AFRI – FAS Environmental Justice (A1461)

Program Area Priority: Climate change poses a significant risk to agriculture, forests, and rangelands across the United States. Underserved communities are especially vulnerable to climate change and researchbased understanding is needed to advance environmental justice and ensure food and nutrition security and economic opportunities for communities at risk. Applications are encouraged that advance understanding of environmental justice and use of traditional ecological knowledge (including indigenous traditional knowledge) to create a demographically diverse and representative research community. Stakeholder-informed approaches that can lead to actionable information and transformational changes are also encouraged.

This program area priority is soliciting applications to fund a single Standard Research Grant to better understand, measure, and track how NIFA’s research, education, extension, and workforce development investments in clean energy, climate change, food and nutrition security and water programming impact underserved communities. This program is particularly focused on secondary, or indirect, community-level social benefits and impacts. Novel and effective approaches to tackle this challenge will be required.

Proposals are required to address all the following:

a) Developing models that leverage and complement existing geospatial approaches to environmental justice and describe multiple dimensions of the indirect and long-term effects of investments on underserved communities.

b) Incorporating input and design principles extensively and meaningfully from underserved and indigenous communities at all stages of model development and execution.