Katie Foster, a postdoctoral researcher working at the University of Georgia in the Humans and Environmental Change Lab, has spent years examining how environmental governance and policy impacts communities. Her entire career has been shaped by meaningful collaborations across disciplines and sectors, and now she aims to build new partnerships to help others.
After her undergraduate study at Southwestern University, where she studied invasive mollusks in Uruguay, Foster spent time as an environmental educator in the metro Atlanta area. She taught at multiple nonprofits, helping students explore science, history and food systems in a tangible way by spending time in nature.
During this time, she also volunteered with the Sierra Club’s international policy team. This experience is what brought her to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’s (UNFCCC) Conference of the Parties (COPs), annual international conferences focused on climate policy and science.
“That was a really productive time, seeing how these international policies get made. All of the geopolitics that go into it and then how they get implemented, and how a weakness in the law can lead to these backwards reactions,” she laughed, “things that are completely contrary to the purpose of the law.” Foster describes this realization during her time in the nonprofit world as the “aha moment” that drove her to her current research.
Foster then came to the University of Georgia for her PhD in Integrative Conservation and Anthropology, which she completed in 2023. In her current work as a postdoc and social scientist working with the Network for Engineering With Nature (N-EWN), Foster explores risk and equity trade-offs in the implementation of nature-based solutions (NbS). Her newest project will examine four different field sites across the US. “We’re looking at a variety of contexts: flooding, coastal resiliency and sea level rise, droughts and wildfires,” she explained.
Foster’s team is kicking off this research with a case study in Miami, Florida, working with researchers from the University of Miami and University of South Florida to explore questions of sea level rise and flooding. They are also in the beginning stages of exploring similar issues in Charleston, South Carolina, as well as post-wildfire restoration and flash flooding concerns with the Santa Clara Pueblo tribe in New Mexico.
“In doing these case studies, we’re taking a broad approach and looking at the full spectrum of what’s gone right, what’s gone wrong, what are the lessons learned,” Foster explained. “How can we design practices and policies that benefit everyone and are more sustained?” Throughout these case studies, one of the team’s major concerns is thoughtful communication. The overarching goal of the project is to support the existing work happening in each community by collaboratively filling necessary roles and providing helpful information.
Foster described this as an important aspect of her initial work with collaborators in Miami: “Because they’re rooted in that area, and we’re doing this broader scale comparative project, they’re doing more ethnographically rich, in-depth, localized study. So in bringing these two pieces together, we have the opportunity to provide useful resources for each other.”
A listening-and-learning mindset in research isn’t new to this team. During Foster’s doctoral study in Peru, she studied mining conflicts in the Andes Mountains and how the implementation of international laws affected Indigenous communities. Mining companies in this area have a high level of influence in the federal government. Foster learned firsthand how the rural and Indigenous communities of the Andes leveraged this in protecting their lands, showing how this type of policy is implemented and confronted at the national level.
“Ideally, these should be long term relationships. So for my collaborators in Peru, I still go down there,” she said. “This is something that I see as a long term investment of myself in these communities and in these relationships.”
This experience has been foundational to her future research with other communities. The plan for each of the four case studies in the N-EWN project is to spend two weeks at the study location conducting interviews and site visits. Foster explained that ideally, ethnographic research would have a longer timeframe, but that the goal of this project is to support ongoing work and explore how NbS projects can be implemented in a more equitable way.
“We as researchers have a partial ability to enact change, and we can use what we have at our disposal to try to benefit others,” she said. “That is absolutely the purpose.”
Learn more about Foster’s research here. To learn more about the Institute for Resilient Infrastructure Systems, visit iris.uga.edu.
Photos provided by Katie Foster.
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