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A Conversation on What it Takes to Build Climate Resilience with Prof. Henry Lee and David Festa
Resilience is a term for the ability of social-ecological systems to adapt, bounce back, and even thrive through shocks or stresses. David Festa, Senior VP of Ecosystems at the Enivironmental DeFense Fund (and a Kennedy School alum), has been working to develop strategies to incentivize management practices support resilient ecosystems throughout his tenure at EDF.
Mr. Festa has a long track record of bringing diverse stakeholders together to meet growing needs for food, water and shelter in ways that benefit the environment and the economy. In these interactons he focuses on what it takes to create resilient ecosystems that make it possible for people and nature to thrive, even as the planet changes because of climate change, population growth and other stressors. In conversation with one of his early mentors from HKS, Arctic Initiative Co-Founder and Co-Director Henry Lee, Mr. Festa spoke about the three major challenges for most climate-adaptation projects: financing, building equity, and aligning diverse stakeholders and conflicting policy structures. While his remarks made it clear that planning for resilience is cost-effective in the long term, he noted that ,in the near term, it takes considerable work to align the financing, interests, and policy to design climate adaptive systems. Mr. Festa pointed to the great need for Kennedy School students to focus on the leadership and consensus-building skills they are learning during their time at HKS as the key to being effective in building connections and trust across diverse communities. These Skills were key to his work in building more resilient communities, he said.
