Explore awards

The Center for Alaskan Coastal Studies and the Kachemak Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve will partner with tribal organizations in southcentral Alaska to foster and support community-driven educational and monitoring programs that will safeguard healthy marine resources and abundant freshwater resources against rapid, ongoing climatic changes affecting Alaska Native communities. The goal is to increase environmental literacy and resiliency within southcentral Alaska’s most vulnerable communities through workshops that enhance community-based monitoring programs and engage tribal Environmental Coordinators, local educators, and high school students in culturally responsive hazards education. Through the Southcentral Alaska Collaborative for Resilience through Education and Decision-making (SACRED) project, communities will establish sustainable long-term environmental monitoring programs and educational opportunities that involve youth in reducing risks from marine toxins and ensuring continued access to traditional foods and safe drinking water.

The "Citizen Science, Civics, and Resilient Communities" (CSCRC) education project led by the Museum of Science, Boston in partnership with Arizona State University and Northeastern University will increase resilience to extreme weather and environmental hazards through citizen-created data, local knowledge, and community values. Building upon previous funding from NOAA in which a set of modules were created and used to engage participants in active learning and resilience planning about four natural hazards (heat waves, sea level rise, extreme precipitation, and drought), the museum and its partners will add participatory citizen science activities selected in close collaboration with resilience planners. This new and expanded project will involve diverse groups of participants at 28 U.S. science centers collecting, analyzing, and sharing data relevant to local resilience planners, learning about vulnerabilities through visualizations of geospatial data and deliberative problem-solving, sharing perspectives about resilience strategies and their societal and environmental trade-offs, formulating community resilience plans, and presenting findings and recommendations to resilience planners and publics. The project aims to formulate a theory of action that sustains engagement and increases environmental literacy among participants, contributes citizen-created data, knowledge, and values to resilience planning, and increases capacity among science centers for including publics in resilience planning and data collection.

Climate change disproportionately impacts low-income and otherwise marginalized communities that typically have the fewest resources to adapt. Furthermore, the very communities that feel the effects of climate change most acutely have been historically underrepresented in the fields of sustainability and green building. The Building a Green Texas (BGT) project helps address these concerns by giving high school students opportunities to develop the knowledge, skills, and confidence to tackle challenges posed by climate change. In the process, students gain valuable green career skills and credentials and become part of a green building school-to-job pipeline that will help contribute to a more diverse workforce. Texas-based nonprofit EcoRise, the University of Texas at Austin, and the University of Texas Marine Science Institute/National Estuarine Reserve System of NOAA’s Office for Coastal Management will lead this robust, three-year project beginning in Central Texas in Year 1 and expanding into Houston and Texas Gulf Coast communities in Year 2. Through school-year field experiences and paid summer internships, students in the program will use established scientific evidence, citizen science, and an understanding of location-specific socioeconomic and ecological factors to explore current and future extreme weather phenomena and other environmental hazards facing their communities. They will gain real-world learning experiences and career exposure by directly engaging with scientists, civic leaders, green building professionals, and NOAA data and staff. As students help design community-based green building projects, they will consider scientific uncertainty, cultural knowledge, and social equity, in the real-world context of improving community resilience.