Collaborative Diamonds Form Under Pressure of Climate Change

An insurance salesman, an engineer and a priest walk into a classroom. While that might sound like the opening line to a bad dad joke, it’s exactly the type of unexpected collaboration being fostered by the Duke Climate Commitment.

Launched in September 2022, the campus-wide program is an “impact-oriented initiative to address the climate crisis by creating sustainable and equitable solutions that place society on the path toward a resilient, flourishing, carbon-neutral world.”

For Duke Engineering and other STEM-focused faculty, that means going far beyond obvious climate-related research looking to reduce carbon emissions through better solar panels, batteries and carbon-capturing technologies. It also means looking beyond technical solutions to address the effects of a warmer world like advanced water resources management and coastal erosion protections. (Although Duke is working on all of these challenges, too.)

To address the wide range of impacts climate change will have on every nook and cranny of society, engineers and scientists need to move beyond technical collaborations aimed at keeping the change to a minimum. Thanks to the Climate Commitment, they’re doing just that and working with new partners to help communities adapt to the unavoidable effects of climate change.

To get an idea of what that means, take a closer look at three projects that might not seem STEM-related on their face but are benefiting from these truly interdisciplinary collaborations.

Risk Management in a Riskier World

It’s been said that nothing ever gets done without some sort of insurance. Often cited as one of the oldest professions in the world, its history can be traced all the way back to 3,000 – 4,000 BCE. From Babylonian merchants to medieval English traders to modern corporations, the insurance industry has evolved and expanded throughout the ages. And as entire cities face new existential threats from extreme weather events occurring more frequently than ever before, insurers must find ways to mitigate their exposure to extreme losses while continuing to help communities rebuild.

“Insurance companies have a tremendous amount of computing power for climate modeling and prediction. They’re doing even more than we can because of the resources they’re putting into it,” said Mark Borsuk, the James L. and Elizabeth M. Vincent Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Duke. “What they need is new ideas and strategies that account for these challenges that can be tested at some capacity before being implemented at larger scales.”

With these needs in mind, Borsuk recently launched Duke’s Center for Risk Science Climate Resilience, or RESILE for short. The initiative looks to integrate data science and modeling, risk assessment and decision theory, and economic and policy analysis to develop actionable strategies to address climate risk.

Take personal property insurance, for example. As it works now, insurance is sold for an individual structure a year or two at a time, which makes incorporating the long-term risks associated with climate change impossible. That leaves insurance providers wary of taking on too much climate-related risk with only one option—backing out from coastal communities entirely. Dwindling suppliers combined with greater chances of extreme events are leading to price spikes, which many long-time residents with lower incomes can’t afford.

What if, instead, property insurance was written at a neighborhood level, or even for an entire county? At these scales, financial liability risks over time and over many households could be better predicted, and communities could be incentivized to take climate resilience measures to obtain lower rates.

“This hasn’t been done before, but we want to explore it because we think it has potential,” Borsuk said. “It would also provide an opportunity to rethink the finance mechanisms and distributions of reimbursements, which has issues of equity around it, too.”

Rather than sending out insurance adjusters to each individual home that sustains damage, Borsuk explained, predetermined payouts could be calculated for each individual home or structure based on metrics such as a river’s water level or a storm’s maximum sustained windspeed. Besides being more efficient, payouts would happen much more quickly. And whole neighborhoods could get a single payout to allocate in a much more informed way than insurance companies typically can.

“Insurance companies can’t meet together to talk about rates or they’d face collusion charges,” Borsuk noted. “Having an initiative like RESILE allows us to be an impartial convener to think through these issues on a longer time scale than individual companies often do.”

The initiative kicked off this past February, when a group of experts from the insurance sector met with faculty from engineering, business, law, economics and environmental policy, as well as faculty from other schools across the country.

“Resilience is not simply rebuilding roads or rebuilding people’s houses,” said Frank Nutter, who served as president of the Reinsurance Association of America for more than three decades. “It’s rebuilding the fabric of these communities.”

Climate Change’s Impact on Rural Health

It’s been well established that urban areas have pockets where a lack of vegetation and permeable surfaces, along with many other factors, create “urban heat islands” where temperatures soar much higher than surrounding areas. While these heat islands often affect the residents with the fewest resources to take care of themselves, cities are beginning to put more resources toward helping their most vulnerable citizens.

But cities have resources to provide residents that rural areas usually don’t. While rural communities may not experience the same heat island effects as cities, they are still being subjected to higher temperatures each year. Researchers are beginning to find that this heat, combined with a lack of resources often provided by cities, is leading to mental health disparities and increased substance abuse.

“Climate change is not at the top of the list of concerns for residents of rural communities,” said Devon Noonan, an associate professor in Duke University’s School of Nursing. “But a growing body of literature is connecting substance abuse and mental health to heat, and heat is obviously a big issue in North Carolina.”

In a new partnership with Marta Zaniolo, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Duke, the team is working to see if they can use AI to predict heat thresholds that lead to an increase in overdoses and hospitalizations.

The project will start by gathering climate data like maximum daily and nightly temperatures, humidity and heat persistence as well as anonymized health data on hospital admissions and mortality data related to mental health and substance abuse. The researchers will then use advanced AI techniques to identify the climate variables that impact health outcomes the most and use them to build a bespoke model for early warning and intervention efforts.

Zaniolo has used this type of approach before for creating specific models for climate and crop failure. Issues of health outcomes, however, are obviously more complex. But the challenge is worth the effort.

“I believe that climate change and mental health are the defining challenges of our time, and the current generation of students at Duke overwhelmingly agrees,” said Zaniolo. “These challenges are so encompassing that they break disciplinary silos, requiring researchers to collaborate across fields and think differently.”

The researchers plan to put together a community advisory board to not only take their ideas and opinions into account when building the model, but also to translate their findings into actionable solutions for rural communities throughout eastern North Carolina.

Heat isn’t the only health issue that climate change is bringing to the residents of North Carolina. It’s also resulting in chronic exposures to Cyanobacterial harmful algal blooms, or CHABs for short. These blooms secrete a neurotoxin that likely contributes to the development of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), an incurable neural disease that is more common in and around the Outer Banks than anywhere else in the state.

Armed with an array of new equipment ranging from algal bloom analyzers and high-resolution drones, a group of Duke Engineers is working with local health partners to better gauge the risks and warn communities when blooms are at their highest. After receiving training on the new equipment, community teams will test waters where blooms have formed or are about to form based on satellite data and test for Cyanobacteria and their toxins.

“Healing estuarine ecosystems to reduce risk for neurodegenerative diseases is a paradigm shift,” said Lisa Satterwhite, assistant research professor of civil and environmental engineering at Duke. “This project will empower coastal communities of eastern North Carolina to monitor their own water and build predictive models to safeguard health across the region.”

Preaching to the Choir

Growing up a Southern Baptist in Kansas, there were few people in Avery Davis Lamb’s congregation, who wanted to talk about the environment. But as a lover of both science and nature, he could never see the two as being separate given that nature is fundamentally God’s creation.

“Maybe I’m weird, but I think it’s fun to bring together environmental science and religion,” said Lamb, who graduated from Duke in 2022 with dual master’s degrees in divinity and environmental management.

Now the co-executive director of Creation Justice Ministries, Lamb is working with Elizabeth DeMattia, a research scientist and director of the Community Science Initiative at the Duke Marine Laboratory, and together they are connecting the two seemingly disparate professions. For the past three years, Lamb and DeMattia have connected ministry leaders with faculty from Duke’s schools for divinity, the environment, public policy, business and nursing during a three-day retreat called “Pastoral Care for Climate Change.” Hosted at the Duke Marine Laboratory in Beaufort, North Carolina, the event aims to discover approaches that address climate change that could empower Christian leaders to move their congregations to action and advocacy.

“One of highlights for me is that this work recognizes the role of churches as central community spaces and how important these spaces are in energizing their members around issues of climate and justice,” said DeMattia.

Each year, the experience looks to find ways to engage its participants through three key goals: connecting hope and action to give people agency; examining the role of storytelling to motivate congregations and create empathy; and developing a sense of place between people and their environments. 

The scientists who attend share their research with ministry leaders, not so much to convince them that climate change is real—although that is a topic that gets a fair amount of attention—but to share information that they can take back to their congregation.

“The interaction between faculty in the Divinity School and those within the STEM disciplines allows the work that we do with congregations to be practically grounded,” said Wylin Wilson, assistant professor of theological ethics at Duke. “Providing hope that speaks to the practical reality of congregations gives faith leaders and congregations confidence in the continued relevance of their faith.”

And in at least one case, that exchange of knowledge was taken to another level. Allen Brimer, pastor at the Church of Reconciliation in Chapel Hill, NC, invited each and every one of them to give the same presentation to his congregation after having heard them at the retreat in 2023.

“There was something refreshing that the numbers and data and explanations brought home for me,” Brimer said. “I was struck by the straightforward numbers and explanations of the creative scientific solutions they’re working on to curb these massive challenges.”

But the retreat is by no means a one-way street. The faith leaders and divinity faculty are working to give the researchers something to take back with them, too—hope.

That is where the organizers believe the most meaningful experiences lie for the environmental scientists. And not some sort of blind hope rooted in mysticism, but hope that is rooted in history and religious scripts in a way that can break their cycle of focusing only on what’s wrong with the world.

“What came up again and again was that the scientists working on the front lines were in pain, and I found myself really wanting to reach out to them,” said Lisa Mullens, a transitional pastor currently at John Calvin Presbyterian Church in Salisbury, NC. “These incredible people must find ways to care for themselves because it can get lonely, and whatever we can do to encourage one another is critical.”

And at the end of the day, perhaps hope is what these three-day excursions are all about. Not convincing people that climate change is real or finding new ways to present the latest climate model predictions, but connecting to each other and building communities that are resilient and reliable to one another no matter what may come.

“Pastors are encouraged by the respect that climate scientists have for the grassroots work of building social networks,” said Jerusha Neal,  assistant professor of homiletics at Duke. “Seeing data about the differences these communal connections make to equitable recovery efforts is deeply empowering.  And scientists are encouraged to find community partners that have committed to this work over the long-haul.”

Research has shown time and again that churches play a crucial role in helping communities and individuals bounce back after disasters. Whether it be a fire, hurricane or flooding, connections between people are the biggest predictors for how a group will come through a crisis.

“When pastors see that data, they start to realize that what they do in terms of hospitality and community building makes a real difference, which brings more excitement toward that work,” said Lamb. “And you can tell that the scientists find emotional support from these connections as well. I feel like it’s a perfect example of not just offering expertise from Duke to the community, but the community offering something back as well.”