Steven J. Green
School of International
& Public Affairs

Vulnerability, Resiliency, and Civic Engagement on Climate Change

Emily Eisenhauer, a Ph. D student in Global and Sociocultural Studies and research assistant for the Miami ULTRA-Ex project, has been working with vulnerable populations to develop community-based strategies for engaging and shaping climate change discourse and climate change adaptation plans. Committed to an ethic of social justice, Emily and the ULTRA team recognize climate change as an opportunity to advocate for new equitable and democratic futures by bringing the potential social impacts into the purview of policy makers, urban planners, and government officials.

Click here to view the comments she sent to the South Florida Regional Climate Change Compact regarding their Adaptation Plan Draft.

Working with the county task force

Hugh Gladwin, as an appointee to the Miami-Dade County Climate Change Advisory Task Force MDCCATF, has participated in meetings and observed how the task force has grappled with issues of climate change evidence, sea-level rise thresholds, and is now working on land use change planning.

Bringing the climate change conversation to the classroom

We have launched a collaboration with the Miami-Dade School System to mobilize teachers to bring socio-ecological science into practice in the classroom. In 2008, collaborator Catherine Laroche participated in an NSF supported Information Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers (iTEST) program called Coastlines, where she was trained in GIS and began implementing GIS activities in her classroom, in collaboration with the Land Stewardship working group. Catherine Laroche is now involved in creating three new teaching modules. The first will use exploratory questions to guide students in developing a standardized method for quantifying canopy cover within an area, using data produced by the working group. They will then be introduced to census block data to explore reasons for the differences in tree canopy between communities. The second will develop an environmental cost value for each tree using an algorithm similar to one currently being used at Baltimore Ecosystem Study LTER (BES). Next students will use the data in a GIS project that will map tree canopy data and the cost value for each tree to demonstrate the impact that trees have in their neighborhoods. The third module will address population growth in South Florida beginning with an activity that examines past aerial photographs of neighborhoods. Using the cost values from the second module, students will predict how changes in tree canopy could affect those neighborhoods and test those predictions in a comparison of census block data and current aerial photographs. The conclusion of this module will discuss the results of their findings and report any environmental injustices that may exist.