University of Pennsylvania

Center for Climate Resilience

Building climate resilience through dispassionate, data-driven, decision-relevant analysis

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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.

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.

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.

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

Press & engagement

Coming soon

Updates from CCR — events, talks, media coverage, and our weekly seminar series — will be posted here soon.

Get involved

Get in touch

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

parkcaro@upenn.edu

Support our work

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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