Seeking Solutions: Stony Brook's Role in Collaborative Climate Action
Through its collaboration with The New York Climate Exchange, Stony Brook University serves as a vital hub connecting academic research with community action for developing and deploying dynamic solutions to our global climate crisis. This partnership plays a key role in transforming climate research into practical solutions and community engagement.
As the anchor institution of The Exchange, Stony Brook is not only helping to shape and develop a hub for climate solutions on Governors Island, but facilitating important collaboration in its mission of unlocking climate solutions at speed and scale.
Kevin Reed, Stony Brook’s associate provost for climate and sustainability and a professor in the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences (SoMAS), serves as chief climate scientist at The Exchange.
“From a leadership perspective, the president of Stony Brook is the chair of The New York Climate Exchange’s board, which includes other members of Stony Brook leadership,” Reed said. “But it’s not just that the president represents the university, Stony Brook is an active partner that’s helping to shape leadership at the board level.”
Reed said that through the campus-wide initiative Collaborative for the Earth (C4E) and the Office of Climate Sustainability Programming within the Provost’s Office, which he leads, Stony Brook is fostering discussion around programmatic areas, potential research ideas and future initiatives. C4E was established in September 2023 on the heels of the university becoming the anchor for The Exchange. The goal was to create a cross-campus community of Stony Brook’s academic leaders in areas related to climate change and the environment.
“Stony Brook faculty and staff can propose potential collaborations directly to The Exchange,” Reed said, adding that The Exchange has a portal in which partners can submit ideas or activities that they think are important or should be considered. In this way, he said, the partnership amplifies impact and accelerates solutions.
“The obvious example is our internship program,” Reed said. “The New York Climate Exchange’s internship program is truly a collaboration between academic institutions, and we identify students that apply to the program who then work directly with the community partners and nonprofits as part of the partnership. That’s where the interns actually work.”
“Our job is to connect students with opportunities,” said Urszula Zalewski, director of Experiential Education in the Career Center at Stony Brook. “We started working with different people in this area, including SoMAS faculty, to create a platform that will let students apply for different types of internships and other experiential learning programs much earlier, starting from their freshman year and extending to seniors and graduate students.”
Zalewski said her group is currently working to place students on Governors Island for the summer.
“Students are matched with climate-related organizations and these are paid positions,” she said. “We collaborate with New York State and other organizations. The magic happens when we connect students with these opportunities.”
Through this program, 15 students will get a paid internship on Governors Island in 2025. Reed added that the interns work on specific projects and activities related to the needs of the nonprofit they are matched with, working in the broad area of climate and sustainability.
“The Exchange administers and helps run the program, which also includes career and skills development,” Reed said. “The interns get to meet and work with other corporate partners. It’s a joint initiative of all of the partners within The New York Climate Exchange.”
Another initiative, said Reed, was the AI Innovation Challenge, a competition that gives students an opportunity to experience and harness the power of technology- and data-driven solutions development.
The New York Climate Exchange, in partnership with its academic institutions, including Stony Brook, and some of its corporate partners, launched the Innovation Challenge for student groups in 2024 to identify and pitch ideas for storm water resilience projects that could leverage artificial intelligence.
“The idea was to base it around one of the topical areas within The Exchange that’s been identified based upon early discussions amongst the partners, one of which is focused on flood resilience in New York City and the surrounding areas,” Reed said. “One of those challenges is stormwater management.”
Through this challenge, students are tasked with creating real solutions for some of the most compelling global environmental challenges of our time. The competition gives students a unique opportunity to target the most pressing climate issues, leveraging a variety of data sources to inform innovative solutions that can help the most impacted communities respond to the challenges they face.
“These are just two examples that illustrate the ways we connect students in very different ways to The New York Climate Exchange,” he said.
Reed also mentioned Climate Week NYC, a September event that draws leaders from around the world in the areas of climate and climate impacts. Climate Week NYC is the largest annual climate event of its kind, held in partnership with the United Nations General Assembly and run in coordination with the United Nations and the City of New York.
“Looking back at last year’s iteration of Climate Week NYC, I am amazed at the scale and diversity of events that The New York Climate Exchange co-hosted with its partners, including Stony Brook, on Governors Island and throughout the city,” Reed said. “It’s a testament to The Exchange’s mission and approach to partnership. I am looking forward to what’s in store for next year.”
Other departments are also working on ways to leverage the new knowledge and technology gained from The Exchange. Derek O’Connor, in Stony Brook’s Office for Research and Innovation, said his group focuses not just on interacting with faculty, but utilizing faculty expertise in ways that engage economic development.
“We’ve gone to professors and practitioners at C4E and talked with them about how they’re looking at aspects of climate change, whether it’s the grid, sustainability and resiliency, aspects of climate change and how that even affects things like offshore wind, solar panels or other aspects of energy,” O’Connor said. “That builds a really nice ecosystem of subject matter expertise within C4E, and they can flow information to us that we can work to put an industry and economic development spin on.”
O’Connor mentioned that workforce readiness is an important part of his mission as the next generation enters a more climate-focused workforce.
“Workforce readiness and engaging the next generation that is undecided about what pathway they want to get on is critical,” he said. “Is going to Stony Brook or another university the answer? Is it a BOCES or a community college? Or is it hands-on training? We’ve found that we’ve had an impact working with the schools here on Long Island, especially high schools and even middle schools, making them aware of this. This next generation is concerned with things like public health, breathable air, drinkable water, but also, what is it going to affect in terms of available resources to them, especially jobs and education.”
“The reality is that the world is one-and-a-half degrees Celsius warmer than it would have been without human-induced greenhouse gasses,” Reed said. “The reality is that our climate is changing and that it’s accelerating. It’s just as important now as it ever was to develop solutions to climate change. We’re living in a climate changed world, and we’re always going to be living in a climate changed world. We have to start to figure out the best resilience and adaptation approaches to that, and Stony Brook and The Exchange are leading the way.”
– Robert Emproto