NSF Award
2330413
Climate change continues to exacerbate environmental challenges associated with urban growth. To help minimize these challenges for urban hydrologic systems around the world, nature-based solutions (NbS) are becoming a popular strategy. The Nature-based Urban Hydrology Center (NUHC) will provide globally relevant, sustainable, holistic, transferable, and community-driven approaches to respond to urban hydrology challenges. Aligned with the goals of the Global Centers Program, this award supports the planning phase of the NUHC to bring together an interdisciplinary team of domestic and international partners to perform use-inspired research. Working with urban communities, the NUHC will share knowledge and make broadly transferable advances that leverage NbS to meet the challenges brought by climate change on urban hydrology. The NUHC will establish a clearinghouse for easily shared data and findings that does not currently exist, as well as enable better modeling and data analysis. Through global collaboration, the NUHC will broaden understanding of the potential benefit of NbS on urban hydrology, increase NbS ecosystem services and resilience, advance understanding of these systems to influence policy, and aid in improving the urban environment and social equity. The NUHC planning phase will build a framework to engage students, urban communities, and industry and academic colleagues to promote issues of fairness and sustainability within urban hydrology. <br/> <br/>As climate change exacerbates environmental challenges associated with urban growth globally, nature-based solutions (NbS) are rapidly becoming the prevalent strategy to mitigate the varied impacts on urban hydrology systems. However, currently there is no common data portal or controlled language around NbS, there is inconsistent terminology, differing design and performance goals, and challenges in scaling and transferring findings inhibit widespread sharing of knowledge. The goal of this project is to plan and design the NUHC to bring together a group of domestic and international partners that have deep knowledge on diverse aspects of urban hydrology and NbS that will enable significant advances in design and policy practices to develop approaches for restoration, and protection that consider broader contexts, such as ecosystem health, stream health, soil health, social health, and emergency management. A key outcome will be to create a data structure to leverage existing data and to easily share data and findings to advance modeling and analytical techniques to determine NbS and urban hydrology trends, commonalities, and differences based on climate, policy, design, and physiographic parameters. As part of this planning project, a framework for how global partners can work together, choose relevant research projects, train students, and engage urban community members and industry and academic partners will be developed. Through global collaboration, this project will broaden the community’s understanding of NbS and urban hydrology, increase NbS ecosystem services and resilience, advance understanding of these systems to influence policy, and aid in improving the urban environment and social equity. <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.
