UMass Amherst Campus Resilience Planning
Amherst, MA
Linnean was brought on by the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2019 to work with the University’s Campus Resilience Task Force in developing a climate resilience plan. Linnean and the task force collaborated with faculty, students, and campus administration through a wide range of activities to understand and characterize campus vulnerability and goals for resilience. Highlights included collaborating with a graduate student planning course to lead campus interviews, developing a campus survey and participatory mapping platform, hosting an open house with interactive and mixed-media activities, as well as leading a workshop where a range of campus representatives identified goals and metrics for measuring resilience across a set of focus areas.
In 2020, the outbreak of the COVID pandemic disrupted all activities on campus, and put the project on pause. By the time the project started up again, the campus and the task force had a reframed vision of what it would take to build resilience in a holistic and comprehensive way.
Linnean worked with the task force to build out a framework designed to help integrate resilience thinking across activities, systems, and operations on campus. The framework asks specific planning questions tied to eight different dimensions of resilience (e.g., redundancy, diverseness, learning capacity, etc.), as applied to five focus areas (health and wellbeing, infrastructure and ecosystems, local and campus community, social equity and governance, and leadership and strategy). Linnean built out an ArcGIS StoryMap with guidance and downloadable tools for implementing the framework within any department, office, or planning initiative on campus.