What does it take for whole cities to take the actions necessary to adapt to a changing climate? What is required for millions of people who live in the same metropolis to agree to certain changes to become resilient to climate change-driven natural disasters? These are the questions that Malcolm Araos has been asking.

Malcolm Araos is a Wilkes Center post-doctoral student in the Department of Geography. Previously Araos, who is originally from Canada, was a PhD student in Sociology at New York University where he researched the process for how the city of New York began changing its infrastructure to become more resilient to sea level rise and future hurricanes in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, which caused mass flooding and destruction in 2012.

As a postdoctoral student now at the University of Utah, Araos has turned his attention to the Great Salt Lake. He is just beginning to examine how millions of Utahns living on the Wasatch Front are confronting problems of dust and air pollution stemming from the shrinking lake levels.