The purpose of this GCRT was to create an interdisciplinary, multidimensional understanding of how communities—in concert with the natural systems within which they interactively exist—may be made less vulnerable to the effects of natural disasters.
The goal of this GCRT was identify critical water issues and explore opportunities for the University to play a key role in future interdisciplinary research and management surrounding these topics.
The activities of this GCRT explored the use of case studies to address highly controversial issues such as climate change denial that typically attract intensely politicized, ideological, and polarized debates.
The EGWG was a multi-disciplinary community seeking to advance research on environmental governance at Colorado State University. For the purposes of this multidisciplinary project, we define environmental governance as the formal and informal institutions/policies/rules/practices that shape how humans interact with the environment at all levels of social organization. This broad working definition recognizes the variation in disciplinary approaches and specific research foci. The study of environmental governance includes—but is not limited to—research on environmental policies and management practices, community conservation programs, common property resource regimes, collaborative decision-making processes, and markets for environmental goods and services. Environmental governance research may investigate particular arrangements and/or address broader questions of authority, accountability, legitimacy, participation, and fairness and equity.
This GCRT’s mission was to synthesize data on the practice of Conservation Development (CD), to evaluate the outcomes of CD, and to engage with practitioners to inform the design of future development and land conservation. They defined CD as an approach to the design, construction and stewardship of a development that achieves functional protection of natural resources while also providing social and economic benefits to human communities. The GCRT was comprised of 30 collaborators from four universities, five government agencies and conservation organizations, and 12 departments and five colleges at CSU. The ecologists, geographers, sociologists, planners, and experts in conservation finance, real estate, and landscape design on the team gave them the breadth of expertise necessary to advance the frontier of Conservation Development.