BIO

Hello! My name is Matt Herr, and I am a second-year International Affairs and Studio Art major. I am currently most interested in exploring how emerging technologies in the digital and AI space will come to shape our future economic, social, and political reality. I aim to explore these concepts through both research and my personal artistic practice. After completing my undergrad degree, I plan to enter a graduate urban planning program.

Analyzing Climate Services that Assess Equity and Vulnerability

Abstract

Climate services, or the applications that provide and organize climate data for easier data finding and comprehension, have seen a recent rise in popularity as a tool to combat the effects of climate change. As the effects of climate change increase in both frequency and intensity, many politicians, policy-makers and planners (i.e., decisionmakers) have come to rely on climate services to provide and organize information about the current and future impacts of climate change. Part of this reliance on climate services is a result of a lack of regulation or guidance about how decision-makers should respond to climate change. This project aims to identify the effectiveness of these climate services and how they can improve. This project is currently focused on providing this service to the Gulf Coast region of the United States. First, we identified climate services that considered equity or vulnerability that that were usable across the United States (U.S.) Gulf Coast Region, then created an analytical framework to evaluate the usability of each climate service. Our analysis yielded themes that were common across many of these climate services, with key takeaways being climate services often lack opportunities for data comparison within the program, have significant learning curves and the vast majority lacked any analysis of action options and outcomes.

Keywords: Climate Services, Climate Change