RII Track-1: Idaho Community-engaged Resilience for Energy-Water Systems (I-CREWS)

There is a national need to proactively address the impacts of climate, population, and technological change on energy and water (E-W) systems across key watersheds in the western U.S. This "Idaho Community-engaged Resilience for Energy-Water Systems" (I-CREWS) project will use Idaho’s Snake River Basin watershed to address two questions: 1) What role do trade-offs and changes in E-W systems, including storage, efficiency, conservation, local knowledge, and governance dynamics, play in determining resilience strategies for climate-driven, population, and technological change? and (2) How does incorporating diverse ways of knowing, community engagement, and advanced modeling lead to more equitable and resilient E-W futures? The State of Idaho provides an excellent testbed for the project. This is due to the features of Idaho’s landscapes, which span a range of gradients (e.g., hydrologic, topographic, demographic, jurisdictional) and population densities (e.g., small rural towns and Native American communities to expanding urban areas). The results of the I-CREWS project will inform multisystemic resilience and E-W issues nationally. I-CREWS will be administered by the University of Idaho in collaboration with Boise State University, Idaho State University, the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes, and the Coeur d'Alene Tribe. The I-CREWS project will grow research capacity with partner Tribal nations through a new Tribal Nations Research Network (TNRN), which will be developed to recenter knowledge exchange between Tribes and Idaho universities, focusing on collaboration through the development of tribally-originated research. The key research themes of I-CREWS are to: (1) characterize and evaluate E-W configurations for a continuum of resilience strategies; (2) model and represent E-W configurations and their resilience; and (3) develop alternative futures scenarios of E-W trajectories and their resilience to change. I-CREWS researchers will use socio-environmental-technological systems (SETS) typologies in their hypothesis that communities undergoing changes in their E-W systems can be characterized by SETS typologies at different scales to determine patterns of multisystemic resilience to climate-driven, demographic, and technological changes. I-CREWS researchers aim to determine whether the adoption of SETS interventions increases resilience and reduces vulnerability in E-W systems. The research will investigate the interaction of competing objectives (e.g., energy, water, resources, public use, local values) in a community-decision context. The I-CREWS project will engage partners across constituencies (scientists, land managers, policymakers, administrators, Tribal nations, and end users) in order to advance the integration of more comprehensive science with management and policy strategies for resilient stewardship and governance, thus providing locally-valued choices as well as capacity-building to achieve the project’s impacts. I-CREWS will support workforce development and student training through high-context, community-engaged courses and projects that are co-created with community members to address E-W systems issues. 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.