Resilience investment will not scale through better metrics alone; it requires practical handoffs that link risk reduction to performance, capital, insurance, public budgets, and community outcomes. This was the central takeaway from an April 22, 2026, workshop during DC Climate Week, hosted by Duke University.

The power sector faces intersecting challenges: surging electricity demand, rising customer costs, and the imperative to decarbonize the grid. Competitiveness policies that broaden market participation and better align utility incentives with these goals offer a path forward.

Explore key findings, action opportunities, examples, and a readiness guide informed by an April 21, 2026, workshop at Duke in DC during DC Climate Week, hosted by Duke University in partnership with Tailwind Futures.

Point data, such as population, disease incidence, and greenhouse gas emissions, are commonly aggregated to a uniform grid of raster data for storage and representation. In many remote sensing applications, polygons are instead used to describe regions of interest (e.g., countries and cities) that form the spatial basis for analysis. The values associated with these polygons are estimated by aggregating the underlying gridded raster data within the boundary of the polygon.

In the summer of 2022, a team of climatologists and researchers piloted the first heat warning system that ranks heat events based upon human health outcomes. This system uses local all-cause mortality data in addition to meteorological factors including air mass identification and the Excess Heat Factor to identify heat events that are likely to endanger human health in the region and applies three categories representing increasing severity.

Interstate water management is a highly contested domain in American environmental governance. Competing claims over shared rivers, aquifers, and watersheds have produced decades of litigation, failed compacts, and entrenched political standoffs. Despite widespread recognition that these disputes must be resolved, the institutional mechanisms for doing so have largely stalled.

Extreme heat is the deadliest weather-related hazard in the United States, disproportionately impacting low-income communities, older adults, and people with chronic conditions. In rural and semirural areas along the I-95 corridor in North and South Carolina, congregations are often among the few consistent institutions providing care and connection. The Cooling Communities project engaged faith leaders across North and South Carolina to understand how church communities perceive and respond to extreme heat and explore their potential role in broader resilience efforts.

Over the past 80 years, biotechnology has advanced agriculture, healthcare, and economic development by harnessing biological processes from the organism inward (i.e., from the organ system to the molecular scale). Today’s global challenges, including biodiversity loss, climate change, and pollution, demand a complementary technological expansion inspired by processes operating from the organism outward (i.e., at the levels of populations, communities, ecosystems, and the biosphere).

Understanding how different intensities of timber harvesting affect species richness for plants and animals in North American forests will enable natural resource managers to better control the impacts of harvesting on flora and fauna communities. Previous syntheses have only examined thinning intensity as a categorical variable, comparing low and high intensity. This new meta-analysis examines how thinning intensity affects plant and animal species richness while examining the influence of other factors.

Understanding the effect of fishing activities on marine organism species richness is important for managing fisheries. Previous reviews and meta-analyses have focused on the relationship between bottom-fishing gears and invertebrate species richness, but there is a lack of understanding around other fishing gears (e.g., long lines and gillnets) and other taxa (e.g., ray-finned fishes).