A Town-Gown Partnership Focused on Climate Resilience

Since 2022, students from Agnes Scott College have helped place 36 heat sensors across their campus and surrounding Decatur, Ga., in an effort to help researchers analyze and mitigate the risks of extreme heat waves in the area.

But the project—one of several initiatives of the joint Climate Resilience Plan partnership between Agnes Scott and Decatur—also demonstrates the power of town-gown collaboration in addressing climate change, an area of mounting concern to institutions and their constituents.

“You can only be as sustainable as the community where you are. Agnes Scott could have its own resilience plan, but we’re not insulated,” said Kimberly Reeves, executive director of the college’s center for sustainability. “We have these connections to Decatur, metro Atlanta and our broader region. If we’re able to build capacity and learn from other people’s experiences and successes, that’s where the best practices come into play.”

Agnes Scott first began working with the city to implement the joint climate resilience plan in 2021. But the college has long been committed to sustainability.

In 2007, it adopted a carbon-neutrality goal; since then it’s halved its carbon footprint and is on track to reach neutrality by 2037. Much of that success occurred after 2014, when Agnes Scott became one of the first 30 institutions to sign the resilience commitment put forth by Second Nature, a nonprofit aimed at accelerating climate action in and through higher education. The group’s resilience commitment includes a provision that requires colleges to work with local governments to assess the community’s climate vulnerabilities and use that information to develop a climate action plan that engages all students in and out of the classroom.

At Agnes Scott, that work got underway in 2015 with the formation of the Climate Resilience Plan Task Force, which included representatives from the city and the college, as well as community partners such as Columbia Theological Seminary and Georgia Interfaith Power & Light. Over the next several years, the task force undertook a vulnerability assessment, mapped community assets and published the final Climate Resilience Plan, which is designed to “both prepare for increasingly severe climate events and to ensure the community has the resources needed to respond to these events.” It also aims to “move beyond limited funding and incentives for climate response in Georgia, create new solutions, and jointly find funding support when needed.”

So far, it’s working—even as the Trump administration has cut federal funding for climate research.

‘Collective Action’ Required

“Climate resilience requires collective action. This isn’t something a city can do alone,” said Cara Scharer, assistant city manager for Decatur’s public works department. “The partnership has helped us build our capacity around data collection for grants and brainstorm about different projects or funding opportunities across both organizations.”

Since the collaboration began in 2021, Agnes Scott and the city have secured five new grants and completed or started 75 percent of the new initiatives outlined in the plan.

In addition to installing extreme heat sensors throughout the city, their efforts have included collaborating with the Atlanta Regional Commission to create a digital twin of Decatur that will allow experts to run extreme heat and mitigation scenarios, installing flood monitors in nearby Sugar Creek, producing a Decatur-specific energy efficiency and electrification guide, hosting “science sprints” for undergraduates to analyze local climate resilience and justice data, and re-establishing annual Community Emergency Response Team training for adults and teens in Decatur.

Students have been involved in all of it, including at least 115 who have gained professional development experience through internships or coursework that intersects with implementing the climate resilience plan.

“Being able to bring our colleagues in from the city just makes the work real,” Reeves said. “It’s not only that we’re reading about [climate-related issues] and that it’s some problem that other communities are facing. Rather, the hands-on learning shows that it’s happening here and we’re part of the solution.”

Kimberly Reeves/Agnes Scott College

For Indie Lorick, a senior who helped install heat sensors and flood monitors in Decatur as part of an internship with the sustainability center, such opportunities have deepened her understanding of what’s involved in implementing a comprehensive climate resilience plan.

“It took me a while to catch on to just how big the project was,” she said. “I’ve taken sustainability and biology classes, but this gave me the opportunity to look at those topics with a wider lens.”

The success of Agnes Scott’s plan—as both educational tool and climate resilience engine—hasn’t gone unnoticed. Last month, it was one of six colleges that received an annual award (known as the Climate Luminary Honors program) from Second Nature for “advancing bold, effective, and equitable climate solutions on their campuses and in partnership with surrounding communities.”

The strong relationships Agnes Scott has built with its local partners solidified the college’s win, said Timothy Carter, president of Second Nature.

“The beautiful thing about Agnes Scott’s plan is that from the beginning they brought in their community partners to co-create the solutions. Too often, higher education thinks they know what’s best for the community,” Carter said. “Instead, the resilience framework creates these durable solutions that don’t end when a workshop ends.”