Linda Shenk is part of the transdisciplinary team to receive a $100,000 Collaborative Planning Grant from the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR). Shenk is one of the Lead PIs of a research team that involves over 30 researchers from Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, and Missouri. The team will be collaborating with tribal communities and women landowners to develop more climate resilient communities in the Central Midwest.
As extreme climate-related hazards increase across the U.S. Central Midwest, women farmland owners and tribal groups often bear the brunt of these climatic changes, yet their knowledge and needs are rarely included when researchers and decision-makers develop climate adaptation and mitigation strategies. Her work addresses this by working to engage these two groups. Members of the research team have collaborated with one or the other of these groups for years, and the Co-LEARN project will build a community of learning across these groups that brings them, researchers, and policy makers into collaboration that yields tangible outcomes. In advance of the formal establishment of Co-LEARN, they propose a series of researcher and community-researcher workshops. These workshops will allow research-community team members to discover commonalities, needs, and assets in how these communities adapt to climate hazards in our region. These workshops build on the team’s existing research-community partnerships that already focus on local action and environmental stewardship as a relational process but now bring these partners and projects together with a shared understanding that Western science can both support and learn a great deal from these two groups who approach climate resilience as a coupled social-environmental system.