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flagship projects

Planet Texas 2050 Research

Planet Texas 2050 researchers are committed to developing programs and policy recommendations that will improve Texas’ adaptability and build its resilience. To do that, we have launched a set of six innovative “flagship projects,” which leverage the talents and expertise of our interdisciplinary research network to tackle what they see as critical issues when it comes to helping Texas respond to rapid growth and climate change.

Flagship Projects

Past Projects  


AI Modeling
AI-Enabled Model Integration

Developing new technologies that combine and analyze data in new ways helps us make accurate predictions about hurricanes and other disasters, resulting in better, more informed decisions.

Equitable cities art
Equitable and Regenerative Cities

Designing community resilience hubs where people can go during disasters — and that use circular economy principles like green infrastructure, water conservation, and solar or wind energy.

Frontline partnerships
Frontline Community Partnerships

Working with frontline communities allows us to better understand the effects that carbon emissions have on health, as well as the challenges and opportunities behind decarbonization.

Networks for hazard preparedness
Networks for Hazard Preparedness and Response

Finely tuned flood maps with specially designed street maps and social vulnerability information will help agencies respond to disasters faster and allocate resources better.

Biodiversity Art
Resilient Species and Ecosystems

A remote network of visual and acoustic sensors detects environmental and biodiversity-related information that helps us understand and track changes in Texas’ natural habitats.

Ancient Resilience
Stories of Ancient Resilience

Looking to ancient civilizations helps us understand how resilience, in its many forms, has influenced human choices, movement, and development. 

Past Projects

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Planet Texas 2050

This project explored how theater and community engagement can help develop a context-specific understanding of climate change to empower Texan communities and individuals to become resilient and adapt to a changing climate.

Planet Texas 2050

The DOLCe (Digital Object Life Cycle) project is a collaboration between University of Texas Libraries, Texas Advanced Computing Center, and the Texas Digital Library to develop a necessary infrastructure component to facilitate the publication and preservation of data from Planet Texas 2050 and other Bridging Barriers projects.

Planet Texas 2050

The importance of communicating the dangers resulting from impending climate collapse is perhaps the most vital issue to be communicated. This project seeks to explore the greeting card as an everyday cultural form that can be used to express ideas and connect people around the subject of climate change. 

Planet Texas 2050

The overall objective of this project was to investigate relationships among climates, cultures and ecosystems over the 20,000 years in Texas.

Planet Texas 2050

The record of human attempts to deal with environmental and demographic challenges is like a library of completed experiments. We can see which ones were successful and which ones weren’t, and we can trace the consequences of societal choices over hundreds of years. 

Planet Texas 2050

This research project developed an evacuation scheduling algorithm that can determine optimal planning for large-scale, complex settings to minimize delays, with particular attention paid to the benefits of autonomous vehicles in terms of cost and efficiency.

Planet Texas 2050

The Texas Metro Observatory (TMO) is a communication and data platform dedicated to sharing information and ideas about Texas’s communities, understanding common problems related to urbanization processes in these communities, and developing solutions across the state’s metropolitan areas. 

Planet Texas 2050

The Texas Futures VR Experience project transformed results from several Planet Texas 2050-funded research projects into an immersive, entertaining, and educational VR experience. 

Planet Texas 2050

Texas Water Stories studied and produced narratives about water in Texas’ past, present, and future. The project illustrated the diverse symbolic ties between water, environmental perception, and environmental change due to the climate crisis and shows how water is a central element of human and other-than-human environmental relations.

Planet Texas 2050

We don’t all breathe the same air. Urban air pollution varies sharply owing to unevenly distributed pollution sources. While fine-scale spatial variation in air quality has profound implications for public health and environmental equity, air pollution measurements are routinely collected at only a few locations in every city.

Planet Texas 2050

This project examined how the cities of Houston and San Antonio are preparing for climate change and addressing existing environmental justice issues.z

Planet Texas 2050

The Urban Watershed Evolution project was a collaborative, multi-disciplinary approach toward understanding the impacts of urbanization on natural waterways within the Austin area to work towards establishing a framework for policies and governance that increased ecological and societal resilience in urban centers.

Planet Texas 2050

The µP-STREAM (Micro-controller Platform Sending Telemetry Real-Time for Earth’s Adaptive Models) project is part of Planet Texas 2050’s larger cyberinfrastructure project (see DataX, DOLCe, and Integrated Modelling for Adaptive Decision Making).