Center for Climate Adaptation and Resilience in Baltimore (CCARB)

The city of Baltimore is facing climate challenges common to many coastal cities: extreme heat stress during the summer, poor air quality, flooding, drought, coastal storm surge and erosion.

erosion

The geological process in which Earth's materials are worn away by weathering processes and transported away by natural forces such as wind or water.

Source: National Geographic Source

Unique to Baltimore are its highly heterogeneous neighborhoods with contrasting racial demographics, incomes, housing types, and amounts of green space. Climate challenges mean widely different things for different communities. Morgan State University (MSU), as a historically Black college and university, and Maryland’s preeminent public urban research university located inside the city, is in a unique position to address climate adaptation and resilience issues in Baltimore. In this project, we propose to lay the foundation of the Center for Climate Adaptation and Resilience in Baltimore (CCARB), which will serve as the nexus of MSU’s multidisciplinary climate research and collaborate closely with DOE-supported urban integrated field laboratory in Baltimore (Baltimore Social-Environment Collaborative, BSEC) and PNNL’s climate modeling community. The immediate goal of CCARB is to build MUS’s climate research capacity, laying a solid foundation for a multi-disciplinary, community-rooted climate research and adaptation center capable of serving as the host of cutting-edge scientific knowledge and extensive community ties gained through the collaborations with DOE supported projects. New urban climate modeling activities and a new climate science certificate program will be established as results of the project.