OUTREACH

URI Outreach Efforts in Support of Sustainability
February 15, 2002

As a Land Grant, Sea Grant and Urban Grant university, URI has long traditions in community service and outreach. Activities that assist the state, municipalities, schools, and business groups to address the many issues posed by the need for sustainable forms of conservation and development are carried out by individual academic departments and a host of specialized centers and institutes. As a university with extraordinary capabilities in coastal and marine topics, we have been leaders in shaping the nation’s coastal and marine agenda over the past decades. URI has worked with state agencies to establish Rhode Island as a pioneer in developing planning tools and decision-making processes that work to balance the needs and desires of Rhode Islanders to the characteristics of our rich natural endowment. This is an awesome challenge, as Rhode Islanders are the stewards of an inheritance that we must safeguard in order to pass it on to future generations in at least as good condition as we received it– an inheritance including Narragansett Bay, our salt ponds and coastal wetlands, rich fisheries, and a magnificent shoreline graced with some of the best beaches in the Northeast.

URI’s outreach programs have developed successful partnerships with the building industry, the marina industry, and insurance companies (as well as communities through planning, landscape architecture, and other studio/problem-solving classes) to address the impacts of on-site sewage disposal, sewage disposal from recreational vessels, and good practices that can reduce the impacts of major storms on shorefront property. Increasingly, URI’s outreach efforts are directed at helping the state and individual communities assess the impacts of human activities at the scale of ecosystems. This involves the analysis of interactions within watersheds as well as meeting the need for municipalities such as those that share Aquidneck Island to set common goals and determine how best to achieve them. URI faculty serve as consultants to wetland restoration projects and teach community volunteers to assess the quality of the water they drink.

URI’s involvement with the accelerating process of human change to our coastline and watersheds has been the foundation for a successful international program that has been leading long-term initiatives in Latin America, South Asia, and Africa. These international programs work to adapt and refine hard-won lessons from the U.S. and Rhode Island to a wide diversity of contexts in countries where the majority of the population lives in poverty and where the condition of the resource base is directly linked to survival and political stability. URI’s international programs emphasize actions at the community level and use tangible successes at a local scale to motivate supporting policies in national government. URI’s international activities address the same issues that are central to achieving a greater degree of sustainability in Rhode Island: water quality degradation, over-fishing, loss of critical habitats, inappropriate shorefront development, and mounting conflicts between competing user groups. Increasingly what we are learning about how to define and achieve sustainable forms of resource use overseas is helping URI work with its partners to make progress here at home.

 

this link must be here?