The Consortium for Climate Risk in the Urban Northeast (CCRUN), funded under NOAA’s Regional Integrated Sciences and Assessments (RISA) program, serves stakeholder needs in assessing and managing risks from climate variability and change. It is currently also the only RISA team with a principal focus on climate change adaptation in urban settings. CCRUN is structured as a multi-modal network that covers the relevant portions of Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, so that local needs for targeted climate-risk information can be served in a coordinated way.

CCRUN is designed to address the complex challenges that are associated with densely populated, highly interconnected urban areas, such as: urban heat island effects; poor air quality; intense coastal development, and multifunctional settlement along inland waterways; complex overlapping institutional jurisdictions; integrated infrastructure systems; and highly diverse, and in some cases, fragile socio-economic communities. These challenges can best be addressed by the stakeholder-driven interdisciplinary approach taken by the CCRUN RISA team. As an important added benefit, the research accomplishments and lessons learned through stakeholder engagement will provide a foundation for managing climate risks in other urban areas in the United States.

CCRUN’s initial projects are focused in three broad sectors: Water, Coasts, and Health. Research in each of these sectors is linked through the cross-cutting themes of climate change and community vulnerability, the latter of which is especially important in considerations of environmental justice and equity. CCRUN’s stakeholder-driven approach to research can therefore support investigations of the impacts of a changing climate, population growth, and urban and economic policies on the social, racial and ethnic dimensions of livelihoods and of communities in the urban Northeast. Disadvantaged socio-economic groups have been particularly underserved in the area of climate change, and one of CCRUN’s long-term goals is the building of adaptive capacity among such groups to current and future climate extremes.