LSU professor receives grant for climate change study

BATON ROUGE, La. (BRPROUD) — An LSU civil and environmental engineering professor received nearly $10,000 from the National Science Foundation for a project studying sea levels and how they can affect coastal migration.

According to LSU, the $10,000 grant Assistant Professor Sabarethinam Kameshwar received is of a $150,000 grant from the National Science Foundation.

“The main purpose of this planning grant is to develop a bigger research proposal for a $15 million NSF grant that will focus on sea level rise in rural and urban systems,” Kameshwar said. “The reality is these systems are separate but interdependent. How will this synergistic relationship change once climate change and sea level rise force people to move elsewhere? The idea right now is to come up with the research questions and write the full proposal based on that.”

The university said Kameshwar’s research will study communities from Louisiana, Texas and Florida.

“We are losing land and have seen so many strong hurricanes in the last three years, such as Ida and Laura. So, people are feeling it and making decisions on whether or not to leave or stay with adaptions, but what are the problems they face as they do this? Where do they need help the most?” said Kameshwar.

Kameshwar plans to bring social scientists and economists into the project while “thinking outside of the box” to receive the full proposal.

“Anything that we are proposing should not just be an academic exercise,” he said. “People should actually see value in it and adopt it.”