Worcester, United States of America
The Community Climate Adaptation MS degree program is a collaborative, research-based, joint-degree program offered through WPI’s Department of Integrative & Global Studies (DIGS) and the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering (CEE). Students in the program will work within teams to use engineering, social science, and physical and biological science skills and expertise to address challenges of climate change impacts and capacities to adapt in communities around the world.
Climate change is one of the Global Grand Challenges of our time. This problem doesn’t separate well into silos; rather, climate change is perhaps best understood as an intensifier of a great number of existing problems. Communities from Worcester to Cape Town, and from Melbourne to Venice, are developing plans to help protect people and infrastructure from the impacts of a changing climate.
From the Indian Himalaya to the Arabian deserts and from Icelandic glaciers to the Costa Rican cloud forest, the changing climate impacts each corner of the globe and is expanding many familiar community challenges to a scope and intensity unprecedented in historic memory.