New center aims to tackle coastal city climate crises

By Hope Yang     9/17/24 11:04pm

The new Center for Coastal Futures and Adaptive Resilience was created to address the repercussions of climate change and social inequality in Houston, the Gulf Coast and other coastal communities, announced by Rice News Aug. 26. 

CFAR’s research has four main areas: climate adaptation in coastal cities, coastal and industrial communities, disaster recovery and resilience and urban infrastructure futures. 

CFAR is housed in the School of Social Sciences and utilizes interdisciplinary research methods, led by co-directors James Elliot and Dominic Boyer said. CFAR features the Convergent Solutions Hub focusing on interdisciplinary solutions, according to Boyer. 

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Boyer, a professor of anthropology, said that individual faculty members at Rice have been working on climate change issues for a long time, but CFAR is the first initiative at Rice to support such research. 

“We represent a multidisciplinary research team,” Boyer said. “We want to shed light on the social dimension of [climate] challenges because we think that although technology and policy are really, really important, there are certain kinds of challenges that are also institutional, infrastructural, ideological, cultural.”

Elliott and Boyer bring different methodologies and disciplinary perspectives to the table, according to Dean of Social Sciences Rachel Kimbro.

“These complex problems require interdisciplinary study and solutions, so it made sense to fund this new center to emphasize the importance of social science perspectives for environmental problems,” Kimbro wrote in an email to the Thresher. “After all, nothing will improve if we can’t change human behavior.”

Boyer said that Hurricane Harvey, which hit Houston in August 2017, was a major catalyst for the center’s establishment.

“In Houston, I think we tell ourselves we’re ‘Houston strong,’ we’re resilient, we can take it,” Boyer said. “It wasn’t until Harvey that I think people really said, ‘You know what? Maybe we can’t actually do this. Maybe … the status quo way of doing things is not going to work in a world where the climate is changing quickly enough that we don’t know exactly what the future holds for us, so we need to build up a more resilient set of practices, attitudes and infrastructures.’”

Elliott, the chair of the sociology department, said that one of CFAR’s current focuses is on hazardous chemicals in coastal industrial communities that can be released during storms and create toxic floodwaters. 

“To help visualize these dynamics, our team produced an interactive map of major polluters at elevated flood risk which was picked up by ‘The New York Times’ last week when Hurricane Francine hit,” Elliott said. “We’ve now updated that map to show where major polluters were located in the hurricane’s eventual cone of impact.”

Boyer said that CFAR is planning its first public in-person event scheduled to happen early February.

“We’re going to have a combination of Rice experts on the four research topics [CFAR is focused on] … community partners, both community organizations and [non-governmental organizations] who we’re beginning to develop collaborative relationships with, and we’re going to bring in people from outside to share their insights about similar problems that might be happening in their communities,” Boyer said. “We’re going to really brainstorm about what our priorities should be, what we should concentrate on first.”

Kimbro expressed hope that CFAR can create new research possibilities at Rice and impact the Houston community.

Boyer said that CFAR has the potential to create stronger ties between Rice and communities in Houston affected by climate change.

“I’m hoping that we can make real world impacts through the work that we’re doing,” he said. “That we can study the problems, but that we can also actually make Houston a more sustainable and safer place for all Houstonians.”

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