The Consortium for Climate Risk in the Urban Northeast (CCRUN) serves stakeholder needs in assessing and managing risks from climate variability and change. It is currently also the only RISA team with a principal focus on climate change adaptation in urban settings. As such, CCRUN is designed to address the complex challenges that are associated with densely populated, highly interconnected urban areas, such as: urban heat island effects; poor air quality; intense coastal development, and multifunctional settlement along inland waterways; complex overlapping institutional jurisdictions; integrated infrastructure systems; and highly diverse, and in some cases, fragile socio-economic communities.
CCRUN’s initial projects are focused in three broad sectors: Water, Coasts, and Health. Research in each of these sectors is linked through the cross-cutting themes of climate change and community vulnerability, the latter of which is especially important in considerations of environmental justice and equity. CCRUN’s stakeholder-driven approach to research can therefore support investigations of the impacts of a changing climate, population growth, and urban and economic policies on the social, racial and ethnic dimensions of livelihoods and of communities in the urban Northeast. Disadvantaged socio-economic groups have been particularly underserved in the area of climate change, and one of CCRUN’s long-term goals is the building of adaptive capacity among such groups to current and future climate extremes.
CCRUN is supported by the NOAA Climate Program Office’s Regional Integrated Sciences and Assessments (RISA) Program.