CAREER: CAS-Climate: Addressing Climate Change Impacts on Urban Water Affordability

职业：CAS-气候：应对气候变化对城市水承受能力的影响

• 批准号: 2337668
• 负责人: Sarah Fletcher
• 金额: $ 51万
• 依托单位: Stanford University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2024
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2024-02-01 至 2029-01-31
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2337668&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: CAREER; CAS; Climate; Addressing; Change

This project will address the impact of climate change on household water affordability. Climate change is increasing hydrological variability and water stress in many regions, leading water planners to invest in expensive new water supply infrastructure. However, many low-income households currently struggle to pay their water bills. Therefore, costly investments in water supply infrastructure may counterintuitively harm water security by making water unaffordable for a larger number of people. This NSF grant addresses this problem by, first, developing a new approach to assess the impact of climate change on water affordability that considers the environmental, social, and infrastructure factors that combine to determine water affordability. Second, it designs infrastructure and policy solutions to enable water supply systems to be both reliable in a changing climate and affordable for low-income populations. Through partnership with external stakeholders, this research will develop knowledge that local water planners and policymakers can use to improve the effectiveness of water affordability programs. This project will develop an approach to comprehensively assess the impact of climate change on household water affordability and design solutions. To achieve this, the project will advance theory for operationalizing distributional equity in systems models and methods for multi-scale urban water systems modeling. First, the project will advance understanding of the drivers of household water affordability through a novel systems-modeling framework that integrates environmental, human, and infrastructure dynamics across state, city, and household scales. Second, the research team will project climate change impacts on water supply and demand, using an approach that targets projections to the scales relevant for water system outcomes. Third, the project will leverage recent advances in reinforcement learning to design infrastructure and policy solutions to meet water affordability and reliability targets. To ensure the findings translate to practice, the research team will partner with two cities and develop an external advisory board. Additionally, the project will advance education on water equity and affordability for students, water managers, and local communities.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.

该项目将解决气候变化对家庭用水负担能力的影响。气候变化正在加剧许多地区的水文变化和水资源压力，导致水资源规划者投资昂贵的新供水基础设施。然而，许多低收入家庭目前难以支付水费。因此，对供水基础设施的昂贵投资可能会导致更多人买不起水，从而损害水安全。美国国家科学基金会的这项拨款解决了这个问题，首先，开发一种新方法来评估气候变化对水承受能力的影响，该方法考虑了环境、社会和基础设施因素，这些因素共同决定了水的承受能力。其次，它设计基础设施和政策解决方案，使供水系统既能在不断变化的气候下可靠，又能为低收入人群提供负担得起的服务。通过与外部利益相关者的合作，这项研究将开发当地水规划者和政策制定者可以用来提高水负担能力计划的有效性的知识。该项目将开发一种方法来全面评估气候变化对家庭用水负担能力的影响并设计解决方案。为了实现这一目标，该项目将推进系统模型中分配公平的可操作性理论和多尺度城市水系统建模方法。首先，该项目将通过一个新颖的系统建模框架，整合州、城市和家庭范围内的环境、人类和基础设施动态，增进对家庭用水负担能力驱动因素的理解。其次，研究小组将使用一种针对与水系统结果相关的规模进行预测的方法来预测气候变化对水供需的影响。第三，该项目将利用强化学习的最新进展来设计基础设施和政策解决方案，以满足水的负担能力和可靠性目标。为了确保研究结果转化为实践，研究团队将与两个城市合作并组建一个外部顾问委员会。此外，该项目还将促进学生、水资源管理者和当地社区的水公平和负担能力教育。该奖项反映了 NSF 的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。