As we approach the first anniversary of last year’s unprecedented and costly hurricane season, we must build preparedness into everything we do, and we must do it together. Extreme weather events, from droughts to heat waves to floods from hurricanes, will become more frequent and more intense. The health and well-being of all of us are at stake.

As the Trans-Pecos continues to be a focal point of energy sprawl, we need to focus on the potential environmental impacts of these activities and how all stakeholders can work together to manage the confluence of substantial industrial activity in this rural and fragile part of Texas.

The dominant languages of climate change have been scientific, technological and economic. But these languages alone cannot speak to the socially contingent beliefs and values that are at the root of human activities altering our planet. We need the knowledge the humanities and arts produce to prevent narratives such as Bacigalupi’s from becoming our reality. We must build common languages between architecture and archaeology, poetry and paleoclimatology, government and genetics.

Scientists from 13 different universities in the U.S. and Canada have descended upon a small house at the J.J. Pickle Research Campus and have brought with them the most sophisticated air pollution measurement equipment on earth to study indoor air quality as part of a major research effort known as HOMEChem (House Observations of Microbial and Environmental Chemistry).

Much of Texas and the southwest U.S. are in some stage of drought or abnormally dry conditions, now is a good time to take a look at land degradation in our own state and at what role Planet Texas 2050 can play in helping to understand and combat the problem.

We are a group of faculty and researchers from The University of Texas at Austin working with communities across the state to ensure this is a healthy, secure, just, and ecologically and economically vibrant place to live in the year 2050. This is UT Austin’s first grand challenge — an enormous, interdisciplinary research project that’s trying to tackle some of our society’s most pressing environmental and humanitarian crises.