Our Mission
The Climate Adaptation Research Center (CARC) strives to facilitate multidisciplinary academic research, to engage with communities, businesses and policymakers, and to provide diverse learning experiences in order to identify, evaluate and advance solutions to adapt to a changing climate and deliver a resilient and prosperous world.
Our Vision
The UC Davis CARC’s vision is to lead climate adaptation research and education, as well as inform policy to achieve a world where community, industry,and government leaders have the knowledge and training they need to build a resilient, equitable,and thriving world in the face of climate change
What we do
The CARC at UC Davis brings together faculty, research staff, and students conducting scientific, engineering, health, socioeconomic, and policy research on the actions across human and natural systems required to adequately respond to global climate change. The Center members support interdisciplinary collaborations between universities, governments, industry,and communities to scientifically assess exposures to climate-driven environmental and human-based hazards across multiple scales; detect and attribute risks to ecosystems, the built environment, and governance arrangements; understand the dimensions of socioeconomic, political, cultural, ecological, and infrastructural vulnerability that lead to the unequal distribution of adaptive capacity; and catalyze comprehensive climate adaptation action across local, state, national, and global levels through sustained research-policy partnerships and research-informed solutions.
Climate adaptation research and education at UC Davis spans the physical, natural, engineering, health, and social sciences, and involves multiple disciplines spanning, e.g., from civil engineering to atmospheric science, public health, environmental policy, community development, and urban and regional planning.Our research informs, e.g., new technologies in modeling climate risks and impacts, methods for enhancing resilience of buildings and infrastructure, as well as innovative approaches to addressing socioeconomic and health inequities in the face of increasingly extreme weather, precipitation change, sea level rise, and other slow-or rapid-onset changes. Many departments, laboratories, faculty, staff, and students at UC Davis collaborate through the CARC to support industry, state and federal governments, multilateral institutions, and nonprofit organizations in developing more innovative climate adaptation solutions. The CARC also educates the public and the broader academic community through conferences, outreach, and scholarly publications.
Our History
Established in 2019 by a cohort of UC Davis researchers concerned with the world's adaptation to the new and ever changing climate.
*Photo Credit Josh Grant, UC Davis Air Quality Research Center