Nancy Grimm, senior sustainability scientist and director of CAP LTER, is a member of the Royal Society working group that informed a recent report on climate change resilience. The report advises that communities take steps to prepare for extreme weather events, which are expected to increase in frequency. Recommendations include financial system changes and ecological, ecosystem-based adaptations along with large infrastructure projects.

“We need to make sure that large-scale engineering isn’t making us too complacent,” Grimm said in an article released by the Ecological Society of America. “In the developed world we have been heavily reliant on some key large scale pieces of engineering, which have been pushed to their limits during recent events. By using a combination of engineering and more natural approaches we can make sure that we accept occasional small ‘failures’ while limiting the detrimental impact of a large, catastrophic event.”