Saint Louis University received $964,848 from the Department of Energy (DoE) to develop a Climate Resilience Center that will aim to mitigate the effects of climate change in the St. Louis area. It is one of 10 centers that received funding from the DoE in the U.S. 

The proposal to the DoE for funding was made by Orhun Aydin, an assistant professor at SLU who put together a team of researchers from the Water Access, Technology, Environment and Resources (WATER) Institute and Taylor Geospatial Institute responsible for mapping heat islands in the city of St. Louis and developing solutions for rising temperatures and other weather conditions in the region. 

Aydin hopes to use this funding to create dynamic solutions to climate change.

“We have a multifaceted approach that combines climate science, social science, urban planning and artificial intelligence crafted to support the local communities,” Aydin said.

Jason Knouft, a professor of biology at SLU and director of the Freshwater Policy Institute, laid out the fundamentals they hope to achieve through this project. 

“The primary focus of the research is documenting the urban heat islands and trying to understand how hot it gets in the city… another aspect of it as well, is trying to develop an urban flood model,” Knouft said.

The urban flood model will help researchers understand what parts of the city are most heavily impacted by high levels of rain so that they can best equip these places with resilience strategies.

Knouft’s background in water dynamics and hydrology is important to this project because “the water component to the climate resilience center helps to understand, if we can, in estimating the likelihood of intense flooding events, and then come up with some possible ideas to remediate against potential flooding,” Knouft said.

Finding optimal locations to plant trees in the St. Louis city area is a solution the team is considering. Knouft hopes the project will help “reduce the impacts of climate change.” 

Trees are an optimal solution for potential climate problems as they mitigate heat and precipitation, the two main areas of impact. 

“The city is [in] the process of planning to plant trees throughout the city. What that does is it reduces the temperature, they have a cooling effect, primarily in the shading… but also, when you plant vegetation, it inhibits flooding by essentially, holding on to water,” Knouft said. 

This multifaceted solution to mitigate the effects of climate change is being worked on in  Aydin’s Artificial Intelligence in Coupled Human-Environment Systems for Sustainability and Resilience (AI-CHESS) lab, whose first goal in this project is to create a “digital twin” of St. Louis: a model of the city that they can use to experiment in. 

Aydin shared some insights into how this model would be used. 

“AI that we know about generally predicts things that are going to happen… there is another part of AI that actually is called prescriptive learning, which basically computes good decisions, or what might amount to good decisions,” Aydin said. 

The prescriptive learning AI model that Aydin and colleagues are working on in their lab will be able to predict the outcomes of certain weather conditions in order to mitigate their effects in St. Louis neighborhoods. 

“One big part of our project is creating this digital twin, creating this digital environment where we can say, if the heat goes over a certain extent in a neighborhood for a measured period of time, it can trigger a specific amount of health-related deaths, or strain on the electricity grid,” Aydin said. 

With the digital model of St. Louis, Aydin and his team hope to find community-driven solutions to climate change to help people become more aware and protected from dangerous weather conditions. 

“One of our end goals is empowering the community with information, sharing our findings in a very objective way, talking about impacts of climate in specific neighborhoods… and educating residents in terms of what that means for them,” Aydin said.

Enbal Shacham, Ph.D, founding director of the Taylor Geospatial Institute, brings her background in public health and community-based work to ensure equitable implementation of the project. 

In this model, they use anonymized smartphone tracking for data to understand how people move around their communities. 

“Where they [people] go and how they [people] spend their time, how long they [people] spend their time away from home – at work – and away from work; those patterns are important to really understand the health of a community,” Shacham said.

Other geospatial data sources include drone technology, satellite imagery and temperature sensors.

“You can use satellite imagery. You can use sensors,” Shacham said. “You can use drone technology, and data collected from drones, or you can use ground measures of temperature.”

The most challenging part of the project is getting community members interested, according to Shacham, what she does is think “about how our community members engage with different systems and different challenges in their daily lives.”

A large goal for the project is ensuring that outcomes are beneficial for the whole St. Louis community.

“The geospatial work that I’ve grown into has led to thinking about how we can make our research more collaborative so our practice is more collaborative, and then we can solve bigger problems,” Shacham said.

The team plans to survey and collect information from surrounding St. Louis neighborhoods to get community feedback. They want to make sure that solutions are implemented so that residents affected by the change feel included in the work being done. 

“If you think about inequity, extreme heat events are a good example. Some people don’t experience heat events in the same way others do,” Shacham said. “If I had central air and access to resources I don’t worry about whether I’ll have money to pay my air conditioning bills” 

The team of researchers want to know “how individual perspectives are thinking through and experiencing these differently to give us a better sense of where and what types of intervention needs to occur,” Shacham said. 

Some other solutions the team is considering are city-wide alerts for adverse weather conditions as well as working with nonprofits to implement climate change mitigation efforts. 

The three year project is in its early stages, and the team is still deciding whether planting more trees in green spaces such as parks or gardens, or simply planting more trees in the city area is the optimal solution to the problems they are facing. 

No matter the solution, they hope to implement equitable change that positively impacts all St. Louis residents. 

“I want to highlight that this is the beginning of many more studies and a work in practice, so for me, I want to translate this research into practice and understand where we need to intervene, and how to best utilize our resources to be accessible to residents,” Shacham said.