Extreme events call for a resilient urban SETS infrastructure

Urbanization is increasing and climate change is an emerging threat. These two realities of the 21st century are on a collision course. To ensure the resilience of desired attributes of cities in the face of this impending collision,  a new concept of infrastructure that integrates social, ecological, and technological (SETS) elements is required.

About Nancy B. Grimm
Nancy B. Grimm is Professor of Ecology and Senior Sustainability Scientist at Arizona State University, where she studies the interaction of climate variation and change, human activities, and ecosystems. Her interdisciplinary research in both urban and stream ecosystems has focused on disturbance, resilience, and biogeochemical processes. From 1997-2016 Grimm directed the Central Arizona–Phoenix Long-Term Ecological Research program, an interdisciplinary study of the Phoenix metropolitan region, with pioneering studies of urban social-ecological systems that conceptually expanded ecology.

She currently co-directs a Sustainability Research Network focused on urban resilience to weather-related extreme events. Grimm has been President of the Ecological Society of America and is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the Ecological Society of America. She is an editor for Earth’s Future, a past program director for the U.S. National Science Foundation and senior scientist for the U.S. Global Change Research Program, author or co-author of over 170 scientific publications, and a lead author for two chapters of the U.S. National Climate Assessment, released in 2014.