Crosscuts

Research highlights from the CLEETS Crosscuts team.

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This research thrust aims to develop decision support tools for equitable and just transportation decarbonization, with a focus on integrating community input and addressing environmental issues. The central goal is to create a visual analytics toolkit that will enable communities and policymakers to make informed, evidence-based decisions regarding clean transportation pathways. The toolkit will be designed using participatory and iterative methods to ensure inclusivity, integrating physical infrastructure data (e.g., street networks, census tracts) and multivariate thematic data (e.g., climate simulations, demographics) into easy-to-use visualizations. The tool will empower users to simulate various decarbonization scenarios, analyze potential impacts, and consider how different policies could affect vulnerable communities over time. This effort will help ensure that decarbonization efforts are not only effective but also equitable, addressing both current concerns and future challenges.

The effort will be organized across six key tasks:

• Development of the decision support tool, leveraging existing tools to address environmental issues. This task will integrate data on transportation infrastructure, climate impacts, and demographic information to visualize the consequences of decarbonization policies for different communities.
• Public health and economic impacts of decarbonization, combining air quality data, health metrics, and economic modeling to evaluate both co-benefits and potential risks.
• Examines governance and policy, analyzing how different governance structures and policy instruments can enable or constrain successful decarbonization.
• Addresses data and cybersecurity challenges, creating a framework for securely integrating data from various sources, ensuring privacy, and assessing the vulnerabilities in data exchange protocols in the transportation and energy sectors.
• Complexities of clean energy systems, developing models that capture the dynamics between transportation electrification and energy production to guide the design of resilient and integrated infrastructure.
• Iterative modeling and scenario co-production with local stakeholders, using participatory workshops and decision theatres to refine decarbonization pathways based on local needs, preferences, and technological constraints.

Together, these tasks aim to provide a comprehensive decision support framework for clean transportation decarbonization that incorporates a broad range of perspectives, integrates public health and economic considerations, and supports effective governance and data security measures. The final toolkit will allow stakeholders to assess the impacts of different policies and strategies, ensuring that the decarbonization process is both effective and just for all communities.