NSF Award
2437386
This project investigates the implications of climatic and environmental hazards for children’s development. These implications are holistic – affecting learning, health and nutrition, security and relationships. They are embedded in a complex ecological framework with possible interactions across ages as children develop from conception through adolescence. Actions to mitigate and adapt to these hazards require understanding of children’s development and the needs of local communities for children from different socio-demographic, economic, and cultural backgrounds. Advancement of scientific understanding of environmental impacts on the world’s children, and development of research-informed strategies for prevention, mitigation, and short- and long-term resilience, requires collaborations among social scientists with expertise from different disciplines – sociology on entrenched childhood inequalities, demography on health and population displacement, economics on human-capital development, and developmental psychology on behavioral development and psychosocial well-being. Significant advancements also require engagement beyond the social sciences, with public-policy experts, geographers and geoscientists, educational planners, engineers and designers, and medical and public-health experts. Such collaborations are rare and challenging to implement. The goal of this planning project is to develop plans for a multi-university Center Consortium on Global Climate Risks and Resilient Childhoods (CC-GCRRC) to a) investigate the complex implications of climatic and environmental hazards for child development and welfare and b) identify and evaluate promising sources of short- and long-term climatic and environmental adaptation and mitigation in the lives of children.<br/><br/>Child development is negatively impacted by numerous climate and environmental hazards, and this project develops a research infrastructure to address those challenges. The project team investigates how to identify children at risk to reduce the impacts of extreme-climatic/environmental shocks on the most vulnerable in society, how to develop programs to build resilience into human-capital infrastructures to safeguard human-capital development and growth and ameliorate ill effects when they occur, and how to provide communities with tools to improve future conditions for child development. The objectives of the project are 1) to identify and test a series of new metrics for assessing childhood vulnerability to, resilience to, and impacts of various climatic and environmental risks, 2) develop an agenda for identifying adaptive and mitigation strategies to promote continuity of housing, health, and educational services in the context of various climatic and environmental hazards and disasters, including those that could cause large-scale population displacements, and 3) plan a research agenda for investigating effective educational strategies for developing and promoting climate-resilient curricular and pedagogical tools for sharing with educational systems.<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.
