Extreme Weather Adaptation Lab - Projects

This project quantifies the effectiveness of a range of hard and soft infrastructure interventions for flood adaptation in metropolitan and micropolitan areas to appraise the value of citizen’s actions, networks, and the information within those networks to foster resilience together with traditional hard infrastructure.

This project capitalizes on the latest climate simulations to assess the potential effectiveness of current climate adaptation capabilities to deliver resilience in the next three decades, spatially estimating which communities are likely to benefit the most, and which ones will require novel approaches to adapt.

This project explores what is driving communities to participate or not in flood planning programs in counties across the United States.

This project explores the adaptation of Machine Learning architectures for flood planning that can embed ecocentric and  indigenous worldviews and tribal needs in the assessment of flood mitigation interventions to enable an evaluation that speaks to a range of values and needs; and to allow the identification of potential shortcomings of the existing programs that may be ill suited to promote resilience on the ground.

This project uses a global sample of urban adaptation strategies to examine how are cities defining and identifying exposure to extreme weather, and how are the drivers to such exposure to heat, flood, wildfire and other extreme weather events being addressed through planning and policy.

This project capitalizes on machine learning techniques to re-examine climate-risk indicators validated by testing which factors best predict real-world hazard exposure and to test the relevance of variables not traditionally found in climate vulnerability indexes.

This project uses Q methodology to map the different ways residents understand—and are constrained by—the barriers to reducing heat exposure during prolonged heat waves. By combining participant-ranked statements with follow-up interviews, we identify distinct “shared perspectives” on what prevents people from staying safe, such as housing conditions, costs, limited cooling access, mobility, work and school demands, health needs, and trust in public information.

This project examines how the recognition of the rights of natural entities (such as rivers, wetlands, forests, and ecosystems) and the adoption of ecocentric policies are reshaping the way cities plan and implement climate adaptation. It explores how these approaches shift governance from treating nature as infrastructure or property toward seeing it as a rights-bearing stakeholder—changing what cities prioritize, how they define “risk,” how they innovate towards more holistic solutions, and who is represented in decision-making.