Why we built a public-private partnership
Moving from climate resilience research to operations at NEMAC+FernLeaf
Last month, UNC Asheville published a press release announcing the formation of a public-private partnership between UNC Asheville's NEMAC and FernLeaf Interactive. In a sentence, we help communities quantify climate risk so they can take the best actions for adaptation.
We are the joint team that works with NOAA to produce the U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit. Within the Toolkit is a climate risk reduction framework called the Steps to Resilience—our playbook for how we’ve delivered quantitative resilience assessments to over a dozen local governments. We also built an interactive product called AccelAdapt that keeps those assessments up to date:
I am incredibly proud of where we are and where we’re going. Taking a step back, I’m reminded of songwriter Michael Reno Harrell’s wise words:
The journey’s where you’re going, but it’s also where you’ve been.
How did we get here?
Over 12 years(!) ago, I started as an intern at UNC Asheville's NEMAC. If you check out their blog (and I recommend that you do), you’ll see the incredible things that go on there—both in the results they produce and in the opportunities they provide to their interns.
As an applied research center, NEMAC learns by doing. One of the first projects I worked on was to develop new visualization techniques in support of Asheville’s Flood Damage Reduction Task Force. This wasn’t lab research. We prototyped rapidly and delivered products to decision makers, continually innovating based on what worked and what didn’t. What we worked on was always new and always exciting.
But some limitations became apparent:
- NEMAC’s charter is to do applied research. If we wanted to take what we learned in Asheville and stamp it out for other cities, we could be seen as competing with private consulting firms and we’d violate the terms of our education software licenses.
- If we created something that could be a product, there wasn’t a good way for NEMAC to develop it in a way that could bring in revenue.
- As a university department, it’s incredibly challenging for NEMAC to add new staff positions. And because we can’t operate at a profit, we regularly had to turn down work because we were fully funded and couldn’t grow to capture the opportunities.
- We would regularly see opportunities that we couldn’t pursue because they needed to be fulfilled by a small business, or a prime consultant didn’t want to have to manage doing business with a university.
In response, a group of us asked the question:
What if we had a private sector counterpart that didn’t have these limitations?
We’d still have a strong connection back to NEMAC and provide a new pathway for opportunities. That conversation started eight years ago.
Taking cautiously optimistic inspiration from the fern that finds success in ground that is fertile but otherwise challenging for other plants to grow in, a group of us formed FernLeaf Interactive in 2014. Earlier this year, after a lot of iterations, we executed the collaborative agreement that created NEMAC+FernLeaf.
Where we’re headed
I touched on how we got here and where we are now. We have some incredible things on the horizon and we are making an early new year’s resolution to take the time to document those in this publication.
I encourage you to stay tuned!
