Climate Resilience Centers
Funding Agency:
- Department of Energy
CRCs will provide an embedded, community focused foundation to serve as both a resource and mechanism for advancing climate science and promoting climate resilience. The CRCs will develop a research agenda that aligns with the BER mission, priorities, and foundational capabilities, advancing new fine-scale research while engaging communities and stakeholders in ways that will improve the research and increase its accessibility and utility for subsequent use in community decision-making and action. Such engagements will also provide use-inspired feedback that can help inform future BER research opportunities and directions. The centers will conduct place-based climate change analyses to evaluate the potential societal and/or environmental impacts of current and future climate risks and the implications of potential future responses. In addition, each center will emphasize a set of local challenges to be addressed through a multidisciplinary effort that leverages DOE resources in modeling, data, observations, and/or analysis. Examples of science challenges that the CRCs may address include:
· Developing contextualized, community-based definitions and models of resilience, illuminating the dynamic processes, quantifiable dimensions, and metrics that can be incorporated to measure progress.
· Developing new and insightful prediction tools and exploring their use through stress testing to evaluate adaptation strategies that can achieve desired levels of equitable resilience over time horizons of interest.
· Building or extending observational capabilities to provide the necessary data for new predictions or improve prediction accuracy in support of resilience strategies.
Importantly, the centers will emphasize science translation, linking climate resilience science with the local climate resilience needs to accelerate the deployment of equitable solutions through participatory engagement. To ensure that CRCs can take advantage of the most up-to-date scientific information to achieve their goals, each center will be required to leverage the scientific products and/or capabilities at the DOE national laboratories, potentially through direct collaborations with BER-supported research at the laboratories, leveraging of research products, or utilizing available instrumentation and resources at the national laboratories and user facilities.
To achieve these goals, CRCs may develop investments in research infrastructure needed to advance institutional research capacity. For example, a high-performance computing capability in support of modeling efforts, or new or expanded observation or analytical capabilities for collection of environmental information.
Up to $1,000,000
$5,000,000
Submission Deadline for Pre-Applications: January 19, 2023 at 5:00 pm ET
March 30, 2023 at 11:59 pm ET