WHAT WE DO
The climate and water problems we face today — sea-level rise, dead zones, coastal land loss and equitable access to environmentally safe spaces — are the cholera and malaria of the 21st century. But conventional science moves too slowly and at too small a scale to address these problems adequately. The ByWater Institute works across disciplines and with and within a network of community, civic, governmental and academic partners to advance convergence research and community engagement initiatives that tackle these challenges head-on. 

Our vision of Thriving ByWater encompasses three pillars:

• Designing Our Future ByWater: We help people achieve better water futures through adaptive designs of neighborhoods, landscapes and technologies that include nature as a tool for achieving those futures. 

  • We collaboratively design “engineered nature” as a tool for improving the outcomes of water infrastructure.

  • We integrate and operate natural assets in coordination with existing built infrastructure – from neighborhood to watershed.

  • We partner to invent nature-based technologies that connect waste, wastewater, shipping and commerce to create hydrogen as clean fuel.

• Sharing Our Future ByWater: We help share the benefits of a Future ByWater through participatory research that embraces inclusion and equity.

  • Our scholarship seeks to improve access to safe living spaces, drinking water and sanitation, especially in rural communities.

  • We conduct participatory research that leads to solutions that are co-produced and co-owned by inclusive stakeholder groups.

  • We partner to speed translation of our scholarship into projects that allow us to test solution design and quickly scale the successes our experiments find.

• Growing Our Future ByWater: We help sustain the growth of healthy river and coastal ecosystems and their embedded economies and communities. 

  • We improve the science connecting climate change and individual quality of life through collaboration across medicine and climate science.

  • We communicate health-climate change interactions as a way to motivate communities to embrace climate action.

Our scientists use New Orleans, our coastline and the Mississippi River Basin as a testbed for developing adapation and intervention strategies that can be replicated in coastal communities and river basins worldwide. We call this approach clinical trials for planetary health — experimental interventions with nature at appropriate scales that, when compared with controls, lead us quickly to solutions that can scale across the whole basin. 

Art is a critical part of Thriving ByWater. At the intersection of arts and the environment, our team at A Studio in the Woods hosts residencies for artists and scholars on land that is on the front lines of climate change. Studio programming focuses on creative responses to our lives by water, the climate crisis and the social issues affecting coastal communities. Studio supports the arts and humanities both as an innovative means of science/environmental communication and as a catalyst for new visions and solutions.

WHY NOW AND WHY TULANE 
In New Orleans, a city prone to floods and hurricanes, water is omnipresent; the health of the water and the health of the city are inextricably linked. And no university has deeper personal and geographic ties to the river than Tulane. We are perfectly positioned for building a center of research excellence on water-related scholarship—and translating this scholarship into positive change. 

As New Orleans and other coastal communities face environmental change, sea level rise and evolving natural and technological hazards, planning for greater resilience and adaptability has taken on an ever-more-pressing sense of urgency. With our future at stake, success cannot be left to chance. We are at an inflection point, and the work we are doing at the ByWater Institute is vital to the existence of New Orleans. 

The Bywater Institute leverages Tulane’s unique location and academic strengths to translate scholarship into solutions, and to do the work that matters, in time for it to matter. The institute will establish Tulane as a local, national and international leader for how scholarship can address climate and water-related challenges.

Water is a priority at Tulane’s highest levels, which is extremely rare in American higher education, according to Professor Sabo. In fact, the university’s energy, expertise and commitment to water research and solutions are some of the reasons that he accepted the position at the ByWater Institute.