Grand Challenges: Addressing Climate Challenges for a Sustainable Earth
Grant Type: Institutional Grant
Topic: Climate Change
Colleges Represented: CMNS, BSOS
Summary:
Humanity’s home, the Earth, faces existential threats due to climate change. Monitoring, predicting, managing, and mitigating these impacts at the regional scale is a major challenge. There is a societal need to address challenges in:
- Extreme Weather and Natural Disasters in a Changing World
- Agriculture and Food Security
- Air and Water Quality
This initiative will use a Research-to-Impact philosophy that builds on UMD research to reimagine:
- Experiential education for students that integrates across multiple disciplines and draws on the expertise of two colleges.
- Monitoring and prediction to help protect MD communities from climate impacts.
This initiative extends beyond the academic and will benefit the students and the people of Maryland by:
- Characterizing regional vulnerabilities to Extreme Weather through high-resolution monitoring and predictions of time, location, and severity to support regional policy and response preparation
- Correlating socioeconomic factors in Agriculture and Food Security with high-resolution scientific data to help policymakers and farmers optimize agriculture productivity and sustainability in the face of climate change
- Identifying the causal factors, including climate change and establishing mitigations for local Air and Water quality, and the resulting health implications, and the environmental justice implications.
Team Members:
 PI: Ellen Williams (CMNS), Distinguished University Professor and Director, Earth Systems Science Interdisciplinary Center |
 Sumant Nigam (CMNS), Professor and Chair, Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Science, and Director, Maryland Mesonet |
