The project is supported under the NSF Science, Engineering and Education for Sustainability Fellows (SEES Fellows) program, with the goal of helping to enable discoveries needed to inform actions that lead to environmental, energy and societal sustainability while creating the necessary workforce to address these challenges. Sustainability science is an emerging field that addresses the challenges of meeting human needs without harm to the environment, and without sacrificing the ability of future generations to meet their needs. A strong scientific workforce requires individuals educated and trained in interdisciplinary research and thinking, especially in the area of sustainability science. With SEES Fellowship support, this project will enable a promising early career researcher to establish herself in an independent research career related to sustainability. This interdisciplinary (geosciences and social sciences) project will explore linkages between smallholder soil and water management practices in tropical deltas to sea level rise vulnerability.
The fertile soils, vibrant ecosystems and abundant waterways of tropical deltas have attracted humans and supported social, cultural and economic development for millennia. Unfortunately, their high populations and cultivated, flat landscapes also make tropical deltas vulnerable to sea level rise predicted in this century. To address coupled socio-biophysical feedbacks between smallholder farm practices and regional scale vulnerability to coastal flooding in tropical deltas, this study will utilize two complementary conceptual frameworks to identify links between rural soil and water management practices and erosion and increased tidal flooding for development of a geospatial analysis and open-source coupled model. The study focuses on the Ganges-Brahmaputra delta in Bangladesh, where social and environmental concerns converge, thus providing a dynamic, complex and globally significant case study for understanding coupled biophysical and socioeconomic processes. The research will advance understanding of how these coupled processes underlie the sustainability of human-natural delta systems by applying an Institutional Development and Analysis Framework, and a SocioEcological Systems Framework. The analyses and results will be produced and stored in open-source formats that will provide for broad dissemination of the results to policy makers, environmental managers, development organizations, and foreign agricultural extensions. The SEES Fellow, Dr. Kimberly Rogers, will work with host mentor Dr. James Syvitski at the University of Colorado, and with partner mentor Dr. Eduardo Brondizio at Indiana University Bloomington.
