Austin city climate policies fueled by UT-Austin partnership - KXAN.com
Austin city climate policies fueled by UT partnership
AUSTIN (KXAN) — With temperatures in Austin projected to rise in the future, Austin city officials have sounded the importance of heat safety. Last Tuesday, the city did a presser regarding Heat Safety and much of the information provided was backed by research done by the UT-City Climate Co-Lab.
The Co-lab is a partnership that started in 2023 between the City of Austin and the University of Texas at Austin with support from Planet Texas 2050, a UT interdisciplinary grand challenge. Marc Coudert, the climate resilience and adaptation manager at the office of resilience, is emphatic on having UT’s resources.
“We have the luxury here in Austin to have this fantastic research organization right in our backyard,” Coudert said.
From the UT side, Co-lab Director Dev Niyogi says the partnership solves pitfalls researchers may face when solving real-world problems.
“The problem with academia is that it can’t just come up with a solution and say: use it,” Niyogi said. “It needs to have a conversation that is evolving where you really understand what are the needs of the stakeholder, both from the community as well as from the user community—like the city departments.”
Project Manager of the Co-Lab Alexia Leclercq points out the benefits of having such a partnership helps city officials’ thought process when it comes to climate related policies.
“In the face of the climate crisis, the different city departments really have to adapt and change the way they make decisions,” Leclercq said. “On the city side, (we) work with different departments to understand what types of policies they can put in place.”
One of the researchers within the Co-lab, Manmeet Singh, illustrates how the data he creates can impact Austinites.
“We are able to get the effect of things like shade,” Singh said. “In the in the new near future, we should be able to say—that give the path—which would be the most optimum path to where (can) people walk.”
The city released the Heat Resilience Playbook that draws from the Co-Lab’s research. The playbook outlines actions the city can take to build Heat Resilience for individuals, neighborhoods and environments.
Related Knowledge Center: Climate economics
Climate change is now a driver of the world’s economy. The impact is profound:
- Catastrophic weather events — hurricanes, floods, droughts, high temperatures — are more frequent and more extreme. The cost can be measured in both the initial damage caused and the longer-term impact on the economy.
- Vulnerable communities are increasing climate-related investments, hardening infrastructure and taking other protective measures.
- Investment in carbon capture and storage technologies is increasingly rapidly.
- Governments are making investments and crafting regulations to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
On top of all of this is the cost of uncertainty. As the Fourth National Climate Assessment, released in 2018 by the U.S. Global Change Research Program, says, “The assumption that current and future climate conditions will resemble the recent past is no longer valid.”