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The Strategic Partnership for Alignment of Community Engagement in STEM (SPACES) is a collaborative research effort under the National Science Foundation’s ADVANCE program. The overarching goal of SPACES is to build an inclusive academic culture to address intersectional gender-race-ethnicity inequities in Environmental Engineering (EnvE) via the application of evidence-based strategies for systemic change. The two main thrusts of the project are to address systemic problems that cause: (1) underrepresented minority women faculty (URMWF) experiences of isolation in and/or departures from STEM academia and (2) the devaluation of research conducted by URMWF, especially community-engaged research (CER). SPACES is a collaborative effort of faculty and administrators from 11 universities with four leading professional societies. SPACES is adapting evidence-based practices to support women’s intersectional identities and catalyze an attitudinal change among individuals and institutional leaders. This process involves the pursuit of 12 objectives crossing the micro, meso, and macro levels and is being operationalized through 11 activities. An overview of the motivations for this project and activities to date are provided in the paper. 

Abstract Traditional infrastructure adaptation to extreme weather events (and now climate change) has typically been techno‐centric and heavily grounded in robustness—the capacity to prevent or minimize disruptions via a risk‐based approach that emphasizes control, armoring, and strengthening (e.g., raising the height of levees). However, climate and nonclimate challenges facing infrastructure are not purely technological. Ecological and social systems also warrant consideration to manage issues of overconfidence, inflexibility, interdependence, and resource utilization—among others. As a result, techno‐centric adaptation strategies can result in unwanted tradeoffs, unintended consequences, and underaddressed vulnerabilities. Techno‐centric strategies thatlock‐intoday's infrastructure systems to vulnerable future design, management, and regulatory practices may be particularly problematic by exacerbating these ecological and social issues rather than ameliorating them. Given these challenges, we develop a conceptual model and infrastructure adaptation case studies to argue the following: (1) infrastructure systems are not simply technological and should be understood as complex and interconnected social, ecological, and technological systems (SETSs); (2) infrastructure challenges, like lock‐in, stem from SETS interactions that are often overlooked and underappreciated; (3) framing infrastructure with aSETS lenscan help identify and prevent maladaptive issues like lock‐in; and (4) a SETS lens can also highlight effective infrastructure adaptation strategies that may not traditionally be considered. Ultimately, we find that treating infrastructure as SETS shows promise for increasing the adaptive capacity of infrastructure systems by highlighting how lock‐in and vulnerabilities evolve and how multidisciplinary strategies can be deployed to address these challenges by broadening the options for adaptation.