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UREx Sustainability Research Network

UREx Sustainability Research Network

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UREx Book Launch: Resilient Urban Futures

A roundtable discussion and launch of Resilient Urban Futures, a new book exploring the ways in which cities are profoundly impacted by climate change, and strategies for cultivating more resilient futures. Based on practical experience in participatory visioning in nine Latin American and U.S. cities, the volume provides tools for engaging urban communities in resilience strategies. Authors of this open access volume discuss urban climate inequity, modeling and communicating the impact of extreme climate and weather, as well as visioning equitable, positive, and resilient futures.

The Urban Resilience to Extremes Sustainability Research Network (UREx SRN) focuses on integrating social, ecological, and technical systems to devise, analyze, and support urban infrastructure decisions in the face of climatic uncertainty.

Working with an initial 9 UREx network cities — six continental U.S. and three Latin American, home to over 35 million residents – and ultimately an expanded network of cities, we aim to co-create a novel set of decision-support tools that confront these resiliency challenges and put cities on a path to sustainable futures.

The UREx SRN is hiring staff, postdoctoral fellows, graduate fellows and undergraduate students across the network. Watch this space for opportunities.

Challenges & Solutions

The Urban Resilience to Extremes Sustainability Research Network (UREx SRN) focuses on integrating social, ecological, and technical systems to devise, analyze, and support urban infrastructure decisions in the face of climatic uncertainty.

Climate change is widely considered to be one of the biggest challenges to global sustainability. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, extreme events are likely to increase in frequency. Weather-related extreme events are the most immediate way that people experience climate change and urban areas are particularly vulnerable to such events, given their location, concentration of people, and increasingly complex and interdependent infrastructures.

The current infrastructure of urban areas is aging and proving inadequate for protecting city populations. Infrastructure must be resilient, provide ecosystem services, improve social well-being, and exploit new technologies in ways that benefit all segments of urban populations and are appropriate to the particular urban context.