Webinar Topics

• Addressing Heat Preparedness in Under-Resourced Communities 
  Held June 9, 2021
• Effective Communication Techniques to Constructively Engage the Entire Community
  Held May 12, 2021
• Building Up Local Food Systems Through the Lens of Equity
  Held April 14, 2021
• Addressing Climate Risks in your Multi-hazard Mitigation Plan
  Held March 10, 2021
• Addressing Climate Change in Your Comprehensive Plan
  Held February 10, 2021
• How to Reduce Energy Use in City Water Movement
  Held December 9, 2020
• Addressing the Burden of Energy Costs on Low-income Households
  Held November 11, 2020
• The Connections Between Racial Equity and Climat Change
  Held October 14, 2020
• Indiana's New Model Solar Ordinance
  Held September 9, 2020
• Managing Extreme Heat
  Held July 8, 2020
• The Economic Value of Preparedness and Resilience
  Held June 10, 2020
• Communicable Diseases and Environmental Change - Is There a Connection?
  Held May 13, 2020
• Effectively Communicating with the Public During a Crisis
  Held April 8, 2020 
• Responding to Floods
  Held March 11, 2020
• Zoning Code and Comprehensive Plan Strategies for Climate Resilience
  Held December 11, 2019
• The Hoosier Resilience Index: Understand Your Community's Preparedness
  Held November 13, 2019
• Identifying Public Health Solutions for Climate Change Impacts
  Held October 9, 2019
• Ticks, Asthma and Allergies: How the Changing Climate Affects our Health
  Held September 11, 2019
• Lessons from North Carolina: The Unexpected Consequences of Urban and Rural Flooding
  Held August 14, 2019
• Planning for Electric Vehicles
  Held July 10, 2019
• Funding and Installing Solar Energy in Your Community
  Held June 12, 2019
• Achieving Flood Resilience in Indiana Rural Communities in the Face of a Changing Climate 
  Held May 8, 2019
• Installing Wind Energy in Your Community
  Held April 10, 2019
• Managing Storm Sewer Flooding
  Held March 13, 2019
• Using Greenspace and Vegetation as an Adaptation Strategy
  Held February 13, 2019
• Identifying your Community's Vulnerabilities to Environmental Change
  Held January 8, 2019
• An Introduction to ERIT
  Held November 13, 2018
• Planning for More Frequent River Flooding
  Held October 9, 2018
• Environmental Change in Indiana
  Held September 20, 2018

View past webinars

This roundtable focused on environmental change research and outreach that is directly engaging Hoosiers through citizen science, public exhibits, teacher training, and collaboration with local governments.

Panelists include:

• Aaron Deslatte, assistant professor, O'Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs, IU Bloomington
• Gabe Filippelli, professor, Department of Earth Sciences, IUPUI
• Adam Scribner, director of STEM Education Initiatives, School of Education, IU Bloomington
• Betsy Stirratt, director of the Grunwald Gallery of Art, Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture, and Design, IU Bloomington

Moderator: Fred H. Cate, IU vice president for research and C. Ben Dutton Professor of Law

 Watch the conversation

Grand Challenges are major large-scale problems facing humanity that can be solved only by teams of dedicated researchers working across disciplines in collaboration with community partners. IU has three Grand Challenges initiatives in progress: Precision Health, Prepared for Environmental Change, and Responding to the Addictions Crisis. 

The Office of the Vice President for Research is pleased to host a series of virtual roundtables to share progress and stories of impact from the innovative research empowered by IU's Grand Challenges program. Roundtable discussions will feature Grand Challenge researchers and partners, and offer participants the chance to engage via live Q&A.

The January 19, 2021, webinar focused on the Prepared for Environmental Change Grand Challenge. Panelists include: 

• Ana Bento, assistant professor, IU School of Public Health-Bloomington

• Rich Hardy, professor of biology, College of Arts and Sciences, IU Bloomington

• Jennifer Lau, associate professor of biology, College of Arts and Sciences, IU Bloomington

• Ranjan Muthukrishnan, community ecologist and invasive species ecologist fellow, Environmental Resilience Institute

• Irene Newton, associate professor of biology, College of Arts and Sciences, IU Bloomington

• Moderator: Fred H. Cate, IU vice president for research and C. Ben Dutton Professor of Law

Watch the conversation

Entering the third year of its mission, the Environmental Resilience Institute continued to facilitate Hoosiers’ resiliency in the face of the climate change crisis. Yet it was a year is like no other. Our conversations and research now cohere around a constellation of other crises as well.

The coronavirus pandemic and racial justice movement against police brutality have shown how environmental racism becomes manifest in compromised human health, social disruption, and economic impoverishment. The crisis of systemic racism and of COVID-19 have converged to reveal a "pandemic within a pandemic," as people of color are uniquely susceptible to three crises—police brutality, devastating unemployment, and the deadliest pandemic in over a century.

As we gathered for our third annual ERI research symposium, we heard from researchers and experts about how the pandemic and racial injustice have informed their work, and what lessons we might take from our current moment as we move forward with our commitment to resilience and building more just and healthier communities.

View some of the recordings

Concerned Scientists at IU and ERI hosted a forum entitled "Science, Health, Environment: How the 2020 Elections will Shape our Future." The panel featured Dr. Rush Holt, Kenneth Kimmell, and Juliet Eilperin, and was moderated by Janet McCabe.

Watch the forum 

Gina McCarthy, Janet McCabe, Jim Barnes, and Jody Freeman talk of lessons learned for the future and a new book authored by O’Neill School faculty and other EPA alumni that examines the agency’s past achievements.

Watch the panel discussion

James Balog is a visionary photographer whose work extends far beyond the camera to the international stage, where he educates audiences about humans’ relationship with the environment. Balog founded the Earth Vision Institute in 2012 with the mission of “integrating art and science to reveal environmental change and inspire a balanced relationship with nature.” He was in in Bloomington for two events focusing on his films.

On April 9, 2019, Balog held a public lecture and reception, which can be viewed online, focusing on his project “The Human Element,” a documentary about human interaction with earth, air, fire and water. It was followed with a screening of the film at the Buskirk-Chumley Theatre. 

On April 10, 2019, Balog held a question and answer session with a screening of his Emmy Award-winning documentary “Chasing Ice” looking at the work of the Extreme Ice Survey, which placed more than 40 cameras on two dozen glaciers to capture time-lapse images of climate-induced change. You can see James Balog present "Chasing Ice" and also see the Q&A with Jon Vickers, the director of IU Cinema 

For more information on James Balog and free climate change resources see lesson plans for "The Human Element" and the Earth Vision Institute's Getting the Picture multimedia tool.

Ryan Gunderson received his Ph.D. in Sociology from Michigan State University in 2014 with Specializations in Environmental Science and Policy, Animal Studies, and Gender, Justice and Environmental Change. His primary interests are in environmental sociology, social theory, political economy, animal studies, and the sociology of technology. Ryan's current research projects include a sociological examination of geoengineering, an integrative study bringing together research on deliberative environmental decision-making and models of global environmental governance, and a conceptual investigation of how classical sociological theory can shed light on the social aspects of contemporary technologies. Ryan teaches introduction to Social Justice Studies, Research Methods, and Social Stratification.

Dr. Gunderson's talk was on how there are paradoxes and risks associated with technological approaches to addressing climate change. Renewable energy development may increase total energy use and increases in efficiency are associated with increases in total resource use. Geoengineering comes with environmental and social risks. Along with explaining the political-economic reasons for the limitations of “techno-fixes,” this talk proposes concrete social changes that reduce carbon emissions and increase social wellbeing while better realizing the environmental gains of renewables.

This presentation was free and open to the public and was part of the Institute's Fellow Speaker Series. 

• "Limits to Technological Solutions: Why Mitigation also Requires Social Change" on March 28, 2019 at 4:00pm in Woodburn Hall

Dr. Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist at Texas Tech University, is known for her work on regional climate impacts and for sharing her research with faith-based communities. In this talk, Dr. Hayhoe explored pathways to productive discussion about climate change: moving past the smokescreens to address the real objections and beginning conversations with values we share, rather than facts we may disagree on. The talk was free and open to the public. If you missed her lecture, there is a recording of her lecture at Purdue. 

The Institute invited IU faculty, staff and students to a community discussion on the development of the Hoosier Resilience Index. The event included a presentation on project goals, the current draft of the index, and opportunities for members of the IU community to plug in. We also held an open discussion to receive feedback on the current direction of the project.

The Institute seeks subject matter experts to advise the Hoosier Resilience Index project. If you would like to become involved, and have expertise in the following areas, please contact us.

• Adaptation
• Agriculture
• Applied statistics
• Aquatic ecology
• Data science
• Energy
• Environmental engineering
• Forest ecology
• Hydrology
• Limnology
• Public health
• Public health systems
• Urban heat
• Urban ecology

More About the Index

The Institute is developing the Hoosier Resilience Index to help local government officials and employees understand the path to making their communities more resilient to climate change impacts. This decision-making tool will:

• Present the risks specific to individual Hoosier cities, towns and counties;
• Provide information on which risks may be most harmful;
• Evaluate progress towards resilience; and
• Offer assistance in making decisions that lead to greater resilience.

The Institute intends for the Hoosier Resilience Index to be easy to use and understand, informative, objective, inspiring and accessible to the diverse array of cities, towns and counties within the state and beyond.

The Environmental Resilience Institute hosted a day-long series of presentations about ongoing research and accomplishments that help prepare Indiana for environmental change. We heard from the Institute's fellows, steering committee, affiliated researchers and staff.

Joel Clement, Science Advocate & Whistleblower, visited IU Bloomington for a seminar on science and public advocacy hosted by the School of Public and Environmental Affairs, Concerned Scientists at IU, and the Environmental Resilience Institute.

Joel Clement is a Senior Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School with a background in resilience and climate change adaptation, landscape-scale conservation and management, and Arctic social-ecological systems. Prior to joining the Kennedy School, Mr. Clement served as an executive for seven years at the US Department of the Interior. In July, 2017, he became the first public whistleblower of the Trump Administration, accusing Secretary Zinke of stifling science, ignoring climate change, wasting taxpayer dollars, and risking the health and safety of Americans in the Arctic. He was awarded The Joe A. Callaway Award for Civic Courage and resigned from public service in October of that year. Since then he has been on a national speaking tour and has received multiple awards for ethics, courage, and his dedication to the role of science in public policy. In addition to his role at Harvard, he is an Associate with the Stockholm Environmental Institute and a Senior Fellow with the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Clement's presentation was free and open to the public:

• "Taking it Personally: Public Service in the Age of Trump" on October 3, 2018 at 5:30pm in Jordan Hall

The Environmental Resilience Institute hosted Dr. Josh Tewksbury, director of Future Earth’s Colorado Global Hub and executive editor for Anthropocene magazine, for talks Feb. 27 at Indiana University Bloomington.

Tewksbury is an ecologist, conservation biologist, and planetary health scientist. During his presentation, Tewksbury explored the challenges posed by global change, the institutional hurdles we face, and the emerging structures, communities, and networks that are tackling these challenges. The presentation was free and open to the public:

• “Sustainability and Science in the Anthropocene,” 4 p.m. Feb. 27, Fine Arts Building, Room 015, IU Bloomington

The Institute welcomed Gina McCarthy, formerly an administrator at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, for talks Jan. 16 at Indiana University Bloomington and Jan. 17 at IUPUI. (See the video on the ERI Facebook page.)

McCarthy has spent 35 years in public service. Currently, she is director of the Center for Health and Global Environment at Harvard's T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

The talks were free and open to the public:

• Discussion: U.S. Environmental Policy, 3 p.m. Jan. 16, School of Public and Environmental Affairs, First Floor Commons, O’Neill Center, IU Bloomington.
• “The Future of EPA and Our Planet,” 5 p.m. Jan. 16, Whittenberger Auditorium, IU Bloomington.
• "Reversing an Environmental Agenda: Will it Stick?,” 11:40 a.m. Jan. 17, IU McKinney School of Law, Indianapolis, Room 300/Inlow Hall. 

Learn more about McCarthy and the talks on the News at IU website. 

Co-sponsors for McCarthy's visit included the IU School for Public and Environmental Affairs, Concerned Scientists@IU and the McKinney School of Law at IUPUI.