Universities Receive AT&T Funding For Climate Change Research

ST. PETERSBURG, FL — Climate change is a hot topic in the Sunshine State, and now the University of South Florida in St. Petersburg and the University of Miami are getting $50,000 each from AT&T to help address the issue.

As part of AT&T’s Climate Resiliency Community Challenge, the two Florida universities are among five in the southeastern U.S. selected to conduct research that will help communities build resiliency to climate change. The schools will use data commissioned by AT&T from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory and funding from AT&T to conduct innovative research on climate impacts and community responses in the southeastern United States.

The University of South Florida project involves the implementation of a multi-modular crowdsourced Community Resiliency Information System in the city of St. Petersburg. CRIS will identify neighborhood-level socioeconomic and biophysical vulnerabilities, which will be combined with crowdsourced data from survey tools embedded in local populations. The system will ensure the participation of diverse communities in decision-making around preparedness, resilience and adaptation.

The University of Miami project will focus on the development of an integrated Climate Risk Assessment for the city of Miami on the scale of individual lots, blocks and neighborhoods. The ICRA is a program of the University of Miami’s Laboratory for INtegrative Knowledge (ULink), which supports innovative interdisciplinary research. The ICRA will enable distinctions among different vectors of vulnerability and risk, including economic, health, food, water, housing, transportation, greenness, and social and cultural dimensions. This will help decision-makers explore different options for climate adaptation and inform resource allocation and policy in a more responsive manner.

The Climate Resiliency Community Challenge is part of AT&T’s Climate Resiliency Project, an industry-leading effort to evaluate and address the risks of climate change.

The universities were selected through an application process that included a review by a panel of nonprofit climate and resiliency experts including Kristiane Huber, Center for Climate and Energy Solutions (C2ES); David Kuhn, World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and Zack Rosenburg, SBP