[CogSci] Cognitive Science meets Coastal Sustainability

[Coley, John]

Greetings colleagues!

I’m involved in organizing a workshop, along with colleagues in Marine & Environmental Sciences here at Northeastern, as part of the NSF Convergence Accelerator program. The idea is to bring together smart, concerned people from a broad range of relevant fields to talk about issues of sustainability in the context of coastal communities, with an eye towards eventually helping NSF craft a future RFP. One exciting aspect of this conversation—and the reason I’m involved—is the idea that in order to devise viable and effect sustainability strategies, we need to understand how people represent knowledge about ecological systems and their place therein, and how this might be related to environmental attitudes, values, decision making, and behavior.

The idea is not so much to target folks who are already doing closely-related work (although some of you may be), but to target folks who may have important perspectives to bring to the table. As such, if you think your work could be relevant to the substance of this workshop, I encourage you to consider participating.



Please feel free to reach out to me with any questions you may have. Also, I encourage you to share this opportunity with anyone else you think may be interested or have perspectives to contribute, including students, postdocs, and folks outside of the academic sphere.

More information is below, and you can read about the workshop and register here<https://apply.hub.ki/coastalsustainability/>.



Thanks for reading, best wishes, and be well.

John Coley

--------------------

Black Lives Matter

John D. Coley, Ph.D. (he/him)

Associate Professor of Psychology

Northeastern University, Boston MA, USA

j.coley at northeastern.edu



Director, CORE Lab: Conceptual Organization, Reasoning, and Education Laboratory

https://corelab.sites.northeastern.edu

Co-Director, CLEAR: Cognitive Laboratory of Environment and Arts Research

https://clear.northeastern.edu/





Dear Coastal Sustainability Colleague,

We are excited to announce our upcoming workshop, “Coastal Sustainability: Clean, Safe, Smart and Equitable Communities”, which is supported by the National Science Foundation’s Convergence Accelerator Program. This NSF program is designed to bring together researchers and stakeholders from a wide range of disciplines to identify research areas where significant investment by NSF can accelerate impactful, convergent research in a short (2-3 year) time frame. The primary goal of our workshop is to identify potential areas where investments in convergent research will lead to rapid improvements in the sustainability of coastal communities and ecosystems.



Meeting the complex challenge of coastal sustainability requires convergent research that integrates the expertise of natural and social scientists, engineers, economists and financiers, and technologists, and fully co-develops strategies via collaboration with diverse stakeholders and decision makers to better understand the viability of sustainability solutions and their potential for implementation. Nature-based solutions represent a potentially powerful path for mitigation of and adaptation to coastal threats that include better methods of acknowledging the integration of people and nature. But many barriers have hindered the acceleration of their implementation, including inadequate engagement with stakeholders, diverse human attitudes and preferences, deeply seated cognitive assumptions and biases, outdated and bureaucratic policies, and historical legacies of relying on built infrastructure to address coastal threats, among others.



We aim to bring together stakeholders from diverse communities and experts from across disciplines to identify research paths that can dissolve these barriers and accelerate change. We are hoping you will be interested in joining us! Although the feedback we receive during our first listening session will shape the direction of subsequent workshop events, we did want to highlight the three topics that we hope will get the conversation going: (1) Living Shorelines, (2) Watershed Planning, and (3) Marine Food Systems/Sustainability. These topics are only meant to ignite the conversation and we enthusiastically seek new ideas and directions that can ultimately enhance the impact and outcomes of this workshop.

In the spirit of the Convergence Accelerator program, things will be moving quickly with our first Stakeholder Listening Session taking place virtually on April 27, 2021 from 2 to 5 PM EST. Please visit https://apply.hub.ki/coastalsustainability/ to learn more and to express interest for the Stakeholder Listening Session. We look forward to hearing from you all, and we would greatly appreciate you forwarding this through your networks!

Sincerely,

The Organizing Committee



Dr. Geoffrey C. Trussell

Vice President, Nahant Campus Operations

Director, Coastal Sustainability Institute/Marine Science Center

Chair, Department of Marine and Environmental Sciences

Northeastern University

430 Nahant Road

Nahant, MA 01908

he, him, his



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