REU Site: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Environmental Adaptation

This project is funded from the Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Sites program in the Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences (SBE). The international community has now realized that the global effort to significantly reduce carbon emissions is insufficient to halt the worsening effects of environmental change. The current consensus holds that we must engage in building and disseminating adaptation knowledge to adjust to environmental change. This REU Program will address current recommendations by producing environmental adaptation research that synthesizes pertinent interdisciplinary and environmental justice information in its design and implementation. In this light, this undergraduate research opportunity offers a diverse and underrepresented group of students the chance to gain research experience on environmental adaptation and have a better understanding of the challenges facing the United States and the rest of the world. In order to prepare undergraduate students for environmental adaptation research at the upper levels and later graduate programs and careers in environmental adaptation research fields, the project draws on the diversity of faculty expertise and graduate student mentors across various disciplines at the University of South Florida. The research uses an interdisciplinary approach that employs multi-level analysis to better understand barriers and facilitators of social, cultural, economic, political, and scientific issues of environmental adaptation. In addition to gaining actual research experience, students will also build networks, acquire professional development abilities, and comprehend interdisciplinary research. Projects will be designed to benefit the University of South Florida’s Tampa Bay community and other communities around the country most vulnerable to the impacts of environmental adaptation. The outcome will be an emerging group of young researchers, trained in interdisciplinary approaches to environmental adaptation research, capable of understanding the complexities of the environmental adaptation problem, and synthesizing complex responses to the problem in ways that encourage and engender social, cultural, political, and economic change. 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.