Climate change is impacting communities worldwide in different ways, albeit with generalizable concerns. Both rural and urban communities face these impacts, however as urbanization continues at a rapid pace, urban systems are expected to be the places where peoples’ livelihoods are going to be challenged the most. Cities also contribute a great deal of the energy consumption that contributes to climate change, and thus have significant decarbonization needs.
One of the United Nations’s Sustainable Development Goals, Goal 11, aims to make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable, with a strong focus on localization of action. How can the scientific community contribute to address this challenge?
The U.S. Department of Energy has funded four Urban Integrated Field Laboratories, or UIFLs, with specific goals of developing the science tools to understand the feedbacks between climate and urban communities. How does a city impact its regional climate? How does climate impact urban areas at the granular scale? How do we ensure that we understand the effects of climate solutions on the community system and on the climate system? In this talk, I will discuss our experience in developing the scientific program for Chicago’s very own UIFL to unravel these dynamics while staying true to community needs and providing a replicable blueprint to address the needs of communities and science elsewhere.
Cristina Negri is the Director of the Environmental Science (EVS) Division overseeing environmental research conducted by approximately 160 staff and collaborators. She leads the development and execution of the Division’s strategic programmatic direction inclusive of a diverse research portfolio in environmental and climate sciences. In her more than 30 years as a scientist at Argonne, she conducted and directed laboratory to full-scale multidisciplinary research focusing on environmental stewardship and sustainable approaches for the environmental improvement of urban and agricultural processes, such as developing multifunctional agricultural landscape concepts to address the food, energy and water nexus. Her interests are in systems approaches where industrial ecology concepts are applied to resource management and green infrastructure, as well as responsible innovation. Currently, she is the Lead Principal Investigator for the Community Research on Climate and Urban Science (CROCUS) project, a large, collaborative, multi-year Urban Integrated Field Laboratory funded by the US DOE Office of Science. Through her Argonne tenure, she has been a strong advocate for women in science and technology and held the Women in Science and Technology Program Initiator position twice.