A message from Heather Houser, outgoing Chair of Planet Texas 2050.

The Planet Texas 2050 theme organizing committee shows its support for the City of Austin's Climate Equity Plan. We also request that the UT Austin President’s Sustainability Steering Committee integrate climate equity-related goals and strategies into the university Sustainability Master Plan.

Our dirty, smelly wastewater could hold something very valuable: the key to tracking COVID-19 hot spots in Austin before diagnostic testing is able to identify outbreaks. The novel coronavirus is a fecally shed virus, which means its signature shows up in our waste. Because of this, University of Texas researchers are hoping they can track its spread by studying human feces.

In a first-of-its-kind study, UT, the City of Austin, the community organization Go! Austin/Vamos! Austin, and St. Edward’s University, will creatively examine long-standing problems in neighborhoods that have worse outcomes in response to climate-related issues because of inadequate infrastructure and investment.

Casey Boyle and Craig Campbell developed a project, Greeting Cards for the Anthropocene, to promote collaboration across disciplines, using greeting cards as a basis for discussing climate change.

Texas is no stranger to drought seasons. Both the 1950s and 2010s saw long dry spells that threatened the way of life for people who call the state home. However, these intense droughts could be nothing compared to what Texas may see in the future, new research published in the journal Earth’s Future finds.

The landscape along the U.S.-Mexico border has changed drastically over the past 150 years — from fencing to surveillance infrastructure to damming and hydraulic projects.

UT researchers have been working with Southeast Texas Regional Advisory Council (SETRAC) over the past three years to build a more efficient model that would show, very clearly, where flooding is expected during major storms. SETRAC could then use that model to decide where to stage assets like ambulances and how to evacuate patients.

As Texas’s population is expected to nearly double in the next 30 years, Planet Texas 2050 grand challenge researchers find it important to understand what effect rapid urbanization will have on the natural environment.