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Healthy Economy

Planning for Resilience

Threatened natural resources may impair local food, energy and water sectors

Meghan Babbar- Sebens

In a warmer, uncertain future, local officials may face tough decisions over water, energy and agriculture. To help program managers, agencies and local communities coordinate decision-making efforts, a research project led by Meghna Babbar-Sebens, associate professor in the College of Engineering, aims to establish clear pathways for adapting to natural resource limitations, such as shortages of water, reductions in energy and changes in land-use policies.

She and her OSU collaborators β€” Ganti Murthy, Jenna Tilt and Jeffrey Reimer β€” and Snehasis Mukhopadhyay and Arjan Durresi at Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis, have received support through a $1.5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture via an interagency partnership with the National Science Foundation.

β€œThe grant is about building the next generation of decision-support systems for enabling adaptation in interconnected food-energy-water systems,” says Babbar-Sebens. The research team is working with communities in Hermiston and neighboring communities in Umatilla and Morrow counties. They will focus on developing long-term water management plans that are resilient to declining groundwater and changing socioeconomic conditions.

Babbar-Sebens specializes in hydroinformatics, the use of information technologies and artificial intelligence to improve watershed management in a changing climate.

By Nick Houtman

Nick Houtman is director of research communications at OSU and edits Terra, a world of research and creativity at Oregon State University. He has experience in weekly and daily print journalism and university science writing. A native Californian, he lived in Wisconsin and Maine before arriving in Corvallis in 2005.