Burlington Standard

The town of Underhill, Vermont, is considering climate-change recommendations developed and presented by some intrepid University of Vermont (UVM) students. As part of an upper-level seminar in the Department of Geography and Geosciences. and under the leadership of their professor, Lesley-Ann Dupigny-Giroux, Ph.D., the students worked in collaboration with town, state, and federal agencies this past fall to come up with a plan to aid Underhill in natural-hazard mitigation in the face of our changing climate. With environmental challenges such as extreme drought, destructive flooding, and massive storms becoming more frequent, this type of class couldn’t be timelier. 

Leah Jaffe, a senior majoring in geography and physics, says the class instantly drew her in because she is interested in a career related to natural-hazards planning. “This is the second climatology class I’ve taken with Professor Dupigny-Giroux,” she says, “so I was excited to build on what I’d learned in the past and create something that would have impacts beyond the classroom.” She adds that this kind of research is important because Vermont is already feeling the effects of climate change—and those effects will only increase in the coming years. 

In her role as state climatologist, a position she’s held since 1997, Dupigny-Giroux often gives talks that provide climate change–related information, data, understanding, and interpretation to towns, municipalities, and state agencies. “The important thing to remember here is that service and applied climatology run on relationships,” Dupigny-Giroux says. (These are two sub-branches of climatology.) The relationship with Underhill began with Sandy Wilmot, then-chair of the town’s Climate Change Task Force. Dupigny-Giroux had worked with Wilmot for many years when Wilmot was with the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources. In May of 2022, Wilmot asked Dupigny-Giroux to give one of her talks to the Underhill task force. 

Fast-forward to August, when Dupigny-Giroux was preparing to teach her Climatology and Natural Hazards class. “I often teach it in a service-learning environment,” she says, “which involves working directly with someone in the community who has either a specific research project or an articulated need.” Dupigny-Giroux reached out to Wilmot and asked her about doing a service-learning activity with the town of Underhill.

“When Dr. Dupigny-Giroux presented the idea of having her class work with Underhill, we could see all sorts of wonderful connections,” Wilmot says. Several of the task-force members had worked with Dupigny-Giroux on professional projects and “were sure that whatever the students produced would be of high quality,” Wilmot adds.

Wilmot came to the second day of class and gave a presentation on Underhill’s geographic features and government. She also clearly explained what she would like to see at the end of the project: aspects of carbon sequestration, additional hazards to be considered in the context of Underhill, moving-water considerations, and so on. “This was a bright, engaged class that asked good questions and seemed truly vested in assisting the town,” she says.

After Wilmot’s presentation, Dupigny-Giroux and the students brainstormed which pieces might fit in best with the class and which pieces they might not be able to address. The class then divided into four groups, each focused on a different environmental aspect—vegetation, mass wasting, water, and miscellaneous—and went out into the field to get a better sense of the landscape.

Cherie Morse, Ph.D., also a professor in the Department of Geography and Geosciences, accompanied the class on their field trip to Underhill in September. “Professor Morse was instrumental in helping us to read the cultural geography of the landscape and understand aspects of the tax base, development pattern, and recreation and tourism access within the town’s boundaries,” Dupigny-Giroux says.

Wilmot also led the class on their tour to “locations that would impress upon them the rural character, the hill and valley topography, and the key locations where flooding can occur and has occurred,” she says. Among their stops was a maple-sugaring operation, where the students learned of the significant value of sugar maple to Underhill and how the operation works.

Another stop was at the town hall, where the students were shown all the town maps to get a sense of the physical geography. They then visited an area where a flood had completely taken out a house. It’s one thing to see an area on a map, Dupigny-Giroux notes, “but it’s different to be standing there on Route 15 and have all the cars go by and to know that a house was right there, and the wetland is right over here.”

As part of the water group, Jaffe met for a few sessions with her fellow group members to brainstorm water-related hazards that could affect the town. They then investigated ways that these hazards have been mitigated in other places and evaluated whether those strategies could be adapted for Underhill. “We started out looking at each hazard as a group, and then each of us chose a more specific aspect to look at,” she says. 

Ryan Goodale, a senior majoring in environmental science and mathematics, was part of the vegetation group. “Based on a list of concerns the town of Underhill presented to us,” he says, “we picked four specific issues to focus our research on under the general topic of forest health: riparian buffer health, sugar maple health, invasive species and pests, and soil health.” (A riparian buffer is a natural area adjacent to a forest that’s managed specifically for conservation.) Goodale was personally responsible for researching how invasive species and pests impact Vermont forests and proposing possible solutions.

Four state agencies worked with the students on this collaborative project, including the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources (ANR)—specifically, the Department of Fish and Wildlife and the Climate Action Office—the Vermont Agency of Transportation, the Vermont Department of Health, and Vermont Emergency Management. ANR’s participation broadened the conversation, bringing in how biodiversity fits with transportation and infrastructure and how things like changing water movement in a changing climate all fit together. The Agency of Transportation provided a planning tool that two of the four groups of students worked with . A social-vulnerability tool and framework offered by the Department of Health proved critical in helping the students understand all the ways to think about vulnerability—economic, household, individual—and how they all come together. After the class ended, the Vermont Emergency Management offered internships to two of the students to work with them on the FEMA-mandated State Hazard Mitigation Plan. 

The class also worked with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Climate Program Office and its U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit, which offers a framework that towns, municipalities, and states can use to identify where their vulnerabilities are and then create steps to make systems less vulnerable. The Windham Regional Commission was able to help the students understand both the feasibility and constraints involved when working at a town level. ESRI, a geographic information system software company based in California, helped the students learn how to do mapping in the field.

Jaffe says all the time she spent reading other hazard-mitigation plans taught her a lot about how knowledge about climate-hazard mitigation is turned into something tangible. “Before this class, I knew that there were actions that needed to be carried out,” she says, “but I couldn’t quite conceptualize how to do that. Now I have a much better understanding of the way that hazard-mitigation strategies are implemented.”

Goodale says the class gave him real-world exposure relating to his academic studies. “I found great value in contributing to a proposed hazard-mitigation plan for a local Vermont town as I got to experience the strategies, issues, and solutions firsthand,” he says. He adds that this class attracted him primarily because he was interested in learning how many of the topics he had previously studied in climate and weather classes manifested in careers. After taking the class, he is now seriously considering going into a career in hazard-mitigation planning and would like to continue to do research with it.

The students made their presentations to the Underhill task force in December, and “knocked everyone’s socks off,” according to Dupigny-Giroux. She gave the students’ 88-page report to an eager Underhill task force in January.

According to Wilmot, who has since retired but still volunteers her time and expertise to Underhill, where she lives, “there were many details of the students’ presentations that will definitely influence our work in planning for climate impacts.” She adds that involving students in addressing town concerns provided a fresh perspective and offered resources the town doesn’t normally have at its disposal. “They provided impressive findings that were so specific to our town situation.” 

Goodale says he was most surprised by the complexity of the entire process. “It’s not just one person making decisions but rather a collaborative effort across state organizations to deduce the best possible hazard-mitigation actions,” he says.

Jaffe adds, “It’s easy to feel overwhelmed and hopeless about our future in the face of climate change, but projects like these remind me that there are still actions we can take to protect our communities.”

Dupigny-Giroux, who was recently appointed to serve a three-year term on the Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, saw this class as a potential model. “I wanted it to be a proof of concept on how to create a working, meaningful relationship between students in a service-learning class and community partners in a way that allows lessons learned to be extracted and the final product to be used immediately,” she says. Because they were able to accomplish this, now when she gives a talk and explains what they’re doing for the town of Underhill, other towns often express interest, creating a ripple effect. She adds, “There’s interest around the state at the town level because we now know how to do it, and I think that’s critically important.”

Several of the students noted that this experience brought together their entire time at UVM. “They had never had a class where the content, the application of that content, how people are going to use it, and how to think deeply about communication all came together,” Dupigny-Giroux says. “It really and truly was a capstone experience for them.” She adds that it was an amazing, humbling experience for her to be able to walk alongside them through the project and to see their final presentations, which exceeded everyone’s expectations and made a valuable contribution toward climate-change mitigation—in Underhill and beyond.

Original source can be found here.