RCN: The Climate and Governance Variability in the Great Lakes (CGVG) Project

The Great Lakes have more shoreline in the continental US than the combined coasts of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, and millions of people depend on these lakes for their livelihoods. Climate-driven disturbances, including changing water levels, warming water temperatures, cyanobacterial blooms, and intensified storms are increasingly threatening the sustainability of coastal communities in the Great Lakes. Communities struggle to respond to the unpredictable timing, intensity, and number of disturbances. The variability of these perturbations occurs over time scales from hours to centuries and different social responses are involved across these time scales. The intensification of disturbances impacting coastal systems requires that community capacities and governance structures must match the temporal and spatial scale of climate-driven disturbances, as the most sustainable social and economic systems will be those that can respond at similar frequencies to key natural system drivers. The RCN will have four key benefits to the scientific community and coastal communities at large: (1) Training early career scholars how to conduct interdisciplinary research in the integration of social and ecological systems, with a particular focus on mentoring postdoctoral scholars. (2) Broader training for participants through collaborative and synergistic activities associated with the RCN. (3) Synergy with other networks. (4) Relevance to decision making. Because one of the primary goals of this RCN is to provide decision makers and stakeholders with information that can solve tangible community problems, the RCN will work closely with practitioners from private and non-profit industry, and local, state, federal, and tribal governments and agencies.

This CoPe RCN will address pressing questions about the nature of climate-driven variability on Great Lakes shorelines; the synchronicity between natural variability and social change; and the feedbacks and couplings between one of Earth's largest fresh water sources and the human socio-economic system on its shores. This RCN will catalyze innovative research to advance the understanding of freshwater coastal systems by hosting a series of three workshops to facilitate networking, publish collaborative manuscripts, and foster an interdisciplinary framework for researching Great Lakes socio-ecological systems. When the RCN is complete, the scientific knowledge of how coastal communities in the Great Lakes Basin interact with climate-driven disturbances will have progressed significantly, and a new framework for understanding coastal variability at a wide range of scales will have been produced.

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.