Sustainability suffers from a problem of ownership: who’s responsible for the state of our planet today? Can we really say that all the blame falls on the companies extracting oil and gas? Does the car owner, shipping company, gas station owner, leasing company, city or state have a share of that blame too?

These are difficult questions to consider in a polarized environment where counter-arguments can be more easily dismissed despite their potential value in solving the problem at hand. It seems easier to dig in on one side of the climate change debate, place blame on a single industry, and move on.

Instead, Urban Offsets has focused on the premise that carbon emissions can have up-side value to companies, municipalities, and universities if they take ownership of those emissions together. We have found that every ton of emissions today has multiple parties involved in its creation, processing, and ultimately in its release to the atmosphere. We have also found that bringing the entities responsible for these shared emissions together to solve them can have multiplicative advantages to the carbon market itself (additional trust and investment), the communities around the buyer (particularly U.S. cities), and their bottom lines as well. We will present evidence of the advantages provided by solving emissions overlap using two case studies of two Fortune 500 companies, two universities, and two separate communities. We will describe the goals of each project, the process involved in communicating value to each party, the results of the programs, and our vision for the future.

Ultimately, these case studies provide evidence that Regional Sustainability Markets address emissions overlap and create multiplicative additive benefits to our environment, our cities, our communities, and our customer’s bottom lines.

Cities and business organizations are increasingly seeking more innovative approaches and technology to implement resilient solutions for dealing with impacts from a changing and variable climate. UNC Asheville’s NEMAC has spent nearly a decade focusing on the technology transfer of state-of-the-art decision-making tools designed to help local planners and other stakeholders become more informed— and make better decisions that can lead to an increase in resilience for their community or organization.

To better facilitate this technology transfer, NEMAC and its spinoff, FernLeaf Interactive, have formed a public-private partnership and are collaborating with NOAA’s Climate Program Office to make federal climate science and other related data more localized, meaningful, and affordable through developing such tools as the U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit and the Climate Explorer.

Recognizing that many communities already have the needed foundational data and basic technology to explore their own climate-related threats and exposure to hazards, the NEMAC-FernLeaf Collaborative developed AccelAdapt — a web application that automates the analyses required in a quantified climate vulnerability assessment. Through a partnership with Esri, the global leader in spatial science technology, local governments and other organizations can integrate AccelAdapt and receive continuous updates to these and other assessments.

This presentation will highlight the development of the NEMAC-FernLeaf Interactive public-private partnership and describe how the team collaborates on building innovative technological climate resilience solutions and tools, and show how these tools are being used by communities and other organizations.

The idiom “water under the bridge” refers to something that has happened, and nothing can be changed. However, “water over the bridge” is the likely physical outcome of sea-level rise and an increase in storm severity along coastlines and especially in port cities. It is also an urgent call to action to improve and speed our collaborative planning processes and implementation of environmentally- sustainable waterborne transportation solutions for freight. This presentation offers a regional perspective on the technological innovations and regional port partnerships that will be needed in the southeast to enable more resilient freight movement during disasters as well as plan for long term shipping infrastructure using innovative technology.

Moving people and the things they need and want is at the nexus of water, food, climate, and energy issues. The use of efficient multi-modal water and rail transportation is critical in reducing the amount of energy to move freight. However, marine and rail transportation infrastructure and corridors will be especially impacted by climate change as they are - by definition - located near the water’s edge. Sea- level rise, severe precipitation events, and the increased frequency and severity of hurricanes threaten short term shipping capacity and the long-run usability of port and community infrastructure.

Port and rail infrastructure includes bridges, tunnels, canals, pipelines, river ways, and roads for trucks and rail cars from resource and production locations to final users with countless seaside and inland ports all along the supply chain. This same freight transportation infrastructure can also present significant physical barriers for the movement of people in port cities. However, the choice and location of infrastructure investment can dramatically increase — or decrease — the potential for human disaster during severe weather events.

Given the long-life cycle of water and rail shipping assets, the ports will need to move inland, be protected by extensive hard and soft barriers, and, most importantly, utilize innovative technology that is adaptable to specific ports to meet the physical challenges of climate change.

Plans to deepen harbors, widen shipping channels, and raise bridges and other corridors to enable larger vessels, longer trains, and increased capacity access to marine freight terminals can also threaten drinking water quantity and quality – especially as coastal populations increase. This risk is compounded by the potential negative impact on food harvesting in both soil and water environments surrounding ports due to increased waterborne freight transport. Innovative partnerships within port communities will be essential to meeting these challenges.

Finally, the frequent role of bodies of water in creating political boundaries at the state and regional levels further complicates the process of implementing best practice port city solutions. Multi-jurisdictional collaboration is essential to building resilient communities, but the presence and power of water borders often make cooperation even more difficult. Innovative economic partnerships will be necessary to address “water over the bridges” of the southeastern US.

As part of the Department of State U.S.-India Partnership for Climate Resilience (PCR), scientists from NOAA NCEI, CICS-NC, and Texas Tech University (TTU) held a series of workshops across northern and southern India in 2017 and 2018 on high resolution climate modeling activities. Expert scientists from TTU, NCSU, and IITM presented state-of-the-art climate downscaling techniques using the ARRM method, NASA NEX climate products, CORDEX-South Asia and analysis tools for resilience planning and sustainable development. PCR collaborators in attendance included India State Action Planners, researchers, solution providers and NGO including the WRI Partnership for Resilience and Preparedness (PREP), and The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI). The scientific techniques were provided to workshop participants in a software package written in R by TTU scientists and several sessions were devoted to hands-on experience with the software package.

The overall partnership and the workshop case studies represent an example of international adaptation and resilience activities that can be meaningful to applications in the Carolinas. The examined case studies on the use of downscaled climate data for decision making in a range of sectors, including human health, agriculture, water resources management and the India State Action Plans can provide meaningful lessons to similar activities for the Carolinas. This talk will discuss key outcomes and lessons learned as well as provide opportunities of the Carolinas case studies to be further applied in future workshops to be held in India.