Climate change has contributed to the severity of tropical storms, causing unprecedented coastal erosion and record rates of flooding. Countries around the world are searching for ways to prevent tropical storms from decimating their coastal infrastructure, and the University of Miami has found a tropical solution: coral reefs. Coral reefs can reduce wave energy by up to 97%. However, corals have also suffered from climate change, and are threatened by extinction. Cassie Sturman (@CassieSturman) interviews Diego Lirman and Landolf Rhode-Barbarigos from the University of Miami’s coral reef restoration team who empathize the importance of rescuing coral reefs from climate change. Learn more about the University of Miami's coral restoration program at their website, and find them on Twitter (@rescueareef). You can also follow the Southeast Florida Coral Reef Restoration Hub (@RestorationHub).
Dr. Lelani Mannetti (Twitter @LelaniM) is a postdoctoral researcher at Georgia State University's Urban Studies Institute. Her research focuses on the analysis of social-ecological systems, particularly surrounding adaptive co-governance of complex systems. In this episode, Dr. Yeowon Kim (Twitter @Yeowon__Kim) talks with her about how she became interested in integrating social, ecological, and technological dimensions for urban resilience study and how her work and academic training in South Africa has affected her becoming an interdisciplinary scholar studying urban systems. Furthermore, she features how the Urban Resilience to Extremes Sustainability Research Network’s scenarios team has been adapting their approaches to participatory scenarios development processes during the COVID pandemic, and how she envisions Atlanta’s urban future as a connected and greener city integrating diverse voices of people in the city.
Dr. Marccus Hendricks is an Associate Professor of Urban Studies and Planning in the School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at the University of Maryland, College Park. Here, Marissa Matsler interviews Dr. Hendricks about his work with communities throughout his dissertation research in Texas and as an early career researcher in Maryland. He discusses his bold visions for the future in which we collectively seize on the opportunities of this historic moment – especially the current focus on environmental justice – to better design and plan cities. Dr. Hendricks also offers his advice to others looking to follow in his academic footsteps. You can read more at arch.umd.edu/sirj and follow Dr. Hendricks on Twitter at @mdhDuBois. You can read his recent piece, Transforming Public Safety and Urban Infrastructure to Mitigate Climate and Public Health Disasters, here.
Host Jason Sauer (PhD candidate, ASU) talks with researcher Heidy Correa (Master of Science, Universidad Austral de Chile) about a grassroots community organization in Valdivia, Chile, that was instrumental in the spread of a wetland conservation ethos across the city. Counter to the work that we often highlight in this podcast, this wetland conservation effort started with a single person and spread upward to academics and politicians through the dedication and hard work of this community, rather than starting with experts or specialists at the top and moving downward. We also talk about “natural heritage,” the importance of the “green commons,” and how “commoning” can be used to articulate and make legitimate the ways in which individuals and communities value their environment and identity.
If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, e-mail us at futurecitiespodcast@gmail.com or find us on Twitter @FutureCitiesPod. Learn more about the Urban Resilience to Extremes Sustainability Research Network (UREx SRN) at www.sustainability.asu.edu/urbanresilience.
Dr. J. Marshall Shepherd (Instagram @marsh4fsu, Twitter @DrShepherd2013) is a distinguished meteorologist, professor, writer, podcaster… and that only begins to share all his accomplishments! Here he chats with Robert Lloyd about science communication, the intersections of climate and social equity, the COVID-19 pandemic, and more. To learn more about Dr. Shepherd, you can visit his personal website or the University of Georgia's Department of Geography website.
The Hudson River flows from the alpine peaks of New York State’s Adirondack Mountains to the harbor of New York City. Its tidal valley includes diverse suburban communities and post-industrial cities that will face new challenges from sea level rise and amplified storms as climate changes over the next few decades. In this episode, George Scott interviews Dr. Klaus H. Jacob, an expert in disaster risk at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, (@LamontEarth), Ryan Palmer, the Director of the Sarah Lawrence College Center for the Urban River at Beczak (@slccurb/@sarahlawrence), and Jessica Kuonen, the Hudson Estuary Resilience Specialist at New York Sea Grant (@nyseagrant) to learn more about how these communities are planning to enhance their resilience to climate-related coastal threats.
Host Jason Sauer (PhD candidate, ASU) talks with researcher Heidy Correa (Master of Science, Universidad Austral de Chile) about a grassroots community organization in Valdivia, Chile, that was instrumental in the spread of a wetland conservation ethos across the city. Counter to the work that we often highlight in this podcast, this wetland conservation effort started with a single person and spread upward to academics and politicians through the dedication and hard work of this community, rather than starting with experts or specialists at the top and moving downward. We also talk about “natural heritage,” the importance of the “green commons,” and how “commoning” can be used to articulate and make legitimate the ways in which individuals and communities value their environment and identity.
The UREx SRN recently supported a pinnacle webinar that profiled two UREx-derived research projects focused on building practitioner resilience. 500 participants attended the day-of event and at least as many will watch the webinar in the archive. UREx SRN member Joyce Coffee partnered with the Innovation Network for Communities on both research projects (Total project amount for the entire team and both reports: $50,000 funded by the Summit Foundation).
These strategies amount to an initial approach for deciding who will pay what and how city governments will generate the needed revenue. Our analysis is based on a close look at how eight US cities in seven states have been organizing the funding needed to implement their ambitious climate-resilience plans. They are among a small number of cities that have gotten this far.
Each of these cities has had to find its own way to public and private financial resources, because there is no system in place for solving the problem of how to pay for climate resilience—no cost-sharing arrangements, for instance, for resilience infrastructure across local, state, and federal levels of government. The cities are involuntary pioneers faced with growing climate hazards and exposure that require more money for resilience. Examining these cities’ pathways revealed common strategies that, while only reflecting the leading-edge of urban climate-resilience financing practices, quite likely foreshadow what other cities already or may do.
This report presents recommendations for how state governments can develop climate-resilience financial systems that help local communities invest in protecting residents, businesses, public infrastructure, private property, and natural resources from climate-driven stresses and shocks. To help states consider and act on the recommendations, we developed a State Climate Resilience Action Checklist that identifies the essential actions that states need to take to build a comprehensive approach to resilience, including a financial system. By “financial system” for states we mean a set of aligned state actions that fund and finance climate-resilience investment, revenue-generating mechanisms for shifting existing revenue or generating new revenue for resilience building, provision of basic state services related to climate resilience, and the administration of federal funding flows that can be used for resilience purposes. Taken together, these support local communities in developing the capacities and actions they need to strengthen their climate resilience in the short- and long-term.
New Orleans, Louisiana faces ecological challenges, but also social challenges in learning to adapt to climate change and to adopt new water management techniques. The existing stormwater infrastructure isn’t cutting it, but new methods have been slow to be implemented. Robert Lloyd (@RL_Grey) discusses why, then interviews Jessica Dandridge, Executive Director of the Water Collaborative, who is one of the people helping to move the Big Easy into a more sustainable and resilient future.
The UREx SRN's Scenarios Working Group and each city team have worked tirelessly to create participatory visions of the future for each network city over the past several years. Now that we have rich databases of visions and preferred strategies for each city, the next step is to communicate and promote these visions to catalyze sustainability transitions. This is what several members of the San Juan City Team set out to do in August 2019.
For more than a year, several San Juan City Team members have been working together to design a platform to share the entire collection of scenario visions, narratives, strategies, and timelines for San Juan 2080 in a visual, engaging, and interactive tool. We also wanted to enrich this platform with background knowledge, a diversity of resources, and relevant case studies from other cities to make them more useful. For instance, to connect local stakeholders with the knowledge and financial resources to actually implement some of the strategies.
We used ArcGIS Story Maps as our platform to present these syntheses. The platform includes syntheses for each of the three flood scenarios (coastal floods, riverine floods, and urban floods) as well as the three transformative visions (Connected Municipality, Food and Energy Security, and Just and Livable City) developed during the UREx San Juan 2080 scenario workshops.
We are very excited to share the final version of this platform: Visiones de Ciudad - San Juan 2080. For those who are unfamiliar with the UREx Scenario Workshop process and/or outputs, we have created a landing page ("Inicio") that provides context for this collection of syntheses. We invite you to view the Story Map and share it with anyone who you think would be interested. Please note that it is in Spanish.
This platform is an example of one possible method for mobilizing each city's Scenario Workshop data within their communities, and it will ideally serve as an example for other UREx cities to create similar tools – increasing the knowledge uptake of the many invaluable resources co-produced by the UREx over the past five years.
This project could not have been possible without the gracious support of two NSF INTERN Supplement Awards provided to Robert Hobbins over the past year.
Pedestrian deaths in the United States have risen by 50% since 2009, with over 6,000 pedestrians dying in 2018 alone. In this month's episode, Stephen Elser (@stephen_elser) talks with our guest, Angie Schmitt (@schmangee), about her recent book addressing some of the factors that have led to this silent epidemic. She explains how marginalized groups tend to be most vulnerable to traffic violence and how systemic racism keeps these communities in dangerous situations. She tells us how design principles in our cities have totally changed over time from being pedestrian-focused to being car-focused, and what that means for pedestrian safety. They also discuss what role autonomous vehicles play in current and future conditions on our streets and how the cars we drive affect pedestrian safety.
Roughly 1.6 billion people across the world live in inadequate, unsafe, and overcrowded shelter. In this episode, Stephen Elser (@stephen_elser) interviews Alan Marcus, the Chief Digital Strategy Officer of Planet Smart City, about what his company is doing to address the global housing crisis by building smart and affordable communities across the world. For Planet Smart City, "smart" is all about thinking in terms of services and how people engage at the community level. By optimizing their use of space, they are able to create more communal areas and other amenities while keeping costs down. We also learn about their process of building trust with the communities where they build, how they incorporate knowledge about climate change, and some details about some of their new developments in Brazil.
Green infrastructure is a unifying theme across the UREx SRN network cities, given its potential for stormwater management along with other benefits like heat mitigation and aesthetic improvements. Green infrastructure implementation is in various stages in our networks cities, and in Syracuse UREx SRN Mentor, Cliff Davidson has worked to integrate an ecological-technological solution through the green roof on the Convention Center in downtown Syracuse.
The Syracuse Convention Center green roof is over 60,000 square feet. The roof underwent a retrofit in 2011, when the green roof was added, and an extensive network of monitoring equipment allows for a plethora of data. Some examples of the data available is rainfall, rooftop runoff, soil moisture, windspeed, temperature through each layer of the roof. Undergraduate and graduate students have utilized this data for their research on the green roof since its construction in areas such as chemistry, energy, and hydrology. The green roof is built on top of a traditionally constructed roof, with a sheet drain, 3” of engineered growth medium, and the vegetation above it. There are five different species of sedum on the roof as shown in the illustration below by UREx SRN graduate student, Courtney Gammon.Courtney was a recipient of the 2020 summer UREx graduate grant, and her current research revolves around using the software HYDRUS-1D to model flow through the OnCenter green roof. Extensive inputs for the green roof are required for modeling, many of which are available through historic and real-time datasets from the green roof’s monitoring network. Other inputs are from mathematical exploration and additional student research. UREx SRN Research Experience for Undergraduate (REU) student, Anna Wojcik’s research on Leaf Area Index will be included in the data sets for modeling. If the model is successful it can be used to predict performance of the roof in future weather events, or to examine how similar roofs with function in locations with varied climate.
Additionally, the OnCenter green roof is being used as a tool for middle school education in New York schools to combat climate change. As part of the UREx SRN REU summer program, Libby Cultra is working with Cliff Davidson and graduate student Courtney Gammon to create a lesson plan using this green roof. The lesson plan utilizes activities, stories, experiments, and figures to teach 7th through 9th graders about green infrastructure in an improved and modern way. The unit is based on the Next Generation Science Standards, which are new STEM guidelines for K-12 students. A NGSS style lesson plan includes important, core subjects (Life, Earth, Physical Science, etc.) that are necessary for science education. Each unit or lesson plan achieves learning goals and follows coded standards made specifically for NGSS. Most importantly, problem-solving and modeling, which are connected to engineering practices, are also a key part of the NGSS learning experience.
Libby’s lesson plans, made for five 50 minute class periods, teach kids about the water cycle, carbon cycle, plant anatomy, natural hazards, ecosystems, and green roof benefits. Ecological cycles like the water and carbon cycle are amazing observable phenomena that continually occur on Earth, with plant life on a green roof playing a big role. Hands-on learning using real data will show students measurable benefits of green infrastructure. For example, the OnCenter green roof collects excess rainwater that could potentially cause flooding in cities. Students get to see the water cycle in action through live graphs of runoff, precipitation, and temperature. Data is collected every five minutes. Using this data, students will also learn about soil saturation and where water travels after it reaches the ground.
Activities and interactive stories throughout the lesson guide both teachers and students, making it easy to navigate through each lesson. Figures drawn by the Syracuse research team were made for easy comprehension by the students. Two examples are our water cycle and food pyramid diagrams (shown below).
This project is currently being reviewed by New York State Master Teachers. Eventually, we hope to distribute the completed plan to schools in the area and in an online format to promote sustainability to future generations.
Sustainability scientist Mikhail Chester is interviewed in the August 8 Washington Post article, Why climate change is about to make your bad commute worse. According to the article, while most motorists are familiar with many reasons for bad traffic, such as construction, inadequate mass transit and crashes, a culprit that must increasingly be considered is climate change.
"We need to fundamentally reassess what our systems need to be able to deliver, and under what conditions," said Mikhail Chester, associate professor of civil, environmental and sustainable engineering at Arizona State University and co-leader of the Urban Resilience to Extremes Sustainability Research Network. "And those conditions, it looks like, are going to be changing faster and faster in the future."
"Climate change is an additional stressor on already taxed infrastructure," Chester said. The situation’s silver lining, he added, is consensus: "Everyone is in agreement that we should do something about infrastructure."
There are many ways to refer to nature in cities: urban green space, nature-based solutions, green infrastructure… But which name is best? Does it really even matter what names we used to describe urban nature? In this episode, Stephen Elser (@stephen_elser) interviews Dr. Dan Childers (director of @caplter) about some of the issues with various terms to describe urban nature, and a relatively new term that he prefers: urban ecological infrastructure. Then, we hear from Jason Sauer (@JasonRSauer) about a term he uses to describe his own study system: "heritage" wetlands. Learn how the words we use can change our research approaches and the perspectives that we adopt. Find Dr. Childers' paper on urban ecological infrastructure here (https://www.elementascience.org/artic...), and listen to his previous appearance on our show with a conversation about urban ecology here: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSRdT...). Also, listen to the episode that Stephen and Jason made about Valdivia's urban wetlands, y tambien en español.
If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, e-mail us at futurecitiespodcast@gmail.com or find us on Twitter @FutureCitiesPod. Learn more about the Urban Resilience to Extremes Sustainability Research Network (UREx SRN) at www.sustainability.asu.edu/urbanresilience.
A new paper in Sustainability Science finds that the use of alternative water supplies, such as rainwater harvesting and greywater use, could offset up to 30 percent of total outdoor water demand for the Phoenix Metropolitan Area under modest implantation of these policies.
The paper, Simulating alternative sustainable water futures, is the work of sustainability scientists David Sampson and Nancy Grimm, sustainability fellow David Iwaniac, UREX affiliate Elizabeth Cook and CAP LTER affiliate Melissa Davidson. The authors adapted ASU’s WaterSim tool to explore differences in water demand and supply, as influenced by runoff, rainfall, changes in land use and land cover, population growth and improvements in water use efficiency.
Dr. Elsa Anderson stops by the show to talk with us about vacant lots and urban biodiversity, or how urban areas can provide spaces for many species of plants and animals. Dr. Anderson has worked on plant diversity in cities as diverse as Chicago, Illinois and Berlin, Germany. Her recent publications explore how different management strategies of vacant lots in cities, actions as simple as mowing or installing fences, or as complex as erecting a wall to divide two political philosophies, can impact plant communities for years to come. Find her on Twitter at @ElsaAnderson16 and Instagram @elsaa1016.
If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, e-mail us at futurecitiespodcast@gmail.com or find us on Twitter @FutureCitiesPod. Learn more about the Urban Resilience to Extremes Sustainability Research Network (UREx SRN) at www.sustainability.asu.edu/urbanresilience.
With the current climate crisis comes the realization that infrastructure built on climate models of the past is no longer sufficient for weather events today. The concept of stationarity will need to give way to more flexible and adaptable engineering approaches that embrace deep uncertainty. In the Vice News article Our Infrastructure is Being Built for a Climate That's Already Gone examples of failed infrastructure are illustrated.
In today’s rapidly evolving climate, and amid unprecedented technological disruptions, engineers and designers seek infrastructure solutions that are resilient to both known and unknown future conditions. This podcast explores the use of biomimicry to provide examples and guidance for resilient infrastructure systems, spanning theory and practice. We evaluate opportunities for improving design, prompted through consideration of Life’s Principles. Collaborators (in order of appearance): Alysha Helmrich, Dr. Samuel Markolf, Dr. Nancy Grimm, Dr. Mikhail Chester, Dr. Cheryl Desha, and Dr. Samantha Hayes.
If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, e-mail us at futurecitiespodcast@gmail.com or find us on Twitter @FutureCitiesPod. Learn more about the Urban Resilience to Extremes Sustainability Research Network (UREx SRN) at www.sustainability.asu.edu/urbanresilience.
Cities are at the center of the COVID-19 pandemic, but what happens in cities once a pandemic takes hold? What systems are failing? Are cities prepared to simultaneously deal with this pandemic and extreme weather events like hurricanes and heat waves? Can we ever return to any semblance of "normal" and if not, how can we transform to create more positive futures? Today, we hear from a group of experts as they reflect on what the COVID-19 pandemics means for our public health systems, critical infrastructure, the research being done in cities, and ultimately – urban resilience. Our guests were Dr. David Eisenman (@deisenman), Dr. Timon McPhearson (@timonmcphearson), Dr. Mike Chester (@mikhailchester), and Dr. Nancy Grimm (@DrNitrogen). Alysha Helmrich and Dr. Bernice Rosensweig (@brr_nyc) conducted two of our interviews for this episode. Our host, Stephen Elser (@stephen_elser) wrote a haiku based on the conversations in this episode:
COVID changed the game. We must transform our cities And build back better
If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, e-mail us at futurecitiespodcast@gmail.com or find us on Twitter @FutureCitiesPod. Learn more about the Urban Resilience to Extremes Sustainability Research Network (UREx SRN) at www.sustainability.asu.edu/urbanresilience.
Climate change has contributed to the severity of tropical storms, causing unprecedented coastal erosion and record rates of flooding. Countries around the world are searching for ways to prevent tropical storms from decimating their coastal infrastructure, and the University of Miami has found a tropical solution: coral reefs. Coral reefs can reduce wave energy by up to 97%. However, corals have also suffered from climate change, and are threatened by extinction. Cassie Sturman (@CassieSturman) interviews Diego Lirman and Landolf Rhode-Barbarigos from the University of Miami’s coral reef restoration team who empathize the importance of rescuing coral reefs from climate change. Learn more about the University of Miami's coral restoration program at their website, and find them on Twitter (@rescueareef). You can also follow the Southeast Florida Coral Reef Restoration Hub (@RestorationHub).
