Climate Resilience Academy Ushers in New Era of Research, Solutions | Spring 2022 | Miami Magazine | University of Miami

THE NEW RESEARCH AND INSTRUCTIONAL HUB IS THE FIRST OF ITS KIND IN UNIVERSITY HISTORY AND OPENS A NEW ERA THAT HIGHLIGHTS ITS ROLE AS A TOP RESEARCH INSTITUTION AND LEADER FOR POSITIVE HEMISPHERIC AND GLOBAL CHANGE. Modeled on the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, the Climate Resilience Academy will help drive studies and solutions to address issues related to climate crisis, sustainability, and resilience.

“The Climate Research Academy will educate the next generation of scientists as we help deliver the solutions to climate change; its impact; and related stressors in partnership with industry, universities, civil society organizations and other stakeholders,” Frenk explains.

“The concept of ‘resilience’ is foundational to the history and mission of the University,” Frenk adds. “Far from just a byword, resilience is first and foremost how our people face the inevitable element of change.”

A generous $5 million commitment from Eric T. Levin, a former University trustee and the former president of the University’s Citizens Board, has propelled the new initiative. The gift is part of the University’s fundraising campaign, Ever Brighter: The Campaign for Our Next Century. The initial phase includes a search for a founding executive director to oversee the academy and a new academic “resilience” elective course to be featured in the fall semester.

“Climate change is the challenge of a lifetime, and here in Miami we sit at the epicenter of the climate challenge,” says Levin. “It’s imperative to get others involved to work collaboratively to tackle these big problems.”

Levin, a financial strategist, investor, and entrepreneur, suggests that many of the projects fostered through the academy will “ultimately become entrepreneurial ventures which will implement business solutions to the stressors of climate change, create more revenue, and become self-sustaining and financially additive to the overall mission of the University.”

Jeffrey Duerk, executive vice president for academic affairs and provost, highlights the academy’s unique design and its timeliness and value for the University and the South Florida community.

“The academy is best described as an interdisciplinary functional structure that will bring together experts both from within the University and others through partnerships and relationships to ensure the necessary expertise to solve challenges that are by their very nature interdisciplinary,” says Duerk.

“If you look across our units, schools, colleges, and programs, there is a consistent theme of being at ground zero for climate change and the impacts of that—from the Rosenstiel School’s incredible expertise in terms of climate change, weather, and hurricanes to the College of Engineering’s expertise in civil engineering and new technologies to the School of Architecture’s knowledge of building environments and so much more,” says Duerk, noting that the expertise and interest crisscross the University like a thread.

“When you stand high enough and look down on the University, this thread is fairly easy to trace throughout in terms of our understanding, appreciation, research, and scholarship on topics related to climate and climate resilience,” Duerk says.

Rodolphe el-Khoury, dean of the School of Architecture, and Sharan Majumdar, professor in the Rosenstiel School’s Department of Atmospheric Sciences, led the planning process that established the foundations of the academy and defined its mission while building a team of collaborators within and beyond the University.

“South Florida is particularly stressed by climate change, and we are a ‘living lab’ even if we don’t want to be,” Majumdar explains. “Building resilience to tackle complex problems such as rising sea levels, changes in weather patterns, and extreme heat need experts across many disciplines to develop a unified, collaborative approach, and the Climate Resilience Academy will do this by bringing together the diverse talents of our students, researchers, and faculty across our schools and colleges,” he adds.

El-Khoury highlights that the academy will help to attract new talent to the University and to identify areas of potential growth and support academic units in mounting searches for joint faculty appointments that defy conventional disciplinary and departmental boundaries.

“Figuratively speaking, the academy is a United Nations for interdisciplinary and interinstitutional efforts, facilitating appointments, brokering deals, mounting big proposals, and shepherding complex projects that break the silos,” el-Khoury says.

David Kelly, academic director of the sustainable business master’s degree program and co-chair of the Sustainable Business Research Cluster in the Miami Herbert Business School, notes the economic benefits the academy’s efforts will yield.

“Companies are increasingly focused on adaptation and resilience to climate change, and the academy will work together with companies and municipalities to ensure that the most evidenced-based adaptation and resilience strategies are implemented,” says Kelly. He reports that the academy will coordinate the use of big data, causal inference, and other advanced statistical techniques to measure the economic impact of resilience funding and thereby guide the most productive investments.

Kelly and Amy Clement, a professor in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the Rosenstiel School, join a cohort of instructors who will teach the first-ever resilience course this fall, a class designed to empower students to become resilient themselves and enable them to spark change in society.

“The academy is part of a national trend where universities are recognizing that there are problems that are immediate and can’t be solved by looking through the lens of any one discipline,” says Clement, who serves on the advisory board for the academy. “Climate is one of those, and Miami is one of those cities where there’s no more delaying with the impacts of climate that are already here.”

Through her research, Clement has interacted extensively with the public sector, nonprofits, and governments.

“Governments, in particular, have been very engaged because they’re the ones being tasked to do something about sea level rise, monitor and understand these trends and technologies better, and generate new designs for infrastructure, among other areas,” she says.

“Those are all things that we could be responsive to at the University if we have the right framework—and that’s where the Climate Resilience Academy comes in,” Clement points out. “The University has an important role in figuring this out because there’s no playbook for it—this is an unprecedented change that we’re experiencing in an unprecedented time.”

Days after the academy’s official launch, the University hosted a Climate Resilience Academy symposium at the Lakeside Village Expo Hall, a green-certified event that symbolized the academy’s interdisciplinary and collaborative focus.

Keynote speaker Jane Gilbert, chief heat officer for Miami-Dade County, highlighted extreme heat as a critical climate change stressor, and 10 teams showcased University Laboratory for Integrative Knowledge (U-LINK) funded projects that propose solutions for climate-related challenges. The projects are the first resilience-related designs destined to progress through the Climate Resilience Academy’s collaborative framework.