Patricia Gober - US grants

Introduction to Human Geography, like most freshman-level survey courses in the social sciences, is typically taught using the traditional model of instructor as lecturer and student as note-taker. The proposed series of one-week summer workshops engage faculty who teach introductory human geography courses in a more student-centered model of learning using hands-on materials that challenge students to collect, manipulate, analyze, and present geographic information. The workshop will be organized around 13 activities from "Human Geography in Action," a recently published human geography workbook (New York, Wiley, 1997). Each freestanding activity demonstrates a basic concept in human geography including: scale, region, diffusion, spatial interaction, space-time prisms, location theory, age-sex pyramids, development, urban hierarchy, urban land use, residential segregation, nations and states, and environmental change. Seven of the activities are computerized projects on CD-ROM. Each session participant will be expected to complete several of the activities, and brainstorm topics and methods for future activities. These workshops will serve as the basis for disseminating a more innovative approach to human geography, one in which students literally do geography as they learn geography.

Balling - 9817781. There has been substantial debate in the scientific community and elsewhere regarding the climatic and ecological effects of a continuing buildup of atmospheric carbon dioxide. This project propose that urban areas represent meso-scale, real-world examples of what happens at high atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide. Such high levels have been demonstrated in a pilot project in Phoenix Arizona and this study will investigate the spatial and temporal dynamics of this urban carbon-dioxide dome, assess its effects, and evaluate how human activities influence the distribution of carbon dioxide near Phoenix and cities in general. This will be an interdisciplinary study with three phases. 1) It will make detailed measurements of local CO2 concentrations, high resolution meteorological observations, land-use patterns and human activities within Phoenix. 2) It will determine the influence of local meteorological conditions on the temporal and spatial distribution of CO2 and consider the interaction between this greenhouse gas and local temperature conditions. 3) It will integrate these different patterns in a modeling effort that will allow projections of different human-activity patterns and urban-CO2 distribution. This work will provide an understanding of how and why CO2 levels vary across a city. It will emphasize the interactions between land use, human activities, and meteorological conditions within an urban matrix. It will allow projection of anticipated population expansions on the Arizona region. The project has substantial educational components and clear links with the Central Arizona-Phoenix Long Term Ecological Research Program.

The confluence of rapid population growth and the threat of global warming in an uncertain climate environment pose challenging policy and decision-making issues for the urbanizing desert of Central Arizona. The Decision Center for a Desert City (DCDC) will coordinate a program of interdisciplinary research and community outreach to improve water-management decisions in central Arizona. To that end, DCDC will study the cognitive processes by which individuals and water managers make decisions, apply sophisticated models of decision science to water-allocation problems, develop GIS-based decision-support tools that foster better long-term and more integrated decision making, use climate models to define the dimensions of uncertain water availability both locally and regionally, and develop innovative educational programs organized around water, climate, and decision making. DCDC seeks to build a new model of science and policy engagement that allows decision makers and scientists to collaborate on important research questions and experiment with new methods.

Even the best climate science cannot reduce significantly the uncertainty associated with global climate change, the climate cycles that lead to droughts and floods, and the expanding and intensifying urban heat island that now grips the rapidly growing Phoenix area. In collaboration with local, state, and regional water managers, DCDC will produce basic interdisciplinary research about water availability, climatic uncertainty, and human decision making, create decision support tools to foster better water-management decisions, develop scenarios of different water futures and share them with decision makers and the public, and investigate the nature of research activity and decision making within DCDC itself for lessons about to build an effective organization at the boundary of science and policy. DCDC is closely aligned with Arizona State University's Decision Theater, a 3-D immersive space for visualization and outreach to the community. Many of the nation's, and indeed the world's, most rapidly growing urban areas are in arid environments and face a future of greater water uncertainty. Arid cities therefore will benefit from a clearer articulation of the effects of climate change on urban water demand and supply and on community response to growing uncertainty. This award was supported as part of the Fiscal Year 2003 Human and Social Dynamics priority area special competition on Decision Making Under Uncertainty (DMUU).

Urban studies have a long tradition in the social sciences, engineering sciences, and planning. Contributions from the natural sciences and health sciences recently have expanded knowledge about urban issues. Absent thus far has been a framework that integrates these disciplinary contributions. An interdisciplinary approach and an effective network that links researchers from across the globe are essential to understanding the complex interactions among global environmental change and urban processes. A stronger collaboration among academics and policy makers also is needed to craft policies that can mitigate the consequences of those interactions. To meet this need, the Urbanization and Global Environmental Change (UGEC) project was launched in 2005 by International Human Dimensions Programme (IHDP) on Global Environmental Change. The following year, the International Project Office (IPO) was established at Arizona State University to coordinate and facilitate the work of the project. For the last three years, the UGEC project IPO has been building an expanded international network of scholars and practitioners that work at the interface of urban areas and global environmental change. The UGEC project is envisioned as a ten-year effort designed to enhance knowledge and understanding about the interactions and feedbacks between global environmental change and urbanization at local, regional, and global scales. Toward this end, UGEC assists in developing conceptual frameworks and methods that support the study and analysis of these interactions; it guides the study of the interactions between global environmental change and urban systems with the ultimate goal of contributing to the improvement of decision-making processes directing urban growth; and it identifies the points and strength of interaction, the thresholds for change, and the direction of causality in a coupled human-environment urban system. The IPO seeks to play a catalytic role in the project by facilitating connections between research and public policy by organizing international workshops and conferences and by using communication tools such as a listserv, newsletter, and website. It also will assist in increasing the connections between U.S.-based networks of UGEC scholars and practitioners with their international counterparts. By engaging urban practitioners, decision makers, and stakeholders, the IPO intends to generate an active, collaborative dialogue among members of the UGEC network on both national and international scales.

The UGEC project will contribute to the process of creating new interdisciplinary knowledge by encouraging innovative conceptual and methodological approaches that link social sciences with natural science, engineering, planning, and finance. The IPO will communicate these integrative research results to decision makers, practitioners, and other end-users at local, national, and international levels, thus linking cutting-edge academic research to public policy. By bringing together an ever-larger and more diverse group of scholars on global environmental change issues, the IPO will help develop theories, strategies, and methods that foster interdisciplinary research and encourage young scientists to reach across the social-natural science divide.

The scale, scope, and uncertainties associated with climate change pose formidable challenges for scientists, policy makers, and citizens. Cities in arid locales around the world urgently need integrative research with a long-term perspective to provide a sound scientific basis for policy making to improve adaptive capacity in the face of climate change. The Decision Center for a Desert City (DCDC), which initially was established in 2004, is a boundary organization at the interface of science and policy that advances the scientific basis for water management decision making in the face of climatic uncertainty in the Phoenix metropolitan area of Arizona. This collaborative group will use additional funding to expand its already extensive interaction with the policy-making community, thus improving links between scientific knowledge and action. The investigators will develop fundamental new knowledge about decision making under uncertainty from three perspectives: climatic uncertainties, urban-system impacts, and adaptation decisions. As a boundary organization, DCDC scientists will use social science principles to develop and test a more integrated decision-support process for policy making in this complex environment. They will examine the interconnected water, energy, and land-use decisions that exist in a complex dynamic urban system under climate change. The previously developed DCDC WaterSim model will be refined to capture the scale dynamics, economic feedbacks, and distributional effects associated with climate-change decisions in the face of climate uncertainty. The DCDC collaborative group will work closely with the NSF-funded Central Arizona Phoenix Long Term Ecological Research (CAP LTER) project to measure, monitor, and model tradeoffs among ecosystem services, social equity, and economic well-being.

DCDC research will produce new knowledge about individual and societal responses to climate change and the best practices for linking science and decision making to improve outcomes. New knowledge about urban-system dynamics will provide a better scientific basis for adaptation strategies to make cities less climate-sensitive, while new knowledge about effective approaches to decision making in the face of long-term environmental risk will aid in formulating approaches to developing and implementing these strategies. DCDC research will link knowledge about water supply and demand under current and future climate conditions with social science research on decision making, thereby providing an improved basis for scientists, policy makers, and other stakeholders to collaborate and to create and evaluate approaches to adaption in the face of climate change. The DCDC educational program will help educate and train the next generation of scholars who can move easily between the worlds of science and policy to improve society's ability to adapt to a changing climate. This collaborative group project is supported by the NSF Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences through its Decision Making Under Uncertainty (DMUU) competition.

In this international planning workshop, researchers from the U.S. and Mexico will catalyze a new research collaboration based in sustainability science between Arizona State University (ASU) and the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). This new collaboration will be initiated through a plenary planning session hosted by UNAM and attended by 30 scientists from both institutions, who will develop a conceptual framework that will serve as the common basis for research proposals to NSF and regional funding agencies. Key policy decision-makers in Mexico will be consulted to define the focal problem domains of the studies. The research that emerges from this collaboration is expected to be innovative in terms of the ideas and concepts brought to bear on specific resource management problems that now appear intractable, and transformative in the structure and process of the cross-border collaboration as well as in the intended impacts on decision-outcomes and planning. A replicable structure and approach is expected to be provided as an example for other research initiatives around the globe. The interdependency of Mexican and US futures adds additional salience to this endeavor. The ASU researchers will interface primarily with UNAM counterparts in the Institute of Ecology, whose Director is Dr. Dominguez Pérez-Tejada.

The funded activities will result in a research agenda formulated together with key stakeholders from outside the academic community who have a strong interest in the projects' results. The primary benefit is the establishment of a research partnership addressing complex sustainability problems. The project will not only contribute new scientific insights, but also enable the formulation of new decision support tools that will aid managers and policy makers at both local and national levels. The initiative will involve early career scholars in both US and Mexico and will enable them to establish themselves within a cutting-edge international research agenda and intellectual network. Arizona State University is well placed geographically and institutionally to support this endeavor. By coordinating this collaboration with an ongoing grant in sustainability science curriculum and education from US AID, graduate students from both institutions will be involved in the development of the research agenda and leverage complementary pedagogical work in sustainability science education. Involvement of junior researchers in international research is a major goal of OISE.

Part 1: Nontechnical Description of the Project

Natural hazards exist in all parts of Earth, and pose risks to humanity, human institutions, and infrastructure. These risks are rendered even more extreme, more complex, and more difficult to manage by global climate change. Effective preparation for and mitigation of natural hazards is not simply a problem for natural scientists and engineers, but also for social sciences, since hazards originate and occur in the interfaces between natural systems and societies. Research has demonstrated that better-educated societies with better-educated decision-makers are best equipped to prepare for, mitigate, and recover from natural disasters. While hazards-related public and professional education are common missions for many universities and colleges, the HazPM project will improve on this model by drawing on expertise from both the social and the natural sciences of hazards to design and implement an undergraduate workforce-training program that integrates both realms from start to finish. Our design plan is fully supported by current research and will result in an innovative, fully accessible, and rigorously tested undergraduate curriculum that will be implemented regionally and disseminated nationally. Through parallel collaboration with faculty at regional two-year colleges that serve major populations of Native American and Hispanic/Chicano/Latino students, the HazPM project team will also increase access and professional opportunities in the sciences for underrepresented minority students.


Part 2: Technical Description

The overall goal of the HazPM project is to better prepare undergraduate students in geoscience and many other relevant fields, such as engineering, planning, management, pre-law, and sustainability, for careers or post-graduate studies related to natural-hazards preparedness and mitigation. Drawing on a research-based design plan that integrates natural and social sciences and employs a nimble partnership of expert professionals and educators from industry, government agencies, and academia, we will develop and bring to fruition an innovative, sustainable, and readily transferable workforce-training program that will be implemented locally and disseminated nationally and globally to enable wider adoption. The primary deliverable will be an innovative, online-native, fully accessible, rigorously assessed, modular curriculum for an undergraduate certificate program. Collaboration with agency and industry professionals will ensure program validity and relevance to career opportunities. HazPM will also increase access and professional opportunities for underrepresented students (including Native American and Hispanic/Chicano/Latino students in the U. S. Southwest) by means of pedagogy that addresses the impacts of socioeconomic inequality on vulnerability to hazards in underserved communities; direct partnership with regional two-year colleges that serve significant numbers of underrepresented students; and collaboration with minority professional STEM organizations (e.g., SACNAS, AISES, NABG) in dissemination of products.

Drawing on the diverse collective expertise of the principal investigators and collaborators, the HazPM project will integrate geoscientific principles and current geospatial, remote sensing, and monitoring technologies with social science principles and practices to inculcate a far broader understanding of the human, scientific, and engineering dimensions of hazards in students. Full collaborative participation of agency and industry experts in curriculum planning, development, and evaluation will ensure the validity of the program. Formative and summative assessment will maintain academic rigor.

Partnering with regional community colleges will allow for the recruitment of a diverse cadre of students who reflect the cultural and socioeconomic diversity of the Southwest, and who will apply their expertise where it is most needed, especially in underserved areas. Students will be able to enter the program at these partner institutions and transfer to ASU to complete their studies. Impacts of the program on diverse students will be tracked and measured by means of institutional demographic data. The undergraduate certificate program will be fully available and accessible online, and formalized in the academic programs at ASU and collaborating community colleges to ensure its sustainability. All HazPM curriculum resources and research findings will be broadly disseminated among the academic and professional communities by means of conference presentations, refereed publications in journals of education research and teaching practice, and web hosting with links to community digital libraries such as SERC, DLESE, and UCGIS. Adoption and implementation of the program resources by other institutions will be encouraged.