Bob Graham Center for Public Service

Barometer Florida is produced by students and faculty at the Bob Graham Center for Public Service. This year’s research on the state of climate change in Florida’s communities was conducted by the spring 2020 class of the Center’s Civic Scholars.

 

Special Thanks

We thank the Knight Foundation for funding Barometer Florida; Bob Graham Center Director Dr. Matthew Jacobs, Associate Director Marianne Vernetson, Communications Director Dorothy Zimmerman, and the rest of the center’s hard-working staff for their support; the Center’s Civic Scholars program, which has sent top UF undergraduates into Florida’s 67 counties for supervised research for the past eight years; and former Civic Scholars Director Dr. Kevin Baron, who helped build that program.

 

We thank the guest lecturers who gave us a grounding in climate change and its community impacts, including David Zierden, state climatologist for Florida; Holly Wilson with the National Center for Environmental Health at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta; and longtime Florida environmental reporter Jenny Staletovich.

 

We are grateful to our UF climate colleagues, especially Carolyn Cox, coordinator of the Florida Climate Institute, who inspires faculty and staff to keep diverse work on climate science collaborative and solutions-oriented. We thank Professors Thomas T. Ankersen and Alyson Craig Flournoy of the Levin College of Law’s Environmental and Land Use Law Program for writing the much-needed Floridians’ Climate Guide.

 

We extend special thanks to the professionals and elected leaders across Florida’s counties who provided information and interviews to Graham Center students, highlighting the real places and people behind the often-abstract data and science of climate change. To all those community leaders—and with a major shout-out to the amazing IFAS county extension agents who stepped in to help when the COVID-19 crisis hit during our research—thank you for making time for students and sharing your knowledge.

 

Lastly, we want to thank our students. At the heart of the Graham Center and its mission to promote civic engagement, service and public leadership, students are also at the center of this project. They are forerunners to the better future to which we all strive. We thank the Mentors and Civic Scholars named below for their extraordinary commitment to this work even as the public health crisis impacted them personally and made the research far more challenging. If COVID-19 has taught us anything, it is that the collective power of individuals can change fortunes and the world. What is true for the generous act of social distancing to ease the crisis of COVID-19 will also be true for our work on climate change. We hope Barometer Florida makes this and other challenges facing our state easier to understand, track and work on. ​

–Cynthia Barnett, Environmental Fellow, and Jenna Tingum, Data Fellow, the Bob Graham Center.

 

The Team

Civic Scholars Spring 2020 Faculty Advisor: Cynthia Barnett, Environmental Journalist in Residence at UF’s College of Journalism and Communications, serving as Graham Center Environmental Fellow for 2018-2020. Contact: clbarnett@jou.ufl.edu

Civic Scholars Spring 2020 Data Fellow: Jenna Tingum,  UF Senior studying Statistics and Political Science. Contact: jenna.tingum@gmail.com

 

Mentors:

Emily Boykin, West Central

Meagan Dipolo,  East Central

Guerin Frei, Northeast

Zachary Kneckt, Northwest

Heidi Neff, Southeast

Megan Pitt, Central

Morgan Spicer, North Central

 

Scholars:

Aniqa Ahmed	Samantha Howley	Shannon Regan
Rifa Ali	Kimberly Janssens	Ariba Rezwan
Caty Allen	Enida Jeteric	Laura Robles-Torres
Connor Aucremanne	Tate Johnson	Yanissa Rodriguez
Jacob Blaudow	Tenney Kapellusch	Jennifer Ronderos
Kahyla Borges-Santos	Charles Karcher	Shannon Salvatori
Cameron Brousse	Giovanna Kubota	Edward Schlein
Esteban Burgos-Herrera	Nicholas Lahera	Makiya Seminera
Megan Cannan	Kaylyn Ling	Elana Sieck
Lily Cao	Lacey Lingelbach	Gaven Simon
Arika Carey	Aleidys Lopez Romero	Nathalie Thelemaque
Samantha Cassino	Sebastian Mallory	Julian Valdivia
Anand Chundi	Katherine McCall	Hien Van
Lianne D'Arcy	Shannon McCloskey	Sofia Varon
Lavanya Durai	Nicholas Mesa	Damon Veras
Nathan Flothe	Karisya Moran-Adames	Sheana Ward
Katharine Frey	Victor Musleh	Rebecca Watters
Sarah Garavaglia	Charles Nussbaum	Jessica Wingen
Melanie Halem	Isabella Orgel	Marisa Younger
Claire Hiaasen	Taylor Paynter	Nuzhat Zaman
Claire Hodges	Ashlyn Posey	Zachary Zeller
Natalie Hollander	Julio Quinones
Kassidy House	Cameron Ramey