed over the life of the projects and future-year funding is conditional on appropriations.
²At the time of publication, all awards may not have been accepted by recipient institutions.