In 2024, GW’s Sustainability Research Institute instituted a new seed grant program to inspire additional interdisciplinary research in the field of sustainability. The goal of these grants is to encourage and support teams of faculty during the initial research and development phase of a project, before the project team goes on to apply for larger grants from external organizations. Having support for early stage development can help make GW’s research teams more competitive against others applying for grants from national organizations and other important funders. The awards are made to faculty, although their teams may include students or other researchers.
Professor Robert Orttung is the Director of the Sustainability Research Institute, which awards the grants. He notes that the grants are also intended to help spark more interdisciplinary conversations on campus. Orttung wants to bring together people who do not normally work together but who could benefit from collaboration because collaborative, interdisciplinary approaches are particularly well-suited to developing innovative approaches to addressing complex problems such as climate change and sustainability.
The Sustainability Research Institute plans for the seed grants to be awarded annually. Orttung is hoping to announce the next opportunity for submitting applications soon. To apply for the seed grants, professors give a short proposal explaining the impact of the proposed research and how the seed grant will plant the tree of a big research project and eventually receive external funding. Following the proposals, a committee evaluates all the proposals and picks the projects they will be funding.
With the first round of seed grants wrapping up, the Institute is planning on hosting small presentations throughout the fall 2024 semester, highlighting the research teams and the work they have accomplished so far. Many researchers have spent the summer months working, and the Institute is excited to announce what their preliminary research has found in the hopes of inspiring others to develop new projects.
The seed grants have provided professors with a new sense of interconnectedness on campus, and have brought many disciplines together. Researching with an interdisciplinary view is very important when applying hypothetical situations to the real world. For example, a pre-existing interdisciplinary team expanded its work investigating the interrelationships between wildfires and the electrical system to look at health problems the fires cause, community impacts, and also governmental roles on preventing future fires and adding protections.
The initial round of grants supported four projects:
The Roots and Branches of Sustainability Culture: Extreme Climate Action
Associate Professor of German & International Affairs, Romance, German & Slavic Languages & Literatures Margaret Gonglewski has partnered with Nina Kelsey, Associate Professor of Public Policy and International Affairs, ESIA & TSPPPA. Together they are investigating extreme climate action (ECA) in Germany, and examining how countries like Germany can become leaders in sustainability and green politics. They also plan to look into the role ECA plays in the German culture, and how policy makers in Germany should respond to ECA
Regulating the Cruise Industry to Address Climate Change Impacts and Other Environmental Harms
Seleni Matus, the Executive Director of the International Institute of Tourism Studies, and Robin Juni, an Associate Professor in the Fundamentals of Lawyering Program are examining greenwashing in the cruise industry. Through analyzing marketing materials, sustainability reports, and industry practices they hope to find the extent to which the industry is actually improving and to what extent their claims are just PR. This research will show we can increase the real impact of these industry efforts as the market for tourism moves towards green tourism with less of an impact on the planet.
Communication, Conservation, and Indigeneity in Hawaii
Imani M. Cheers, PhD, Associate Professor of Digital Storytelling in the School of Media and Public Affairs, Mona Atia, Associate Professor, Department of Geography and International Affairs, and Aman Luthra, Assistant Professor, Department of Geography and International Affairs are investigating the August 2023 wildfires that affected Hawaii. The goal of this research project is to find how indigenous communities, and indigenous women, prepare for and respond to natural disasters and climate change on the island of Maui. The research also will highlight how communities are returning to their homes and rebuilding after these fires.
Standards for Sustainability Governance
Maryam Zarnegar Deloffre, Ph.D. Associate Professor of International Affairs and the Director of the Humanitarian Action Initiative is finding new ways to conceptualized sustainability standards. This project aims to map out and conceptualize standards in order to analyze how standards interact with each other and how they affect the government and outcomes of sustainability. By creating concrete metrics we can measure how much an intervention actually changes behaviors while moving towards a sustainable future.