Community Resilience Related to Climate: Moving from Research to Application
Wednesday, March 6, Reuter Center, Room 102

4:30 PM to 6:00 PM

Speaker: James Fox (Director, UNC Asheville’s NEMAC)

One of the pillars of the U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit is a process, the Steps to Resilience, which 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 the NEMAC + FernLeaf Collaborative 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.