How do disparate climate and climate-related models come together to help us understand the climate crisis? Climate Changed considers this question by bringing together contributors from across disciplines, including atmospheric science, history, urban planning, hazard research, building science, and more. Together, the book underscores the necessity of combining locally situated and transdisciplinary knowledge with climate science. Doing so will better equip us to navigate current and future cataclysmic changes. In this Q&A, co-editors Mara Freilich, Irmak Turan, Jessica Varner, and Lizzie Yarina reflect on their relationship to climate work and the inspiration behind the volume.

Q: Climate Changed brings together so many different disciplines. How did you achieve the diversity of voices?

Jessica Varner: We are fortunate to each be from different disciplines. Mara is a climate scientist, Irmak is a designer and building scientist, Lizzie is an urban planner, and I am a historian. Because we are trained across a wide spectrum of the sciences and the humanities, inviting experts across an equally broad range was second nature. During this process, we also held a series of conversations with the invited contributors to embed the very process of learning together into the volume. The conversations find their way into the section introductions, in our introduction, and even within the contributors’ pieces.

Mara Freilich: We decided early on to focus on models as a theme that could unify multiple disciplines by being simultaneously concrete but also broad enough that everyone had something to contribute to the discussion. Even as a point of connection, models also serve as one of the central points of contention, as we work through the disparate meanings and uses of “models” in each discipline.

Q: What inspired you to edit a book on this topic?

Mara Freilich: Many climate scientists are grappling with how to make our work live up to the urgency of the challenge of climate change. This project helps to address this head-on by bridging knowledge to action. The contributions in this volume provide multiple perspectives on the ways that climate science and modeling can serve wider societal goals and advance fundamental science. The work on this has influenced my research and helped me to articulate a community-engaged climate science research program, and also influenced my teaching. I use some contributions to infuse interdisciplinary thinking into my climate dynamics classes.

Lizzie Yarina: As a scholar of climate adaptation planning, I am particularly interested in how models make their way from the halls of science to the practice of shaping the built environment. For my own research, the chance to convene scholars and practitioners from across disciplines really allowed me to deepen my understanding of what these tools do in the world and what their limitations might be. And as a professor, it’s also important to me that my students are thinking about how to design for cities in the context of the climate crisis. While it’s broadly acknowledged that fields like architecture, landscape, and urban planning have important roles to play, tools to actually operationalize cross-disciplinary understandings of climate risks are often lacking in the classroom. One thing I’m especially excited about with this book is its potential as a resource for both students and practitioners who are grappling with these questions, too.

Q: Who is this book intended for?

Irmak Turan: The book is for a wide range of readers: scholars, practitioners, and students in science, design, and the humanities, particularly those engaged in issues related to climate change impacts and the built environment. It is intended as both a scholarly effort in understanding the importance and role of models and a practical resource for those grappling with how to understand, create, and use climate-linked models in practice.

Q: A “model” can be a lot of things. How do general and specific models matter? Can you give an example?

Irmak Turan: As a practitioner, I see models not as background tools but rather as the basis of consequential decisions. For designers, planners, engineers, and policymakers, that means decisions about where people live, what gets protected, and how cities are built to last. Architects and engineers use climate projections of extreme heat and flooding to shape buildings and urban spaces; planners and policymakers use storm surge models and flood maps to prioritize resilience where it is needed most. But applying a model well means understanding its limits, not just its outputs. What I have learned is that practitioners must ask harder questions of the tools they rely on: What choices are embedded in this model? Whose data shaped it? Whose expertise was left out? Addressing climate change in the built environment means moving fluidly between scales, sitting with uncertainty rather than demanding a single authoritative answer. It also means treating model-making as a collaborative practice, one that belongs as much to communities as it does to technical specialists.

Q: Why is thinking with models important for thinking about climate change and the built environment?

Lizzie Yarina: Climate change isn’t something we can directly see or touch, so models are essential to both understanding how the climate has and will change, as well as how the climate relates to the built environment. At the same time, using and interpreting models tend to require high levels of disciplinary expertise, which means translating the models’ significance to other disciplines can be a challenge. While the limitations and assumptions of models are often readily apparent to their creators, these complexities can become lost when their outputs are translated into design or planning. With this project, we really wanted to open up the black box of climate-linked models to see how their users and creators could better serve one another—and also to figure out what questions model-makers and model-users might still need to ask.