Climate-Ready Hudson

Preparing local communities in the Hudson Valley for bad weather and climate events

Climate-Ready Hudson is a community science project funded by the Hudson River Foundation and led by the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry in close collaboration with partners in the Town of Poughkeepsie and the City of Hudson.

We want you to get involved as a community researcher and help us form questions, collect project data, and formulate findings. All training will be provided, and we can reimburse travel costs!

Project Goals

The goal of the Climate-ready Hudson (CRH) project is to help ensure that all Poughkeepsie and Hudson residents, including those from historically marginalized communities, are well-informed and prepared for negative weather events such as heat waves, floods, or storms. Using a survey, interviews, and community events, the project will gather data directly from residents to ensure their needs are addressed.

Town of Poughkeepsie Virtual Community Event!

Town of Poughkeepsie Residents, we want to hear from you! Join Climate-Ready Hudson for a virtual community meeting on October 6 from 6:00–7:30 PM to share your experiences and perspectives on local bad weather and climate impacts. Connect with SUNY researchers and members of the Town’s Climate Smart Task Force while helping us better understand how we can build a more climate-ready community. Attendees will receive a $20 gift card as a thank-you for their participation.

Want to join us? Hit the button below to register!

How to Get Involved

Our Research Questions

1. Finding Vulnerability:

Within identified climate justice communities, who are the most vulnerable populations that are currently affected by or are at the highest risk of experiencing negative climate change impacts within the partner municipalities?

2. Residents' Risk Awareness:

How do members of the most vulnerable populations understand climate risk and obtain information on risk planning and response when disasters and other climate-related impacts happen?

3. Residents' Resilience Needs:

What do members of the most vulnerable populations identify as their specific needs for building their own and their communities' resilience?

4. Communicating Risks:

What are the most effective ways for partner municipalities to communicate climate risk and to engage these vulnerable populations in the co-production of potential solutions for building equitable resilience?

Why it matters

Climate change and sea level rise have been addressed in the Hudson Valley for over fifteen years, concentrating on the loss of wetlands as urban development, railways, and geomorphology provide little space for these important ecosystems to migrate. Over time, hurricanes and other severe storms that have brought massive amounts of rain in short period have posed threats to ecosystems and human communities alike. Flooding in the absence of rain is also increasing, posing major risks to cities and towns along the estuary.

Despite these dangers, there are an insufficient number of academic studies on climate resilience in the Middle and Upper Hudson as compared to the Lower Hudson. Sustainability plans have emphasized the need for environmental justice considerations in resilience planning for these areas. Thus, our hope is to provide the literature needed to plan in conjunction with the needs and desires of the communities at risk.

Core of Collaboration

Community Resilience Champions

These two project-trained residents local to the climate justice communities will act as liaisons between the research team and municipal partners on one hand, and Climate Justice communities on the other. We understand that the entire communities' interests may not be uniformly represented by these two individuals, but it is crucial to our mission that interested citizens be directly represented by their peers.

Community

Co-Investigators

Interested members of the identified climate justice communities will be trained to assist with data collection and analysis at sessions held at local libraries and community centers, as well as online.

Project Partners

A transdisciplinary research team of researchers, policy-makers, public officials, planners, activists, and students which includes experts in the fields of climate change adaptation, environmental communication, and planning, as well as local residents with knowledge of the local needs and challenges.

Take Our Research Survey!

Climate-Ready Hudson is inviting all local community members to share their experiences with bad weather and climate impacts by completing our research survey. Your responses will help us better understand community experiences, preparedness, and needs as we work toward building more climate-ready communities. Ready to share your experience? Hit the button below to take the survey!

Take the Survey

Methods:

Community Science

Any research that aims to help prepare local communities for weather events must explicitly prioritize the needs, views and knowledges of the most marginalized groups and individuals. To do so, we follow the ‘community science’ method (Sittenfeld et al. 2022). Some of its key principles include being community-driven or -controlled, focusing on place and local values, and aiming to empower participants, transform their learning, foster local leadership, build local trust, treat local knowledge as an asset, and maintain connections to local governance structures, all while ensuring sufficient capacity and resources (Charles et al., 2020; Freschi et al., 2024; Groulx et al., 2021).

We will use an online survey, interviews with experts and long-time residents, and community events to collect data necessary to answer our research questions.

We want to involve residents in setting project priorities, collecting the data, formulating findings, and evaluating project progress. If you’re interested in getting involved, please fill out this form. We provide training and reimburse travel costs!

We will also conduct semi-structured expert interviews with municipal employees, including planners, scientists, and outreach specialists, as well as the Conservation Advisory Council, Climate Task Force members, and representatives of relevant local community-based organizations.