Penn State-led team awarded $17M to study climate risk and adaptation strategies

Source: Penn State News

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — A multi-institutional research team led by Penn State has been awarded a $17 million, five-year cooperative research agreement with the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science to understand how interconnected systems are exposed to natural hazards that create vulnerabilities and risks for society and how societies respond and adapt to these risks.

The team will be employing computational modeling and data science tools to investigate the following research questions: How does the characterization and quantification of hazards (flood, water scarcity, wildfire) propagate through the interconnected system, affecting the exposure and vulnerability of populations and physical systems to these hazards? How do these populations and physical systems respond to these risks and how do these responses feed back to the interconnected system? What are the features and characteristics that fundamentally give rise to resilient human and institutional response strategies.

Specific regional case studies the team will consider are water stress and wildfires in the U.S. West; water stress in the Great Plains; and flooding in the Upper Midwest, Gulf Coast and Northeast.

The new project, called PCHES-ADAPT, is the third the DOE’s Multisector Dynamics (MSD) Program has awarded to the Program on Coupled Human-Earth Systems (PCHES), a nine-university research team that works to develop new, state-of-the-art, integrated modeling frameworks to drive advances in the quantitative understanding of coupled systems, and risk and response behaviors.

Read the full story here on Penn State News.

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Murali Haran is a Department Head and Professor of Statistics at Penn State. His research interests are in the areas of computational statistics, spacial models, and applications to climate and infectious diseases.