Planning Grant: Engineering Research Center for Advancing a Circular Water Economy (ACWa-Econ)

The Planning Grants for Engineering Research Centers competition was run as a pilot solicitation within the ERC program. Planning grants are not required as part of the full ERC competition, but intended to build capacity among teams to plan for convergent, center-scale engineering research.

By the year 2025, two-thirds of the world's population is expected to live under conditions of water-stress. This has been identified as an enormous global risk, based on the potential impact of this water crisis on society. The National Science Foundation's Engineering Research Center (ERC) program provides national investment in engineering solutions for high-impact societal benefit, and this planning grant will be used bring together scientists, engineers, industry leaders, social scientists, and entrepreneurs to develop the framework for an ERC that will ultimately lead to breakthrough on how water is treated and managed in the United States and beyond. The potential benefits of the project are (1) increased capacity within institutions and the scientific/engineering community to perform impactful and inclusive research on the circular water economy, (2) enhanced understanding of methods to increase diversity and create a culture of inclusion within a research enterprise, (3) strengthened relationships between water-focused researchers and the industrial, non-profit, government, and community partners that can facilitate societal impact, and (4) knowledge among the team of different leadership and management approaches and their benefits and challenges.

The provision of clean water and the development of strategies--technological, economic, and societal--to create a true circular water economy is clearly an area of high-impact societal benefit. For this reason, we have proposed a series of planning activities that will allow us to build capacity and an inclusive culture around the challenge of solving technical water provision and reuse problems while also addressing the global and national health and economic risks of water stress and water reuse. We will work to incorporate the expertise of scientists, engineers, and computational scientists with the perspective of entrepreneurs and social scientists. Central to these activities will be the inclusion of individuals who, by nature of their cultural, racial, gender, or ethnic identification, see problems and solutions differently, and the tight integration with industrial, governmental, and non-governmental partners that are critical to implementing research into a true circular water economy. Through this grant we will share deep subject-matter expertise, co-create novel hypotheses and focal points for future research, identify critical characteristics of an inclusive culture and effective strategies for including diverse researchers, perspectives, and approaches into a large research effort, and identify successful management and leadership strategies for large and diverse groups. These activities will build national capacity to make smart water reuse a reality, as well as facilitate inclusion and better leadership across all those involved with the effort. The plan that develops will be technically grounded, broadly supported by stakeholders, and will incorporate risk aversion, economics, and different corporate and cultural 'frames' to facilitate high-impact solutions to the problem of water-stress.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.