MIT Professor Lawrence Susskind contends that communities can take action to combat climate change now, but such actions will happen only with widespread public engagement; public education and public opinion surveys are not enough. Susskind and colleagues have been facilitating workshops with role-playing sessions where people consider how what they want and need can be meshed with the different wants and needs of others. Dialogue focuses not on worldwide climate change but on localized weather catastrophes. Climate risk is thereby translated into public health risk and people emerge with ideas for change rather than a mere summary of problems and disagreements. Susskind's discourse serves as a blueprint for ways that government agencies and citizens can work together to build climate-resilient communities.
Susskind delivered this lecture on March 30, 2016, at the twenty-first annual symposium sponsored by the Wallace Stegner Center for Land, Resource and the Environment at the S. J. Quinney College of Law at the University of Utah.
