Engaged Research for Community Resilience to Climate Change

By Shannon Van Zandt, Jaimie Hicks Masterson, Galen D. Newman and Michelle Annette Meyer

Engaged Research for Community Resilience to Climate Change is a guide to successfully integrating science into urban, regional, and coastal planning activities to build truly sustainable communities that can withstand climate change. It calls for a shift in academic researchers’ traditional thinking by working across disciplines to solve complex societal and environmental problems, focusing on the real-world human impacts of climate change, and providing an overview of how science can be used to advocate for institutional change.

Engaged Research for Community Resilience to Climate Change appeals to a wide variety of audiences, including university administrators looking to create and sustain interdisciplinary research groups, community and state officials, non-profit and community advocates, and community organizers seeking guidance for generating and growing meaningful, productive relationships with university researchers to support change in their communities.

• Focuses on the process of building a successful, active partnership between climate change researchers and climate resilience professionals
• Provides case studies of university-community partnerships in building climate resilience
• Includes interviews and contributors from a wide variety of disciplines engaged in climate resilience partnerships

• Language: English
• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Release date: Jun 17, 2020
• ISBN: 9780128155769

Shannon Van Zandt

Shannon Van Zandt is professor and practitioner of urban planning. She currently leads the Department of Landscape Architecture & Urban Planning at Texas A&M University, Texas, United States. As a researcher, she engages in applied research on social vulnerability and the recovery of neighborhoods and communities after disaster. As a planner, she works with communities to develop programs, plans, and policies to increase their resilience and advocate for themselves.

Book preview

Engaged Research for Community Resilience to Climate Change

Shannon Van Zandt

Texas A&M University, Department of Landscape

Architecture & Urban Planning, College Station, USA

Jaimie Hicks Masterson

Texas A&M University, Texas Target Communities Program, College Station, USA

Galen D. Newman

Texas A&M University, Department of Landscape

Architecture & Urban Planning, College Station, USA

Michelle Annette Meyer

Texas A&M University, Department of Landscape

Architecture & Urban Planning, College Station, USA

Contents

Cover

Title page

Copyright

Contributors

Acknowledgments

Part I: Discovery

Chapter 1: Introduction: our global story

A community

A university

Organization of the book

A partnership

Chapter 2: A case for engaged research and practice

Abstract

Social problems as wicked problems

Chapter 3: Resilience is Rawlsian

Abstract

Chapter 4: Origin of the Institute for Sustainable Communities

Abstract

Introduction

Director and founder of the IfSC

TAMU environmental grand challenge

The Resilience and Climate Change Cooperative Project (RCCCP)

From RCCP to IfSC

Living laboratories

Conclusion

Chapter 5: Discovery initiatives

Abstract

Introduction

Coastal risk reduction and resilience initiative

Community infrastructure initiative

Water security initiative

Community resilience initiative

Health and environment initiative

Cross-pollination across discovery initiatives

Chapter 6: Breaking down the walls: challenges and lessons learned in interdisciplinary research

Abstract

Introduction

Engaging graduate students

Developing a common language and shared conventions

Overcoming barriers and challenges

What happens next?

Part II: Process for Creating Citizen-Engaged Science

Chapter 7: The community in work

Abstract

The east end story

Furr High School

The south side story

Jones Futures Academy

Conclusion

Chapter 8: Empowering learners

Abstract

Introduction

Projects that benefit all

Discussion: student feedback

Conclusion

Acknowledgment

Chapter 9: Integrated impact

Abstract

Community and university engagement process

Differences in partnerships

Conclusion

Chapter 10: Ethics of community-based research

Abstract

Introduction

Participation rules of thumb

First, who designs projects?

Second, who holds the knowledge?

Third, who benefits?

Finally, who stays?

Conclusion

Chapter 11: Program evaluation

Abstract

Introduction

Why evaluate?

Evaluating program activities of the IfSC

Conclusion: challenges for the future of the IfSC

Chapter 12: Conclusion-lessons and regrets

Abstract

Introduction

Finding synchronicity in theory and practice

Institutionalizing and sustaining engaged research: challenges and opportunities

Conclusion

Appendix

Index

Copyright

Elsevier

Radarweg 29, PO Box 211, 1000 AE Amsterdam, Netherlands

The Boulevard, Langford Lane, Kidlington, Oxford OX5 1GB, United Kingdom

50 Hampshire Street, 5th Floor, Cambridge, MA 02139, United States

Copyright © 2020 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Details on how to seek permission, further information about the Publisher’s permissions policies and our arrangements with organizations such as the Copyright Clearance Center and the Copyright Licensing Agency, can be found at our website: www.elsevier.com/permissions.

This book and the individual contributions contained in it are protected under copyright by the Publisher (other than as may be noted herein).

Notices

Knowledge and best practice in this field are constantly changing. As new research and experience broaden our understanding, changes in research methods, professional practices, or medical treatment may become necessary.

Practitioners and researchers must always rely on their own experience and knowledge in evaluating and using any information, methods, compounds, or experiments described herein. In using such information or methods they should be mindful of their own safety and the safety of others, including parties for whom they have a professional responsibility.

To the fullest extent of the law, neither the Publisher nor the authors, contributors, or editors, assume any liability for any injury and/or damage to persons or property as a matter of products liability, negligence or otherwise, or from any use or operation of any methods, products, instructions, or ideas contained in the material herein.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-0-12-815575-2

For information on all Elsevier publications visit our website at https://www.elsevier.com/books-and-journals

Publisher: Candice Janco

Acquisitions Editor: Marisa LaFleur

Editorial Project Manager: Devlin Person

Production Project Manager: Vignesh Tamil

Designer: Christian Bilbow

Typeset by Thomson Digital

Contributors

John T. Cooper, Jr.,     Texas A&M University, Office of Public Partnership and Outreach, College Station, USA

Juan Elizondo,     Furr High School, Houston, USA

Jennifer A. Horney,     University of Delaware, Epidemiology Program, Newark, USA

Katie Rose Kirsch,     Texas A&M University, Department of Epidemiology & Biostatistics, College Station, USA

Jaimie Hicks Masterson,     Texas A&M University, Texas Target Communities Program, College Station, USA

Michelle Annette Meyer,     Texas A&M University, Department of Landscape Architecture & Urban Planning, College Station, USA

Galen D. Newman,     Texas A&M University, Department of Landscape Architecture & Urban Planning, College Station, USA

Juan Parras,     Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Services (t.e.j.a.s), Houston, USA

Garett T. Sansom,     Texas A&M University, Department of Environmental & Occupational Health, College Station, USA

Shannon Van Zandt,     Texas A&M University, Department of Landscape Architecture & Urban Planning, College Station, USA

Charles X. White,     Charity Productions, Houston, USA

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to acknowledge those involved in the creation of the Institute of Sustainable Communities, which emerged from the Environmental Grand Challenge. There were people in the upper administration at Texas A&M University, including Karan Watson and Chad Wootton, who helped to make both happen, but we want to acknowledge those from our department, including Forster Ndubisi, Jorge Vanegas, and Walter Gillis Peacock. They were instrumental in the hiring first of John Cooper, Jr. as a community engagement and outreach expert, who pioneered and continues to drive our way of working, and then of John’s long-time mentor and collaborator, Phillip Berke, the first director of the Institute, as a direct result of the Environmental Grand Challenge. Berke brought together an initial group of faculty, including Francisco Olivera from Environmental Engineering, Steven Quiring from Atmospheric Science, Kent Portney from Public Service Administration, Nasir Gharaibeh from Civil Engineering, author Shannon Van Zandt, and the inimitable Jennifer Horney from Public Health, who first suggested this book as a way to capture the processes and outcomes of the work we were doing. This first group was later joined by Wendy Jepson from Geography and Ashley Ross from Marine Sciences as other Discovery Leads (along with authors Galen Newman and Michelle Meyer) and have continued to drive the engaged research being done today.

We would also like to acknowledge the first class of students to come through the Institute, including Marccus Hendricks, Tiffany Cousins, Leslie Munoz, Matthew Giglio, Isaac Oti, and finally Garett Sansom, who took on a leadership role as Assistant Director and has ensured the day-to-day operations of the Institute. These students got a hands-on education in engaged research, played critical roles in how the rest of us experienced engaged research, and all have gone on to make it a critical part of their research agendas going forward. Texas Target Communities staff members and interns, led by author Jaimie Hicks Masterson, including Jeewasmi Thapa, Emily Tedford, and Amanda Hoque, and others provided excellent support for our field efforts and relationship building. We are immensely proud of each of them.

Finally, we would like to acknowledge our major partners in the field—Charles X. White of Charity Productions; Juan Parras, Ana Parras, Yvette Arellano, Yudith Nieto, and Nalleli Hidalgo and Cinthia Cantu (former Green Ambassadors) and their team at the Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Service (tejas); Tracy Stephens, president of the Sunnyside Civic Club; and the Green Ambassadors at Furr High School, led by Juan Elizondo, David Salazar, Fredalina Pieri, and others. These young people are going to save the world. We are thankful to the residents that participated in the work, who opened their homes and hearts to us—sharing experiences, stories, and their invaluable local knowledge.

The engaged research described within has been supported both by internal funding from Texas A&M University, as well as millions in external grant funding from agencies and funders including the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Environmental Protection Agency, and others. Furr High School involvement has been funded in part by a $10 Million grant from the XQ Foundation.

Part I

Discovery

Chapter 1: Introduction: our global story

Chapter 2: A case for engaged research and practice

Chapter 3: Resilience is Rawlsian

Chapter 4: Origin of the Institute for Sustainable Communities

Chapter 5: Discovery initiatives

Chapter 6: Breaking down the walls: challenges and lessons learned in interdisciplinary research

Chapter 1

Introduction: our global story

Jaimie Hicks Mastersona

Shannon Van Zandtb

a    Texas A&M University, Texas Target Communities Program, College Station, USA

b    Texas A&M University, Department of Landscape Architecture & Urban Planning, College Station, USA

Chapter outline

A community

A university

Organization of the book

A partnership

References

When you know their stories, you grow strength from their survival.

Sam Collins III, City of Hitchcock, Texas resident

This is the story of community-university partnerships. It is the story of place and of people. It is a story of survival and urgency. It is the story of local knowledge and empirically driven science.

A community

Once I heard a local Houstonian chuckle and say, smells like money, referring to the toxic fumes of the refineries along either side of Highway 225, the major highway along the Houston Ship Channel connecting the port areas to downtown. Fenceline communities and those vulnerable to hazards do not chuckle at this sentiment.

Instead of snow days, Houston schools are more likely to temporarily close from flood days. These flood events might not make the national news because they are not always named events like Hurricane Harvey in 2017. Houstonians know all too well the devastation of tropical cyclones and bake the colloquial hurricane cookies (or hurricane cake) when a hurricane is in the Gulf of Mexico.

If Texans embody the independent, rugged spirit of the nation, Houstonians embody that of Texas. Houston is gritty and tough. Houstonians are tougher and fiercely independent. They possess a rugged spirit that do not give up.

In fact, Houstonians deal with pollution, environmental injustice, hurricanes, storm surge, and ever constant flooding. This place has toxic industries adjacent to neighborhoods and schools-which are also primarily communities of color on the city’s historic East End. Houston has 4600 energy-related companies, refines 14% of the the nation’s petroleum, and produces 44% of the nation’s chemicals (Greater Houston Partnership, 2019). Houston air quality regularly exceeds healthy ozone levels and is ranked among the most ozone-polluted cities in the United States (American Lung Association, 2019). A study by the University of Texas School of Public Health found that children living within two miles of the Houston Ship Channel had a 56% greater chance of contracting leukemia than children living 10 or more miles away. The residents within the Manchester/Harrisburg neighborhood in East End Houston along the Ship Channel bear some of the highest cumulative cancer risk among all of Harris County (Linder, Marko, & Sexton, 2008).

Flooding in Houston makes up most of the whole state’s losses, and the city’s flooding issues have become a bear weather of impacts to come for other urban areas under increased climate change impacts. As for flooding, between 1996 and 2007 Houston had $1.1 billion of the $1.8 billion in insured flood losses for all of Texas. Predictions show that the frequency and intensity of heavy rainfall events will only increase due to climate change. Climate change is expected to increase the annual probability of Houston receiving large-scale rainfall events from once in every 2000 years to once in every 100 years by 2081-2100 (Emanuel, 2017). While annual precipitation is expected to remain about the same over the next 100 years, the variability-more extremely wet days and extremely dry periods-will increase (Li, Li, Wang, & Quiring, 2019). Events like Hurricane Harvey, and the floods (e.g., Tax Day Flood and Memorial Day Flood of 2016, among others) in the years preceding Harvey, will be a new normal for the city.

The problems described are not a neighborhood problem, or just a Houston problem, but a global problem. Since 1880, the earth has warmed 1°C (1.8°F). With current carbon-emitting trends, by 2100 the earth will warm by 4°C (or 7.2°F). Because of these grave numbers, in April of 2016, 175 of the 196 world countries committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions by curbing the impacts to only 2°C (3.6°F). The Paris Agreement set the record for the highest number of countries to sign an international agreement, and the highest emitters, -such as the United States, China, India, and the EU, all committed to lessening the impacts of climate change, although the United States ceased participation in 2017.

Many cities within the United States continue their commitments to this agreement and other environmental and resilience goals, in hopes of addressing some of these challenges. City-led initiatives and neighborhood-level resilience efforts can promote grassroots and equitable practices that compliment national efforts or fill a void in national leadership. Houston is a microcosm of global trends and problems. Houston happens to be a living laboratory to understand these complex problems and how cities and neighborhoods can develop just resilience practices for the future.

A way to establish and grow resilience locally is through knowledge sharing. Universities are leaders in knowledge generation. Positioning themselves to engage with local communities in using this knowledge and developing new knowledge is one underutilized and needed avenue to address the complex challenges communities face.

The Institute for Sustainable Communities (IfSC) with the Texas Target Communities Program of Texas A&M University has partnered with civic clubs and nonprofit organizations in inner city Houston, but Houston is not alone. We have worked in rural places in Texas, like the cities of Nolanville and La Grange, and counties including Liberty and Grimes County. We have worked with small communities like Buffalo, Texas with less than 2000 in population, to large multicounty regions, like the Southeast Texas Regional Planning Commission. We have worked side by side with communities to think about hazards, and we have been a resource to communities recovering from wildfires, technological events, tornadoes, and flooding. All communities we have worked with say the same things. We want safe places, we want higher quality of life, we want, as Judge of Liberty County put it, a place we’d be proud for our kids and grandkids to live in.

So what does that mean for Houston and other communities faced with hazards and climate change? Communities and universities across the country and the world are working together to understand these complex problems to affect change. This book details one such relationship that supports the best science simultaneously with community empowerment.

A university

Rather than using communities as laboratories, community groups desire a partnership with researchers to identify problems and issues within the community and develop solutions. Laboratories imply scientists testing their hypotheses in a space without external input or especially input from the subjects of the studies. While many scientists are accustomed to engaging students in field research and data-gathering, they are often accused of using communities for their own scientific needs, and failing to build bidirectional relationships that bring real change to communities or address problems that the community itself identifies. The partnerships community partners want require a shift in the traditional thinking of academic researchers. They require working across disciplines to solve complex societal and environmental problems, as well as a mode of communication that is unfamiliar to academics, focusing on the real-world human impacts of climate change, and how the science can be used to advocate for and institute change.

Fortunately, universities engaged and working with communities is not new. Even at the founding of American colleges, they were cloaked with a public purpose (Rudolph, 1962, p. 177). The Morrill Acts of 1860 and 1862 linked higher education to the concept of service with the formation of land-grant colleges. Woodrow Wilson signed the Smith-Lever Act of 1914 to establish cooperative extension services within the land-grant institutions to promote the spirit of service. The very concept of extension was to extend the knowledge of universities to communities, mainly farmers and other industries. During this time the settlement house model was pioneered by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr’s Hull House with a community-centered response to social problems. Other Black scholars and educators working on community issues used a settlement house model in the late 19th and early 20th century (Stevens, 2003). We can also see the community focus and community voice as pivotal to the civil rights movement. In 1970, the University Year for ACTION, involved more than ten thousand students from over one hundred colleges and universities (Jacoby, 1996, p. 12).

Boyer identified three areas of successful colleges, one being students that advance the common good (Boyer, 1988, p. 296). President Clinton wrote a letter to all higher education institutions in 1994 asking for their help in inspiring an ethic of service across our nation (Jacoby 1996, p. 17). Boyer insisted universities were not doing enough (Boyer, 1990, 1996; O’Meara & Jaeger, 2006). Land-grant institutions and other universities were urged to apply knowledge and provide service to the community and be the new American college (Silka et al. 2013, pp. 42-43).

State universities across the nation, particularly those that are land grant, face increasing pressure to engage meaningfully with their communities and state residents. The Kellogg Commission on the Future of the State and Land-Grant Universities advocated for community engagement by integrating teaching, research, and service (Silka et al. 2013, p. 42). In 2004, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching established the Carnegie Classification for Community Engagement to recognize universities for their service to community partnerships and reciprocity (Carnegie, 2006). Other groups have pushed for community engagement along the way, such as the National Science Foundation, Campus Compact, the National Coordinating Centre for Public Engagement, the Engaged Scholarship Consortium, the Educational Partnerships for Innovation in Communities Network (EPIC-N), and the list goes on.

In total, 100 years have passed since the extension service model moved research into communities, and today universities aim for community inclusivity, mutuality, reciprocity (Driscoll, 2009). In the last decade, over and over again, researchers have called for more authentic community engagement and liberating service-learning to go beyond outreach and lip service of change and moving toward community (Driscoll 2009; Frank 2015; Yarime, 2014; Stoecker 2016). Universities are moving away from fitting communities into their courses and research projects and moving toward designing courses, research, and new processes to tackling pressing local problems. Universities are embedding such efforts into organizational structures and institutional commitment (Frank, 2015). The main message is universities also want higher quality of life in communities. We feel that universities in this age of climate change and environmental inequities can move toward resilience scientifically and in practice by moving toward community.

Organization of the book

The authors and their collaborators describe in the chapters that follow how we-a team of interdisciplinary academic researchers working hand-in-hand with practitioners and communities-undertake engaged research that seeks to bridge the uncertainties of science and the multiple and sometimes conflicting interests present in communities vulnerable to impacts from climate change. We offer both successes and failures, best practices and lessons learned, in our efforts to engage in vulnerable communities and to directly work with them to identify research questions, develop approaches to collaboratively answer these questions, and to return the gained knowledge in such a way as to facilitate both learning and action.

The book is useful for university administrators and researchers who wish to build meaningful relationships with communities in their state or region, thereby strengthening their real and perceived contribution to society. Put more simply, universities (especially, but not exclusively, public universities) are under increasing pressure from state legislators and external funders-including federal funding agencies and private foundations and donors-to produce research that transforms communities by addressing locally identified and defined problems. This book is also for community organizations-both public and nonprofit-as well as local, regional, and national philanthropic institutions (i.e., foundations) that have as part of their missions the application of science to the betterment of society-solving real problems and reducing negative impacts.

The book is in two parts. The first part offers case studies of research projects that have resulted in positive resilience outcomes for communities and their stakeholders. While each case shares peer-reviewed research findings, it also explains and discusses the funding sources, field methods, and short- and long-term outcomes for the community, demonstrating the ways in which the science benefited from its interdisciplinarity, as well as how community input changed the research process. Specifically, Chapter 2 describes why it is challenging to understand and solve wicked problems (through theory). Universities can move from theoretical purity toward productive action when we include multiple forms of knowledge. Chapter 3 describes the case for equity and supporting the most marginalized in resilience planning. Chapter 4 explains the creation and formation of the IfSC and how this hub of connection supported researchers and residents. Chapter 5 describes the various Discovery Leads or interdisciplinary group of faculty and the research they focused on with community partners. Chapter 6 explains how we were able to break down disciplinary walls along with challenges and lessons learned while working across disciplines in an academic institution.

Part II focuses on the process of creating, growing, and sustaining interdisciplinary working groups of researchers and methods of engaging meaningfully with community groups and residents. It addresses ethical behavior for researchers working with community groups, beyond that which is required by human subjects review in universities. Chapter 7 describes the work of the IfSC community partners and their relationship with science and researchers. Chapter 8 describes projects codesigned and coproduced by interdisciplinary scholars (and their students) and local residents to understand hazard risk in socially vulnerable communities and resulted