climate

The field of urban planning is gaining interest as cities around the world, including nearby Houston, are facing increased exposure to weather-related risks and hazards ranging from sea level rise and flooding to temperature build-up and urban heat island effect.

In the nation’s capital, congressional staff and professional meterologists heard Phil Berke, professor of urban planning, present research-based strategies aimed at heightening communities’ ability to withstand and recover from natural disasters.

Municipalities are more responsive to natural disaster plans that focus on a single threat, such as flooding, than they are to comprehensive resiliency strategies, according to a study evaluating how U.S. cities are adapting to the impacts of climate change.

As tens of thousands of Texans undergo a long, difficult recovery from Hurricane Harvey, numerous faculty and students initiatives at Texas A&M University are helping individuals and communities learn how to emerge from the damage and mitigate the effects of future disasters.

Houston's growth has created a city at risk to devastating floods, said Sam Brody, a flood impact expert and professor of urban planning at Texas A&M, in a June 16, 2017 article in The Guardian, where he said “it’s not if, but when” a natural disaster will strike the metropolis.

In the first comprehensive architectural history of McMurdo Station, a research facility located in Antarctica, former Ph.D. student Georgina Davis traces the station’s days from its founding in 1957 as a temporary military field camp to a modern, if spartan, hub for scientists.

Not only do shady landscapes offer relief from the summer heat, they can also reduce heat-related medical emergencies, according to a study undertaken by Robert Brown, professor of landscape architecture at Texas A&M, and four colleagues.

After each heavy rain last spring on the streets of an impoverished, east Houston industrial neighborhood, students from nearby Furr High School trained by Texas A&M graduate planning students mapped and tested the toxicity of storm floodwaters.

Extreme rainfall events in Houston like the April 18, 2016 deluge will become more frequent in the future according to a study conducted for the Resilience and Climate Change Cooperative Project, an interdisciplinary research initiative at Texas A&M.

Phil Berke, professor of urban planning, and Jennifer Horney, Texas A&M associate professor of epidemiology and biostatistics, are conducting research to raise community resilience to natural disasters.

A research station on Palmyra Atoll, a remote, 680-acre South Pacific wildlife refuge 1,000 miles south of Hawaii, is operating primarily on wind and solar power thanks to efforts by David Sellers ‘02, a former environmental design student at Texas A&M.

Clint Brown ’78, director of software products at Esri, the world’s leading developer of geographic information system applications, will keynote Texas A&M’s GIS Day festivities 4:30 p.m., Tuesday, Nov. 18 in Memorial Student Center Room 2300E.

The Sea Grant Program at Texas A&M have teamed up with the university's Institute for Applied Creativity to produce videos that illuminate important issues related to weather, water and climate change in Texas.

GIS Day, the worldwide salute to geospatial technology and its power to transform and enhance lives, is going to be extra “spatial” this year in Aggieland, where the Texas A&M celebration is expanding to encompass three event-packed days, Nov. 17–19.

Procedures to create resilient communities — places that avoid, absorb and recover quickly from natural disasters — are detailed in a new book co-authored by four urban planning educators at Texas A&M’s College of Architecture.