The host city for last year’s ESA meeting, Louisville, Kentucky, is aiming to become a leader in climate action and resilience, addressing what its mayor deemed as a “climate emergency.” Louisville is in the midst of a multi-year initiative to address climate and environmental issues within its city. The Earth Stewardship Initiative undertook its fourth demonstration project in conjunction with the 2019 ESA Louisville meeting, uniting graduate students, ecologists, city managers, designers, and urban planners in a synergistic effort to address some of the most significant issues faced by the city. City sustainability managers identified four key topics that were addressed by the ESI project: park connectivity and access with considerations of public health and contamination; urban heat island; watersheds, water quality, and park connectivity and recreation; and public health and infrastructure flooding. Like many other areas across the country, Louisville’s environmental issues disproportionately impact low-income and minority neighborhoods, and social equity concerns were inherent within each topic. Nineteen graduate students were divided between the topics and spent the duration of the ESA meeting working with city officials, ecologists, and designers to develop novel, integrated solutions to their assigned topic. To further the connection between research and development, students were introduced to designed experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of a designed urban solution over time.
Results/Conclusions
Graduate student participants reported a high level of satisfaction with the hands-on interdisciplinary experiences provided through the ESI project, particularly emphasizing the benefit of working directly with designers, city managers, and community members. Students recognized both the benefit and need for additional training in effective communication skills beyond the scientific community, highlighting the importance of providing graduate students and early-level ecologists with an immersive experience of this type. However, the feasibility of implementing viable solutions to some of the topics became a major factor in students’ motivation and development of final deliverables, indicating shortcomings in topics development and refinement from the data and information provided to the ESI staff by the city managers that reduced the overall effectiveness of the program for some participants.