Planet Texas 2050 Research

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.

Spanning across a wide range of climatic regimes, Texas relies on water extracted from rivers and aquifers within its own borders. Climate change and population growth are adding unprecedented stress on Texas waters and other types of natural resources.

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.

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. 

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

This project investigated the role that nonprofits based in Texas with an environmental focus play in securing a future that benefits all state residents. 

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. 

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.

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. 

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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).