A project by the Connecticut Institute for Resilience and Climate Adaptation won a grant for over $250,000 from the National Science Foundation (NSF) after the Trump administration disrupted the award process, according to the project’s principal investigator.
The project, called “Identifying Community Need-Based Adaptation and Resilience Priorities in the U.S. Northeast,” is part of the first phase of NSF’s Regional Resilience Innovation Incubators (R2I2) grant program.
A second phase of the project will be accepting proposals this fiscal year, with anticipated funds for an annual $3 million for up to five years, according to the grant website.
James O’Donnell, the principal investigator of the project, said that for the Connecticut Institute for Resilience and Climate Adaptation (CIRCA) to receive the grant, an NSF program manager had to help align their R2I2 proposal with shifting federal priorities.
“There was a review process that was novel by the [new] administration,” O’Donnell said, explaining that CIRCA was notified about the review when the NSF was making the award. “They were looking for proposals that were addressing the impacts of climate change, which they don’t believe in, and were trying not to fund those.”
O’Donnell said that a key goal of the R2I2 grant was to make the scientific work done at the NSF more relevant to regular people without scientific backgrounds. To align CIRCA’s proposal for the grant with new priorities of the Trump administration, he said all that was needed was a few last-minute grammar changes.
“The NSF program manager said [CIRCA’s] proposal had a lot of climate change in the title, and it was really about severe weather impacts,” O’Donnell said, adding how the only thing changed was the title. He speculated that due to the small nature of the award, which has a maximum of $500,000 for the first phase, the Trump administration was probably only scanning the titles.
In addition to the small grant sizes in the R2I2 grant, O’Donnell said that storm repercussions could be another reason the Trump administration didn’t disrupt the funding further.
“The administration doesn’t really prioritize climate change, but they are aware that severe weather has negative impacts generally,” O’Donnell said. “So, the climate change part got taken out.”
The first phase was comprised of 16 smaller awards that went to the planning and prioritization of solutions for regional climate-based challenges. Proposals for the second phase of R2I2 funding will be accepted based on a merit and performance review of the projects in the first phase, according to NSF’s website.
CIRCA, which combines research and regulatory expertise from UConn and the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, submitted its phase-one R2I2 proposal in Dec. 2024.
The main mission of the project is to address climate adaptation needs like reducing flood risk, protecting vulnerable populations from heat related illness and preserving coastal infrastructure, according to the CIRCA website.
CIRCA will use a 10-step implementation plan to deliver this mission. O’Donnell said one of these steps that he is least excited for is the selection process to prioritize a specific proposal for the second phase.
O’Donnell explained how the amount of feedback CIRCA is getting on which challenges should be prioritized makes it hard to reach a consensus on what to focus on in the proposal. He mentioned two possible challenges that CIRCA could end up focusing on: coastal erosion and predicting precipitation increases.
“If towns really think it’s important to understand how effective a living shoreline technology is in reducing coastal erosion, then we can design experiments in mathematical models and monitoring programs,” O’Donnell said.
A successful first phase of an R2I2 grant will also incorporate where workforce development is needed so programs can be created as soon as the second phase starts, according to O’Donnell.
The end date for the first phase of the grant is estimated for Aug. 31, 2027, according to NSF’s website.
As the due date for the second proposal nears, O’Donnell said he’s never disappointed when proposals to the NSF don’t get funded because of how competitive they are.