Saint Louis University (SLU) received $964,848 from the Department of Energy (DoE) to develop a Climate Resilience Center that will aim to mitigate the effects of climate change in the St. Louis area. It is one of 10 centers that received DoE funding in the US.

The funding proposal to the Department of Energy was made by Orhun Aydin, an assistant professor at SLU who brought together a team of researchers from the Water Access, Technology, Environment and Resources Institute (WATER) and the Taylor Geospatial Institute responsible for mapping the heat islands in the city of St. Louis and developing solutions for rising temperatures and other weather conditions in the region.

Aydin hopes to use this funding to create dynamic solutions to climate change.

“We have a multi-faceted approach that combines climate science, social sciences, urban planning and artificial intelligence designed to support local communities,” Aydin said.

Jason Knouft, professor of biology at SLU and director of the Freshwater Policy Institute, laid out the rationale they hope to achieve through this project.

“The main goal of the research is to document urban heat islands and try to understand how hot it is in the city… another aspect is also to try to develop a model of urban flooding,” Knouft said.

The urban flood model will help researchers understand which parts of the city are most affected by high levels of rainfall so they can better equip these places with resilience strategies.

Knouft’s expertise in water dynamics and hydrology is important to this project because “the water component of the climate resilience center helps to understand, if we can, the estimation of the probability of intense flooding and then to propose some possible ideas for remediation. these situations.” possible flooding,” Knouft said.

Finding optimal locations to plant trees in the St. Louis city area is one solution the team is considering. Knouft hopes the project will help “reduce the impacts of climate change.”

Trees are an optimal solution to potential climate problems as they mitigate heat and precipitation, the two main areas of impact.

“The city is (in) the process of planning to plant trees throughout the city. What that does is reduce the temperature, they have a cooling effect, mainly in the shade… but also, when vegetation is planted, it inhibits flooding by essentially retaining water,” Knouft said.

This multifaceted solution to mitigate the effects of climate change is being worked on in Aydin’s Artificial Intelligence in Coupled Human-Environment Systems for Sustainability and Resilience (AI-CHESS) laboratory, whose first objective in this project is to create a “twin “digital” of St. Louis: a city model that they can use to experiment.

Aydin shared some ideas on how this model would be used.

“The AI ​​that we know generally predicts things that are going to happen… there’s another part of AI that’s actually called prescriptive learning, which is basically calculating good decisions, or what might equate to good decisions,” Aydin said.

The prescriptive learning AI model that Aydin and his colleagues are working on in their lab will be able to predict the outcomes of certain weather conditions to mitigate their effects on St. Louis neighborhoods.

“A big part of our project is creating this digital twin, creating this digital environment where we can say, if heat increases to a certain point in a neighborhood over a measured period of time, it can trigger a specific number of health-related problems. deaths or stress on the electrical grid,” Aydin said.

With St. Louis’ digital model, Aydin and his team hope to find community-driven solutions to climate change to help people become more aware of and protected from dangerous weather conditions.

“One of our ultimate goals is to empower the community with information, share our findings in a very objective way, talk about the impacts of climate on specific neighborhoods… and educate residents in terms of what that means for them.” Aydin said.

Enbal Shacham, Ph.D, founding director of the Taylor Geospatial Institute, brings her expertise in public health and community work to ensure equitable implementation of the project.

In this model, they use anonymous smartphone tracking to obtain data that allows them to understand how people move in their communities.

“Where (people) go and how they spend their time, how much time they spend their time away from home – at work – and away from work; those patterns are important to really understand the health of a community,” Shacham said.

Other sources of geospatial data include drone technology, satellite imagery, and temperature sensors.

“Satellite images can be used. You can use sensors,” Shacham said. “You can use drone technology and data collected by drones, or you can use ground-based temperature measurements.”

The most challenging part of the project is getting community members interested; According to Shacham, what she does is think “about how members of our community interact with different systems and different challenges in their daily lives.”

A big goal of the project is to ensure that the results are beneficial to the entire St. Louis community.

“The geospatial work that I’ve grown up with has led me to think about how we can make our research more collaborative so that our practice is more collaborative and then we can solve bigger problems,” Shacham said.

The team plans to survey and gather information from surrounding St. Louis neighborhoods to gain community feedback. They want to make sure solutions are put in place so residents affected by the change feel included in the work being done.

“If you think about inequality, extreme heat phenomena are a good example. “Some people don’t experience hot spells the same way others do,” Shacham said. “If I had central air and access to resources, I wouldn’t worry about whether I would have money to pay my air conditioning bills.”

The team of researchers wants to know “how individual perspectives think and experience this differently to give us a better idea of ​​where and what types of interventions should occur,” Shacham said.

Some other solutions the team is considering are citywide alerts for severe weather conditions, as well as working with nonprofit organizations to implement climate change mitigation efforts.

The three-year project is in its early stages and the team is still deciding whether planting more trees in green spaces such as parks or gardens, or simply planting more trees in the city area, is the optimal solution to the problems they face. .

Regardless of the solution, they hope to implement equitable change that positively impacts all St. Louis residents.

“I want to highlight that this is the beginning of many more studies and work in practice, so for me, I want to translate this research into practice and understand where we need to intervene and how to best use our resources to be accessible. to the residents,” Shacham said.