09/09/2024
By Brooke Coupal

UMass Lowell is teaming up with the city of Lowell to tackle climate change.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) recently announced $10 million in funding for climate resilience centers (CRC) in 10 states, including the Massachusetts Gateway Cities Climate Resilience Center, led by UMass Lowell.

The commonwealth’s CRC seeks to develop a community-driven model on how to prepare for, adapt to and recover from the effects of climate change in Lowell, with the intention that the model can be replicated in similar cities across the U.S. Juliette Rooney-Varga, a professor in the Department of Environmental, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences and the principal investigator for the Massachusetts Gateway CCRC, sees Lowell as the perfect city in which to create such a model.

“UMass Lowell is embedded throughout Lowell with its strong existing community partnerships,” says Rooney-Varga, who also directs the Climate Change Initiative and co-directs the Rist Institute for Sustainability and Energy. “This offers us the opportunity to create a scalable climate resilience model that is centered on a university and a city working together.”

In partnership with the DOE and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Washington, the CRC will provide locally focused projections to better prepare the Lowell community for extreme weather events like heat waves.

“We’re not saying, ‘Here’s what it will look like for the Northeast,’” says Mathew Barlow, an EEAS professor and co-PI for the Massachusetts Gateway CCRC. “We need to be able to say, ‘Here’s what it will look like for Lowell.’”

In collaboration with fellow co-PIs Civil & Environmental Engineering Assoc. Prof. Arghavan Louhghalam and EEAS Asst. Prof. Joy Winbourne, the CRC will also assess the impact that climate change has on Lowell’s infrastructure, how tree cover and green spaces can mitigate climate change and how transitioning to renewable energy affects the city.

“We are going to model and simulate different scenarios to see how they benefit the community, and how they relate to Massachusetts' plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050,” Louhghalam says.

The Massachusetts Gateway CCRC will work closely with city leaders and community members to share findings and gather input.

“Climate resilience and energy transition will be informed by what matters to the community and the science that comes out of the center,” Rooney-Varga says. “The results can be used to guide strategic planning in the city.”

Rooney-Varga adds that the center will be “ripe with opportunity” for students to gain hands-on experience with climate resilience and mitigation efforts.

With the university and local communities joining forces against climate change, the Massachusetts Gateway CCRC group is optimistic for the future.

“A strength of the campus is its connection to the city, so it’s exciting to have an opportunity to develop this center in a community-oriented and collaborative fashion,” Barlow says. “That’s really what’s needed to address a problem of this scale.”