Resilient Futures Podcast

• It's All Connected: A Framework for Intertwined Infrastructure Systems

  This month's guest is someone close to home for our team- meet Alysha's PhD student, Negin Shamsi! Negin gives an overview of her first first-author publication, titled, "Interdependency classification: a framework for infrastructure resilience."Shamsi's research focus is infrastructure and urban resilience. Infrastructure managers collaborate across engineering, urban planning, emergency response, policy making and more. The goal of Shamsi's research, including the new paper, is to better prepare all of these fields for disturbances from hurricanes to cyber attacks."These systems do not function in isolation, they are interdependent and if one system fails, it will have effects on other systems as well," she said. "When we talk about interdependencies, especially in the past, people think about vulnerabilities, cascading failures- something negative. But recently, there has been a changing perspective: we can look at them as an opportunity for collaboration and innovation."Check out the new paper here: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/2634-4505/adac89/pdfNegin's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/negin-shamsi-b6736b160/

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• Building Biodiverse Urban Gardens

  How big does an urban garden need to be to support pollinators and other important insects? What kinds of plants lead to the most biodiverse space? How should homeowners manage their gardens to support the natural world?Get the full garden scoop with PhD researcher Joeri Morpurgo, from University Leiden in the Netherlands! Morpurgo and his colleagues visited urban gardens throughout Amsterdam and counted all the different plant and insect species they could find. Some key findings? Gardens can be small but mighty--as long as there's dense foliage and a plethora of plant species, they supported a variety of insect species. And one controversial finding: native vs. non-native plant species didn't seem to make a difference to insect diversity. Hear Morpurgo's take on his findings, and his urban garden management recommendations on the podcast!Related links: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1618866724003297https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/news/2024/07/pavement-gardens-are-crucial-to-urban-biodiversity

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• Greening the cul-de-sac: How can we encourage nature-positive residential developments?

  Big, leafy shade trees, burbling creeks, and access to recreation in beautiful natural areas: most people intuitively know that these kinds of natural amenities create pleasant communities, and houses located close to these kinds of resources tend to sell for more than those without. What folks often aren't thinking about is the fact that these resources have other benefits too--including filtering stormwater, sequestering carbon, and cooling neighborhoods. But how can we use policy to help encourage developers to adopt these policies from the start? And how can policy backfire in helping create equitably distributed natural resources for communities? Michael Drescher, Associate Professor in the School of Planning and Adam Skoyles, PhD student at the University of Waterloo, joined host Alysha Helmrich to discuss these questions and more. Drescher is the Director of the Residential Development Impact Scorecard for the Environment (RISE) project, which "Aims to better understand the longer-term impacts of urban residential developments on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and seeks to measure the effectiveness of GHG mitigation efforts of green infrastructure." Learn more about how RISE is working to help institute permanent changes in the development sector through their scorecard on the podcast!

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• The Resilient Future of Solar Power

  Lauren McPhillips didn't always dream of being a professor, but she knew she loved solving problems.After earning three degrees in Earth systems science and environmental engineering at Cornell University, McPhillips completed a postdoctoral research fellowship at Arizona State University, where she met our host Alysha. Now, she's working on ecological and water resources engineering problems from green stormwater infrastructure to solar implementation. In her position as a researcher and assistant professor at Penn State's Institute for Energy & the Environment, she studies how best to implement solar power across ecosystems while preserving ecosystem services in proposed solar fields.Solar farms get a lot of pushback due to their potential to interrupt ecosystems, whether they're just taking up important habitat space or actually causing harm through increased erosion or stormwater runoff. But McPhillips argues that, when done carefully, solar power could be just the nature-positive energy solution we need.Lauren's Haiku:Solar energyCan keep nature's benefitsCould be a win-winGuest Bio: https://iee.psu.edu/people/lauren-mcphillipsMcPhillips' Lab Website: https://sites.psu.edu/lmcphillips/

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• Water in the USA: Affordable, Accessible, Clean Water for All?

  Water is a natural resource all of us rely on, but there's a lot of thought and work that goes into being able to turn on your tap. How do we make sure water is accessible to everyone? Who does a water source belong to? And why is getting water out West so complicated?This month, hosts Alysha and Todd are joined by Dr. Ben Rachunok, an assistant professor at the Edward P. Fitts Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at NC State University. Rachunok studies how communities evaluate and respond to water rights, climate risk and natural hazards. Costs of water and climate action are not equally distributed across space, and low-income households often pay a higher price for water access- and during periods of water scarcity.With examples from the Carolinas to California, the group explores the surprising interconnections in the world of water rights and affordability, the role of policy in risk management, and how at-risk communities manage climate threats.Check out the recent paper they discuss in this episode: Socio-hydrological drought impacts on urban water affordability (https://www.nature.com/articles/s44221-022-00009-w)And this "companion paper" for more context: The unequal burdens of water scarcity (https://www.nature.com/articles/s44221-022-00016-x)Ben's haiku:Droughts raise water's priceLow-income homes bear the costThirst deepens the gapBio: https://ise.ncsu.edu/people/barachun/

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