Jim Fox to Discuss Community Resilience at OLLI on March 6
Jim Fox, NEMAC’s Director, will present a talk entitled Community Resilience Related to Climate: Moving from Research to Application on Wednesday, March 6, 2019, from 4:30–6:00 PM in Room 102 at UNC Asheville’s Reuter Center. The talk is part of the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI)’s Interdisciplinary STEM Seminar Series.
One of the pillars of the U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit is a process—the Steps to Resilience—that emphasizes a sequence of procedures and actions for local decision making. The process includes inventorying assets and their associated climate-related hazards; conducting exposure, vulnerability, and risk analyses; examining options to build resilience; and prioritizing climate adaptation decisions and investments prior to taking action. Although the steps are complex and may take months/years to do by hand, we have formed a public/private partnership and created a local small business to provide this service.
The work involves many aspects of STEM, including climate science, computer programming technology, process engineering, and the mathematics of analytics. The presentation will include examples about how communities nationwide are using the products and process from NEMAC+FernLeaf to be building community resilience. Join us to see how UNC Asheville’s NEMAC (National Environmental Modeling and Analysis Center) is working with FernLeaf Interactive to create local jobs and a rapidly growing enterprise here in Asheville.
Karin Rogers and Matt Hutchins to Speak at NCA4 Panel on February 21
The Collider will host the second in its two-part panel series focusing on the Fourth National Climate Assessment on Thursday, February 21, from 4:30 to 6:00 p.m. NEMAC’s Karin Rogers and Matt Huchins will join Tom Maycock, science public information officer with the North Carolina Institute for Climate Studies, and Jess Laggis, the Farmland Protection Director for the Southern Appalachian Highlands Conservancy, to identify some of the impacts climate change is having on cities and highlight the importance of conservancy in creating and maintaining climate resilience. For more information, see the press release published in the Mountain Xpress.