Our world is experiencing an unprecedented amount of climatic and environmental change. It’s a complex and constantly evolving situation that can be difficult to understand, and even more difficult to make informed decisions about. How do we make sense of what the science is telling us? How do we use that information to move forward?
That’s where NEMAC comes in.
For the past 20 years, the National Environmental Modeling and Analysis Center (NEMAC) at UNC Asheville has worked to turn data into action. That work covers everything from science communication and geospatial analysis to helping communities build resilience plans and developing innovative software tools to deliver complex research.
And in those 20 years, NEMAC has developed resilience plans with partners Fernleaf at NOAA that have helped more than 3 million residents in more than 20 cities across the country, helped generate $100 million in grants to conserve and restore land along the coastal U.S. in partnership with the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, and created tools that continue to monitor 600 million acres of forests with the U.S. Forest Service.
NEMAC is currently contributing to NOAA’s Climate-Smart Communities Initiative, which aims to scale up and accelerate climate adaptation and resilience efforts across the nation.
“It’s exciting; we're involved with all sorts of different aspects of this,” said Karin Rogers, director of NEMAC. “We're working with several partners to figure out how to match communities and practitioners who do climate resilience assessments, so we're building an online database matching system.”
This isn’t the first time NEMAC has been in the national spotlight. The center was instrumental in developing the U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit, which offers information and data-driven tools to aid those making decisions about how to help communities prepare for impacts of climate variability and change. For the past 10 years they’ve also contributed to National Climate Assessment, a congressionally-mandated climate report that summarizes the impacts of climate change on the United States, now and in the future.
Locally, NEMAC recently partnered with the Biltmore Estate to help them understand and visualize how land use has changed in the communities surrounding the estate, and how those changes may impact them in the future.
“They're really interested in what the landscape view looks like from the property itself, because there's been a lot of development,” Rogers said. “I think they themselves are probably just as interested as some of the rest of us in what does the population increase look like for our city and what does that mean for everybody?”
NEMAC has made an impact on campus, as well, employing more than 200 student interns since 2007 who represent more than 17 majors at UNC Asheville.
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