The 50th anniversary of Earth Day offers Planet Texas 2050 a chance to reflect on how defining moments can mobilize millions to envision more just and healthy futures. How crises, whether they be COVID-19 or climate change, can rouse us to redress inequities and ensure the vitality of all people and places as we plan for the days, years, and decades ahead.

Students and faculty at UT's College of Fine Arts came together to construct a fully operational escape room prototype that places participants in the shoes of scientists on an observational platform in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico during a devastatingly powerful hurricane that’s intensifying quickly.

It is imperative that we use technology to maximize the best and minimize the negative parts of the human condition. But in order to do this... companies must act sustainably. And in this case, ‘sustainable’ refers to ethical practices.

We're designing virtual reality simulations that will help people see what their city could look like in 30 years, given a massively increased population and a changing climate. Our aim is to make scientific findings accessible and relevant to people and to encourage informed discussions that can help us make better decisions about our future.

Planet Texas 2050 sponsored Seyi Odufuye, a UT studio art major, to join a 12-day ClimateForce expedition in the Arctic with environmentalist and explorer Robert Swan. His ClimateForce team is dedicated to significantly reducing carbon emissions in the next five years, and students from around the world join him each summer to see firsthand one of the planet’s most impressive yet delicate ecosystems. These are Seyi’s thoughts and experiences from that journey.

David Schnyer is the inaugural faculty chair of Whole Communities –Whole Health. The team is partnering with families, schools, and community organizations in Central Texas to build a more complete picture of health. A year into the quest, Schnyer reflects on the team’s progress and looks to the road ahead.

The Good Systems team here at UT aims to help technologists stop to think about what they are doing. We’ve embarked on an 8-year mission to design AI technologies that are driven by human values and that benefit society. We’ve done so because we believe it is ethically irresponsible to think about AI only in terms of what it can do; we believe it is even more important to consider what AI should — and should not — do.

Tim Hwang, a lawyer, writer, and researcher working at the intersection of emerging technologies and society, says this isn’t realistic; machine learning and AI aren’t as they’re portrayed in the movies. Hwang is the former director of the Harvard-MIT Ethics and Governance AI Initiative and has previously served Google’s global public policy lead on AI.

For scientists, building relationships means getting out of our heads and into our hearts. It means bringing our full self to the way we go about our quest to understand the world.

Paul Adams, a professor the Department of Geography and the Environment at The University of Texas at Austin, has met with farmers in the Panhandle and West Texas. He wanted to hear how they talk about things like the weather, climate, and the water they have available for their crops. If we don’t understand how people communicate about the ground they live on, we’ll have little success finding common ground to propel us toward a more resilient future.