Miami groups join together to launch Miami Climate Week and year-round push for action
At climate change conference after climate change conference, David Duckenfield started to notice a pattern. In Paris, in Los Angeles, anywhere he went, the expert talk on how sea level rise would affect the world always started the same way.
“The first slide was always Miami,” said Duckenfield, a longtime communications pro and one-time Obama administration official.
“The rest of the world is looking at us saying, ‘How are they gonna do it? Or are they? Are they going underwater?” he said. “It felt like being in a fishbowl.”
Miami has long been a source of fascination in global conversations on climate change. As a waterfront city, it has more money, property and people to lose with even a handful of feet of sea level rise than most anywhere else in the world.
That’s why Duckenfield, along with leaders of multiple other Miami nonprofits, are launching Miami Climate 365, an effort to get more Miamians to understand the risks they face from climate change, and organize the community’s nonprofits and businesses to streamline grant funding for solutions.
The initiative will kick off with a Miami Climate Week conference in March and bleed into a series of meetings and workshops year-round.
“We need something like a climate week to get people focused,” said Duckenfield, program director for MC365. “The idea is to get beyond the conference, get beyond the week and extend into the whole year.”
San Francisco and New York host their own climate weeks already — a series of talks, roundtables and panel discussions on climate issues ranging from sustainable fashion to lowering greenhouse gas emissions at the building level.
Miami’s version is funded by the Knight Foundation, a $250,000 seed grant that Duckenfield said allows the group to get off the ground and start planning events. So far, Miami Waterkeeper, the Climate Resilience Institute at the University of Miami, the Urban Impact Lab and Miami-Dade’s ClimateReady Tech Hub are on board.
“Miami Climate Week 2025 will bring together visionaries, advocates, community leaders and residents who share our determination to protect and preserve our environment for future generations,” Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said in a statement announcing the event. “This initiative is pivotal for advancing the important work of addressing climate change and fostering sustainable innovation.”
Miami Climate Week also includes a summit, which fills a void left by Aspen Ideas, the Colorado-based nonprofit that ran a climate-change-focused conference in Miami Beach for the last three years. It is not set to return this year.
“We’re proud of the lasting impact of these events, which drew thousands of attendees and hundreds of prominent climate leaders to South Florida, and showcased the region as an epicenter of climate innovation and resilience,” said Jon Purves, an Aspen spokesman. “Given the clear, ongoing need for solutions-focused climate programming in many parts of the country, Aspen Ideas: Climate will return in 2025 in another region, with details to come early in the new year.”
Duckenfield said he hopes Miami Climate 365 can help push forward solutions like planting more trees in Miami-Dade County and finding new money to address sea-level-rise-driven flooding, through group conversations and actual, shovel-in-the-ground projects.
“There’s a fierce urgency of now. No time like the present,” he said. “We have the wind at our back.”
This story was originally published December 19, 2024 at 2:49 PM.
