University of Pennsylvania

Center for Climate Resilience

Building climate resilience through data-driven, evidence-based policy.

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About CCR

The Center for Climate Resilience at the University of Pennsylvania advances the science and practice of climate adaptation and resilience. Our goal is simple: inform the development of scalable, evidence-based climate resilience solutions by catalyzing groundbreaking research and bringing together world-class researchers and policy, community, and industry partners.

A New Climate Reality

The world is warming rapidly, and climate change exhibits enormous systemic inertia. Even if global emissions ceased immediately, significant warming would persist for decades. This warming is already causing significant impacts on human flourishing, whether through disrupted learning, deteriorating health outcomes, or reduced economic livelihoods.

The evidence suggests the need for a two-pronged strategy: aggressive emissions reduction to prevent catastrophic outcomes, alongside strategic investments in climate resilience and adaptation.

Beyond the political headlines around climate, there is an urgent and often overlooked need to develop climate resilience: the ability to prepare for, respond to, and recover from inevitable climate-related events like droughts and floods. Climate resilience is like a healthy immune system that can fend off disease. It takes global warming and its consequences in the near-term as a given and asks how we can prepare our homes, health, and livelihoods to minimize harm and maximize restoration of functioning.

Our Approach

Social systems and public policies can either act as shock absorbers or shock amplifiers in a warming world. Strategic interventions such as early-warning systems, urban heat mitigation, and upgraded public infrastructure might reduce the health and productivity impacts of extreme heat, while inadequate power grids, misaligned incentives, and insufficient insurance coverage can transform manageable weather events into systemic failures with cascading economic losses.

Our approach centers on the often-overlooked social, economic, and psychological dimensions of climate adaptation and resilience, particularly those where, due to behavioral or market failures, private actors may not be expected to adapt fully on their own. Our work applies rigorous evidence-based methodologies to test, design, and scale interventions that address the human elements of climate preparedness.

Policy impact

We are currently working directly with these municipal governments to understand their climate adaptation needs so that we can produce targeted, evidence-based products they can use in decision-making.

Land-Ocean Temperature Index anomaly, January–March 2026, relative to 1951–1980 baseline

New York City

London

Seoul

Melbourne

Land-Ocean Temperature Index anomaly, January–March 2026, relative to the 1951–1980 baseline. Source: NASA GISS.

Our Work

Turning climate evidence into practical adaptation.

CCR advances evidence-based climate adaptation by measuring climate risks, testing practical interventions, and helping institutions act on the best available research.

Current focus From research to practice

A practical adaptation pipeline

Our work moves from diagnosis to evaluation to implementation — connecting rigorous research with the decisions that shape climate resilience.

Measure

Measure climate risk

We quantify how climate hazards affect people, communities, infrastructure, and economic opportunity.

Test

Test adaptation solutions

We study which policies, investments, and institutional responses reduce harm from climate shocks.

Translate

Translate evidence into action

We partner with governments, nonprofits, businesses, and communities to support better resilience decisions.

Current focus

Climate change and human capital

Climate change is already shaping people’s ability to learn, work, stay healthy, and participate fully in economic life. CCR studies how climate shocks affect students, workers, families, and vulnerable communities — and which interventions can reduce those harms.

Our research spans the full range of climate hazards — heat, flooding, wildfire smoke, storms, and drought — but our current portfolio zeroes in on extreme heat as a high-impact, near-term threat to human capital.

Spotlight: extreme heat

Heat and learning

How extreme heat affects student performance, school attendance, and long-term educational opportunity.

Heat and work

How rising temperatures affect worker safety, productivity, earnings, and labor market inequality.

Heat and homelessness

How extreme heat impacts unhoused populations, and which shelter, cooling, and outreach strategies meaningfully reduce harm.

From research to practice

Turning evidence into decisions

CCR works with partners to produce actionable evidence, decision tools, case studies, and training that help institutions prepare for climate impacts.

Partnerships

Applied research partnerships

Collaborative projects with public agencies, nonprofits, community organizations, and private-sector partners.

Decision support

Risk analysis and tools

Tailored evidence products that help institutions understand exposure, prioritize investments, and plan adaptation strategies.

Capacity building

Education and training

Programs that help leaders understand physical climate risk and translate research into concrete decisions.

Team

A multidisciplinary team bridging climate science, economics, public health, and urban policy.

Core team

JP

Jisung Park

Director

CP

Caro Park

Deputy Director

PS

Paul Stainier

Postdoctoral Fellow

HL

Hwiyoung Lee

PhD Candidate

HH

Husel Husile

PhD Candidate

R. Jisung Park, PhD

Director · SP2 · Wharton

R. Jisung Park is an environmental and labor economist at Penn SP2 and Wharton studying how environmental factors shape economic opportunity. His research combines large-scale data and quasi-experimental methods to understand the implications of environmental change for human flourishing, and how effective policy responses may be designed.

His work spans heat and learning, extreme heat and labor market inequality, natural disasters and human capital, and worker and firm adaptation to climate change. His research has been published in leading journals including the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, Journal of Human Resources, and Nature Human Behavior, and has been widely covered in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and the BBC.

He has advised policymakers through Congressional testimony and briefings for the UN, World Bank, and multiple U.S. federal agencies. He holds a PhD in Economics from Harvard, where he was an NSF Fellow, and master's degrees from Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar.

Caro Park, PhD

Deputy Director

Caro is the Deputy Director of the Center for Climate Resilience. She is an applied climate scientist whose research spans climate variability, agricultural systems, and population health outcomes. She has experience working with climate-exposed and resource-constrained communities across Sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, and Australia.

She holds a PhD in Population Health Sciences from Harvard University, where she went on to conduct postdoctoral research in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences. She was previously a Fulbright Public Policy Fellow at the University of Melbourne.

Paul Stainier, PhD

Postdoctoral Fellow · SP2

Paul Stainier is an applied microeconomist and Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Social Policy and Practice at the University of Pennsylvania. His research covers topics in environmental and labor economics, including the welfare costs of extreme weather events, the barriers to climate adaptation, and the determinants of worker compensation.

He holds a PhD in Environment and Sustainability from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Hwiyoung Lee

PhD Candidate · SP2

Hwiyoung Lee is a PhD candidate at the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Policy & Practice. His research focuses on the impact of temperature on labor markets in South Korea.

Husel Husile

PhD Candidate · SP2

Husel is a PhD candidate at the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Policy & Practice. His research focuses on climate adaptation and social resilience in the Global South. He studies how environmental shocks influence social cohesion and social welfare by using large-scale panel data, demographic surveys, and satellite-based climate indicators.

Climate Adaptation Fellows

Angelo dos Santos, PhD

Postdoctoral Fellow

Yabo Vidogbena, PhD

Postdoctoral Fellow

Yujie Zhang, PhD

Postdoctoral Fellow

Chris Wodicka

PhD Candidate

Abishek Nippani

Doctoral Student

Rebecca Pepe

PhD Candidate

Sebastian Prandoni

PhD Student

Heather Do

PhD Student

Mohamad Al-Abbas

PhD Candidate

Nazar Khalid

PhD Candidate

Tingting Rui

PhD Candidate

Angel Bao

Graduate Student

Anicca Liu

Fellow

Lindsay Park

Fellow

Ellery Spikes

Undergraduate Fellow

Ljuben Atov

Undergraduate Fellow

Research community

Climate Adaptation Fellows

A research community at CCR advancing evidence and ideas for a more resilient world. CAF focuses on building evidence for how communities, institutions, and economies adapt to the climate shocks already underway.

CAF brings together researchers from economics, sociology, demography, public policy, and other fields for weekly seminars, project presentations, and collaborative research. Fellows are paired with mentors and supported to carry out applied empirical research projects during their time at Penn.

Academic year

Weekly seminar

Mondays 1:00–2:00 pm
GSE 427, University of Pennsylvania

Summer

Summer seminar series

Schedule TBA
Open to Penn affiliates and collaborators

Advisory Board

We're building an advisory board to help guide CCR's research agenda, strengthen our partnerships, and expand the center's impact.

Coming soon

We're in the process of finalizing board member decisions over the coming months. The advisory board will bring together leaders from urban policy and corporate governance to support CCR's mission of translating research into real-world resilience.

If you're interested in being part of this effort as we build the center, we'd love to hear from you.

Get in touch

Press & engagement

Engagement

Keep up to date on all the activities happening at CCR. From public talks and policy briefings to media coverage and our weekly seminar series, this is where we share what we’ve been working on.

Events Blog

Events & talks

Recent appearances, panels, and media.

Construction workers at sunset — extreme heat and worker safety

Event

It's Getting Hot Out Here: Protecting Workers & Productivity

April 14, 2026 · Kleinman Center for Energy Policy

A panel on extreme heat, worker safety, and productivity featuring Jisung Park and former OSHA administrator David Michaels, moderated by former Biden Council of Economic Advisers member Heather Boushey. The conversation covered econometric estimates of productivity losses, evolving OSHA standards, and what a climate-aware worker protection agenda should look like.

Event

Penn Alumni Climate Resilience Event

2026 · University of Pennsylvania Alumni

A conversation with Penn President J. Larry Jameson and Professor Dorit Aviv (Weitzman School of Design) on extreme heat: what it's already doing to cities and workers, and what we can do about it. Hosted for the Penn alumni community to connect CCR's research to real-world adaptation.

Talk

Seoul Asian Leadership Conference (ALC)

May 2026 · Seoul, South Korea

"The Future of Energy Transition and Climate Regime Reshaped by Geopolitical Crises." A talk at the Asian Leadership Conference connecting CCR's research on cooling access, labor market exposure, and adaptation to the shifting geopolitics of the energy transition across the Asia-Pacific.

Blog

Updates from the Center for Climate Resilience.

April 22, 2026

Wrapping up CAF for Spring 2026

As we close out the spring semester, we're reflecting on a productive season for the Climate Adaptation Fellows. Our weekly Monday seminars brought together fellows for project presentations, paper reviews, and thematic discussions spanning the breadth of climate adaptation research.

This semester's lineup:

Jan 26 (Wk 3): Angelo dos Santos · "Deforestation policies in Zambia"
Feb 2 (Wk 4): Yujie Zhang · "The effects of environmental factors on respiratory health among young children in Bangladesh"
Feb 9 (Wk 5): Discussion: Human Capital & Labor, the micro-foundations of adaptation
Feb 16 (Wk 6): Chris Wodicka · "The impact of natural disasters on school district finances in Virginia"
Feb 23 (Wk 7): Hwiyoung Lee · "The impact of temperature on labor markets in South Korea"
Mar 2 (Wk 8): Oindriza Nodi · "Predicting zip code-level utility disconnection rates in Oregon and Washington states"
Mar 16 (Wk 10): Angel Bao · project presentation
Mar 30 (Wk 12): Paul Stainier & Sika Gadzanku · "The impact of extreme weather on truck accidents in the United States"
Apr 6 (Wk 13): Yabo Vidogbena · "Temperature and learning outcomes in Western and Southern African countries"
Apr 13 (Wk 14): B. Jones et al. (2026): "With or Without U? Binning Bias and the Causal Effects of Temperature Extremes"
Apr 20 (Wk 15): Tingting Rui · "Climate hazards and adolescent mental health in Malawi"

We're grateful to every fellow who presented work and contributed to discussions this semester. Stay tuned for announcements about the summer seminar series, with details coming soon.

Get involved

Get in touch

For inquiries about research collaboration, policy partnerships, or joining the team.

parkcaro@upenn.edu

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Gifts to the Center for Climate Resilience support research that directly shapes policy for the communities most exposed to climate risk.

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