Duke experts are exploring ways to enhance community resilience to extreme weather events. Lydia Olander and Francis Bouchard joined engineering professor Mark Borsuk in leading a 2024-2025 Bass Connections team exploring community-based catastrophe insurance.

Nicholas Institute experts Sara Mason, Lydia Olander, and Katie Warnell shared insights from their collaboration and development of the Department of the Interior Nature-Based Solutions Roadmap in a Southeast Climate Adaptation Science Center webinar.

The 2024–2025 Bass Connections program featured 16 interdisciplinary teams in the Energy & Environment theme administered by the Nicholas Institute. Duke students involved in a handful of the teams talked about their projects during the annual Fortin Foundation Bass Connections Showcase last month.

Nicholas Institute research associate Jin Bai was among 19 conservationists recognized during North Carolina Wildlife Federation's 60th Annual Governor’s Conservation Achievement Awards banquet on May 3. Bai was named NCWF's Wildlife Volunteer of the Year for "extraordinary dedication to bird conservation, citizen science and community engagement."

North Carolina Wildlife Federation named Nicholas Institute research associate Jin Bai as its Wildlife Volunteer of the Year. The federation recognized Bai for "extraordinary dedication to bird conservation, citizen science and community engagement."

The Nature Activation Hub brings together tools, guidance and resources to help decision-makers and practitioners integrate nature's benefits into decision-making. The hub builds on the Nicholas Institute’s two decades of actionable research and purposeful partnerships focused on nature-based solutions, ecosystem services and natural and working lands.

World leaders gathered in Baku, Azerbaijan, in November for the 2024 United Nations Climate Change Conference, also known as COP29—and Duke University experts and students were on the scene.

The Nicholas Institute, in collaboration with the U.S. Department of the Interior, developed an interactive version of the DOI Nature-Based Solutions Roadmap with a new database of more than 400 case studies. One of the Nicholas Institute experts who led the project discusses some of the resource’s features and its applications for DOI staff and beyond.

While interest and investment is growing in the use of nature-based solutions in the United States, significant barriers remain to implementing them more widely. A new Nicholas Institute working paper examines how Florida, North Carolina and Virginia are surmounting permitting hurdles to expand the use of one type of nature-based solution—living shorelines.

A new paper co-authored by Jin Bai, research associate at the Nicholas Institute, proposes a framework for urban ecologists to investigate the causes behind disparities in biodiversity between affluent and less wealthy neighborhoods. “Seeing the pattern of inequality is just the first step,” Bai told the Southeast Climate Adaptation Center. “Truly understanding the major factors that are driving those patterns is where we can address those gaps on a policy level.”