Climate Resilience Through Mutual Aid

About This Event

For Our Common Home Lecture Series

As climate hazards and extreme weather impacts intensify and public systems across the United States face growing strain, mutual aid—understood as grassroots, reciprocal networks of care and solidarity—can be understood as a critical yet underrecognized form of climate resilience. While most academic and policy attention has situated mutual aid within the context of COVID-19, its significance extends across both sudden-onset disasters, such as heat waves, hurricanes, and winter storms, and ongoing structural crises, including housing and food insecurity. Across these contexts, mutual aid operates as flexible, trust-based infrastructure: networks that mobilize quickly, adapt to changing conditions, and sustain forms of care that formal institutions often struggle to provide. This talk highlights the role of mutual aid within a climate adaptation and resilience framing, in Seattle, Washington and Asheville, North Carolina and draws upon semi-structured interviews to examine possibilities and challenges to collaboration with formal health institutions and local governments. Attention to these dynamics highlights both the possibilities and tensions that emerge in relation to formal institutions, with implications for how climate adaptation, disaster response, and structural inequities are understood and addressed.

About the speakers:

Rishi Sugla is a Lead Scientist at the Climate Impacts Group (CIG) at the University of Washington, where his research sits at the intersection of climate resilience, environmental justice, and storytelling. Rishi helps lead the Northwest Regional Integrated Sciences and Assessments (NW RISA), a NOAA-funded program that connects climate science to decision-making across the Pacific Northwest. He brings a commitment to building durable, community-rooted relationships across sectors—connecting academic research to the lived realities of frontline and Tribal communities navigating environmental and climate change.

Becca Nixon is the Climate Social Science Specialist with the Climate Impacts Group at the University of Washington. Becca uses a climate justice lens and mixed social science methods (i.e., qualitative and quantitative approaches) to support climate adaptation decision-making processes and outcomes. In this work, she has partnered with local governments and community organizations throughout North America and Asia on topics including flooding, heat, smoke, green infrastructure, agricultural systems, and coastal planning. Becca holds a Ph.D. from Purdue University in environmental social science and a dual master’s degree from Iowa State University in sustainable agriculture and community and regional planning.

Dante Jester is Climate Resilience Program Manager at the Climate Institute. Read their bio here.