NSF Award
2330533
Many of the most glaring health, economic, and social effects of climate change are experienced through housing. Access to efficient sources of energy can make the difference between life and death in vulnerable communities, but sustainable household energy use remains a major global challenge. Sustainable energy strategies will only be effective if there is a clear understanding of how people who live in the places most vulnerable to extreme heat and cold interact with energy systems, thermal technologies, and housing itself. This award to design a global center for Household Energy and Thermal Resilience (HEaTR) will develop scalable, community-driven solutions to the vexing question of how housing can be converted from a space where marginalized groups experience climate vulnerability to one where they can ensure climate resilience. While poor and marginalized people spend a greater proportion of income on household energy, those same people have developed creative solutions to energy challenges, from low-cost cooling and insulation using locally-sourced materials, to heat and cold action plans that leverage social networks to protect the most vulnerable. The award supports multidisciplinary research on how households use energy, how community-driven home building and repair practices can save energy, and how regional and global energy and housing market dynamics enable or impede net-zero living. HEaTR will assemble research teams in the US and four international locations (Ghana, India, Singapore and United Kingdom) to develop an approach to household-level climate change mitigation that foregrounds the perspectives, idioms, materials, and socio-economic realities of the communities that are most vulnerable to climate extremes. The teams will foster a bottom-up approach to climate change and to the technologies that work to protect individuals and communities. <br/>HEaTR brings together researchers from anthropology, geography, spatial data science, labor studies, and architecture to analyze the social dynamics of household energy use. The research will develop transferable, adaptable models of sustainable and equitable behaviors that foster household-level climate resilience. It will deploy comparative, qualitative methods to analyze the social forces that shape how people use energy to heat and cool their homes, as well as how household energy use is situated in systems of kinship, gendered divisions of labor, and vernacular architectural and climate control practices. It will integrate this qualitative approach with quantitative and spatial analysis of the distributions of housing and climate risk. In this way, HEaTR’s research will lead to novel and robust understandings of how the process of constructing and maintaining housing, from individual practices to community action to long-range urban planning, might contribute to climate resilience. HEaTR will result in a multimodal platform (texts, computer models, data sets) focused on best practices for addressing heating and cooling challenges. <br/>This award is funded by the Global Centers program, an innovative program that supports use-inspired research addressing global challenges related to climate change and/or clean energy. Track 2 design awards support U.S.-based researchers to bring together international teams to develop research questions and partnerships, conduct landscape analyses, synthesize data, and/or build multi-stakeholder networks to advance their use-inspired research at larger scale in the future.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
