Climate Resilience and Adaptation

Connecticut’s communities face an existential threat from a convergence of climate risks, including coastal vulnerability, extreme storms, and pervasive urban heat.

This climate crisis is severely compounded by pervasive non-linear environmental risks and Environmental Justice failures, which disproportionately impact our low-income communities and residents of color and extend beyond the coastal zones into urban cores. The resulting challenges require a fundamental shift in planning, and evolution from conventional, single-purpose infrastructure toward adaptive and flexible layers of urban systems that can do more than one thing. To ensure long-term viability, municipalities must move beyond monofunctional infrastructure to secure essential urban functions and address structural inequities in vulnerability.

We have worked with communities to design new flexible urban infrastructural layers that integrate engineering requirements with other community needs and desires. To address both flooding and urban heat, our strategy includes deploying scientific research—such as our work with the Yale Center on Climate Change and Health to measure heat heterogeneity across New Haven's Dwight Neighborhood—to inform neighborhood-scale adaptation strategies. Much of our design practice has focused on the potential for 'blue-green' infrastructure that actively manages flood risk, reduces urban heat, and is both visible and engaging, turning climate adaptation into beautiful, public features for the community (performative and representational). This approach drove our contributions to the award-winning Resilient Bridgeport strategy, which combines surge protection with new stormwater parks, and our work on the East Side Cool Corridors project, which designs cooling interventions along critical urban walkways.

For more of our work related to Climate Resilience and Adaptation, check out our project archive.

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