Our Work Is Local, but Our Impact Is Global

Reexamining the past to inspire a new vision of human resilience and effective response to the climate crisis.

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.

The goal of this project is to build an AI system using crowd-sourced data to help predict the health impacts of different neighborhood environments.  

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).