Institute Vision, Goals, and Specific Objectives
The origins of this proposal arose from the enthusiastic and organic outpouring of interest by faculty across campus and diverse disciplines recognizing the urgent need for climate resilience. Our vision is for an organization that provides high impact research, education, and engagement targeting critical barriers to climate resilience, as well as an integrated framework and infrastructure to foster and sustain convergent climate resilience collaboration across UNL campuses, with the goal of growing climate resilience in Nebraska and other locales. We seek to establish UNL as a leader in climate resilience scholarship and engagement in the US and globally. CCRI has the following overarching and specific objectives:
- Establish UNL as a leader in climate resilience – through research, education, and engagement – and help to provide an example of climate resilience by working with campus partners to make our campuses a model climate-resilient community.
- Conduct high impact research on critical climate resilience questions by facilitating convergence collaboration across currently disconnected areas of expertise at UNL and using those areas of strength to expand UNL’s footprint and profile in climate resilience scholarship and related creative activity.
- Foster resilience thinking on and off campus by (3a) training successive cohorts of graduate and undergraduates through Climate Resilience Traineeships and (3b) developing more effective pathways through the arts and humanities for communication to those who are resistant to recognizing climate change and its potential impacts.
- Co-develop inclusive and actionable climate resilience strategies by actively collaborating with community partners and governments in the Great Plains and beyond.
Given the strong climate gradients in the Great Plains (i.e., significant temperature and precipitation variance across the region) and the combination of urban centers and rural communities, the Great Plains is a natural laboratory for exploring climate resilience. Moreover, we propose that many findings and policy applications in the Great Plains will be translatable to other locales and settings. This will allow CCRI activities to have national and international applicability.