 Hi, my name is Thad Velosky. I'm the managing director at the Center for Resilience Cities and Landscapes. I'm also adjunct professor of urban planning and urban design at GSAP and a research scholar at the Center for Resilience Cities and Landscapes. And I want to introduce my colleague, colleagues, Joanna and Gerga. Do you want to introduce yourself, Joanna? Hi, everyone. I'm Joanna Lavecchio. I'm the associate director of the Center. And I'm Gerga Basic. I'm an associate research scholar at the Center. We'll share a few slides to show you a little bit about our work and then maybe we can talk for a minute about how they get involved with us. So we have a research center that we started two and a half years ago at Columbia GSAP and let me just share my screen to show you some slides. I'm the co-director of the Center. The faculty director is Kate Orff. She's a MacArthur genius landscape architect, also the director of our urban design program and principal at SCAPE. We have started the Center to bring some of the resources at Columbia University in terms of research and planning and design to the ground and some of the cities and other places throughout the world that are facing a rapid transition away from what we sometimes call the term petrochemical urbanization. The world does not have long to transition from the land use energy industrial systems of the present to a future which will better manage our resources. And if we do not make this transition, most poor and disadvantaged among us will already suffering the worst consequences of climate disasters. This has a mode of empowering local communities and ecosystems to survive and thrive in a world that is more and more mired in crisis. You can see some of our work on our website. We've been working around the world. We'll show you a few quick examples now. I'm working with the World Wildlife Fund in Mozambique, which is a country that has had a very tragic history but also enjoys incredible natural resources, including mangroves and coral reefs, but also natural gas. And the government of Mozambique and our partners at the World Wildlife Fund are interested in exploring the idea of resilience and how it could help them build a policy framework to manage extraction in such a way that it doesn't foreclose on the growth of their natural and human capital. In other words, how they might not suffer from the resource curse. So we brought students there to do a workshop with range of stakeholders from the gas companies to local environmental activists, local municipal governments, national governments. And we produced some research, this visualization by one of our research scholars builds on an understanding of how other extraction sites have suffered from devastation of natural environments that has led to civil unrest to disequilibrium and the economy. A lot of haves and have nots which eventually leads to civil violence in a very disruptive landscape. So we focused on these lessons to have a conversation. This is about this future negative scenario and how it could be turned into a future positive scenario one where natural capital is prioritized where the investments that are made a natural gas are able to be translated into a robust and diversified economy regenerative industries, investing in local agriculture and aquaculture. We were doing this work and then tragically, the two cyclones devastated coastal Mozambique in the spring of 2019. This is the city of Barrow which was 90% destroyed by the cyclones. So we worked with our partners in Mozambique to bring our urban design studio back to Barrow to work with UN Habitat and local design school, UNI Zembezi, to envision Brazilian recovery for Mozambique. So we studied how the recovery from this tragic cyclone was proceeding and how we can elevate local voices in the reconstruction process so that natural capital and the unique culture of the place could be preserved as they rebuild. Joanna, I'll turn it over to you for Tel Aviv. So one other issue that we've been focusing increasingly on at the Center for Resilient Cities and Landscapes is, is the issue of extreme heat and nested within that, right, how the built environment not only has constructed hotter cities but also the social vulnerabilities that make people more or less sensitive to climate risk like extreme heat and the direct role of urban designers and planners in constructing both of those phenomenon. So one place where we address some of these issues is in Tel Aviv. Tel Aviv is getting much more populous. It's growing really fast, expects a lot more upward growth, and is getting much, much hotter. Go to the next slide. We worked with them through something called the Resilience Accelerator Program where we worked directly with Tel Aviv-Yafo, the municipality in Tel Aviv, to help support their resilience strategy implementation. We worked with climate scientists here at Columbia, microclimate scientists at Tel Aviv University and then worked with the municipality as well as designers, community members, and others through a workshop, and then sort of synthesized all of that into, into a report which is on our website. You can go to the next slide. So a little bit more about Tel Aviv. It's getting much, much hotter and much drier. So we worked with the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in the Center for Climate Systems Research here at Columbia to help prepare these climate projections, which make a pretty convincing case for some reimagined planning and design. Next slide. It's also not spatially equal, right? So we looked across the city and mapped land surface temperature across Tel Aviv, and if you can see in the, in the bottom section of that left map, it's much, much hotter than the rest of the city. And people are more sensitive, meaning we map the social factors that make people less capable of adapting so things like low income, low educational attainment, large households, single parent households, the very old, the very young, and map those on top of each other and those help point us in direction of where in the city we should focus efforts and engagement. You go to the next slide. So we focused in a neighborhood called Shapira, where it's sort of right on the precipice of gentrification pressures. And there's a lot of asylum seekers and migrants that come and settle in this neighborhood. Very crowded housing, not to mention one of the hottest in Tel Aviv. So we partnered with micro climate scientists and social scientists to sort of gather some input from the community. And we also really understand the thermodynamics of this neighborhood and the built environment's relationship to that. You can go to the next slide. These are some thermal images that we took. We're really interested in public space as sort of this key asset of all communities and the fabric of cities so we took thermal images across the neighborhood sort of illustrate the profound impact of materials and layout of streets on heat. I'm going to the next slide. And then during the workshop we we thought through concepts for pilot projects in public spaces. So this is one of the design concepts that came from the community center group so group of designers and academics, and policy makers and community members sat together over a three day intensive workshop, came up with different regimes to increase the ventilation use stormwater increase the shading and, of course think through programming to make it a more accessible, inclusive, and engaged space programmatically go to the next slide. There's just some pictures of the community engaging with some of the work we did some interactive mapping and some discussion around the design work that came through and all of which is sort of at the moment being incorporated into some of the cities design and planning actions and implementation. Now, we go to the next slide. I'm going to turn it over to Gerga who's going to talk about how some of this urban heat research is pulling forward now. Yeah, so does that are working tell us we focus primarily on urban heat island effect and mitigation. But after that we realize that, you know, most, most natural hazards don't come alone they usually occur simultaneously or successfully. And so, and particularly now we have global pandemic in the mix. So we asked ourselves the question how do we identify most at risk communities that will bear the brunt of compound events. And so, and our hypothesis is that we can look at land surface temperature as a proxy for community vulnerability. And so to test this idea with we compared land surface temperature maps with other historic or current maps of vulnerability or inequality. So this is an example of LA we see correlation of land surface temperature map on the left and redlining map on the right. So the areas that are hotter have also been historically redline. And in the next slide, we can see that those same areas are also designated as least healthy to live in the city. In the next example, we looked at the Houston and the case of flooding. So the areas that are hotter in the city are also the areas that are impervious and therefore prone to floods. And then in, in the example of gouting South Africa on the next slide, we looked at the correlation between land surface temperature and vulnerability to COVID-19. And so some interesting correlations there. And finally, we also looked at the COVID-19 case rates here in New York City and compare that to land surface temperature maps. And I'll hand it over to Todd. Well, I'll just close by saying, we are now focusing most of our attention locally as 2020 has taught us so much about the need to focus on injustice in our own backyard. So we've been working with local community groups to think about to participate in this conversation about remaking New York City's public realm, in light of the, the combined threats of climate change global pandemic and reckoning with racial injustice. And so one of the ways we've been working on this is with local school, high school students at the wheels Academy in Washington Heights, these students have conceived notion of turning the street in front of their school into a clean air green corridor. So our planning practicum students in the urban planning program are working with these high school students to have a conversation about how building a park on the street could improve community health and procreating implementation plan for building this park together. We went out and did field measurements of using thermal cameras to understand which areas are hotter and why in the summer. We did urban design surveys and cross sections. So that's a little sample of the work we've been doing but feel free to reach out to us with questions and just quick closing about how to get involved with us. As I said, we, we try to combine our research or marry our research in some ways with developing curriculum and climate action and resilience. And that's in the urban design program and our studios and the seminars that I teach an urban planning. Lots of this work also involves other schools in Columbia and elsewhere around the world. We have events where you can become part of a network of people who are both practitioners and community members who are focused on these issues. As well as we sometimes have job postings and in fact we have one right now which you can find on our website. Anything else, Gerga and Joanna closing thoughts for prospective students. Well, thanks for your attention and looking forward to meeting you hopefully in person by the time where you come around we have a space in Skimmerhorn and so maybe we'll see you there next year but in the meantime, feel free to reach out and thanks. Bye.