What does it mean to build resilience in a world facing wildfires, rising seas, disappearing biodiversity and increasingly complex infrastructure demands? At a recent MSEM panel moderated by Dr. David Saah, four practitioners, each working at a different scale of climate resilience, shared their experiences, challenges and advice for the next generation of environmental leaders.
On the modelling, planning and advising side of the equation sat Thomas Buchholz, PhD, Co-Director of Forest and Agriculture Management with Spatial Informatics Group (SIG) and Chris Lowrie, Engineering Manager with UCSC Center for Coastal Climate Resilience and Founder of Whitecap Geospatial. On the implementation side, representing highly local, on-the-ground resource management sat Rick Duffey, Watershed Keeper Supervisor with the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC) and volunteer fire captain. On the large-scale infrastructure end of implementation was John Lim Ji Xiong, Chief Digital Officer with GAMUDA.
Designing Climate-Ready Cities of the Future
John Lim Ji Xiong, Chief Digital Officer at GAMUDA, travelled all the way from Malaysia to sit on the panel. He opened the discussion by framing cities as complex systems where every decision carries long-term consequences. His company oversees large-scale infrastructure projects across Southeast Asia, including metros, dams, water treatment plants and solar installations. While the scale of the work is important, John emphasized that resilience is about foresight and a responsibility to one’s community, not size. Every development plan GAMUDA executes is designed to anticipate climate shocks decades into the future, baking resilience into cities that are built to withstand threats from sea level rise, worsening storms, and intense heat.
Beyond forward-thinking resilience, GAMUDA builds with the philosophy that modern developments must balance growth with heritage protection, ecosystem preservation and carbon-aware design. GAMUDA increasingly integrates nature-based solutions as deliberate business decisions rather than publicity gestures. For example, the company favors mangrove restoration over seawalls, recognizing that restored ecosystems provide superior long-term functional value while reducing maintenance costs. Data-driven tools play a central role in protecting both natural and cultural assets: the company has used DNA-based biodiversity monitoring to track species health and digital tools to track and protect centuries-old heritage trees in Penang.
John’s insights highlight that resilience requires foresight, responsibility, and the innovative use of data to design cities that thrive ecologically, culturally, and socially for decades to come.
Fire, Forests, and Community Engagement
Thomas Buchholz, forest and carbon expert at SIG, brought the conversation into the realm of modelling and the fire-adapted forests of the American West. He began by reflecting on his childhood near the Black Forest in Germany, a landscape vastly different from the one he works with today in Missoula, Montana.
Western U.S. forests, he explained, evolved alongside frequent low-intensity burning, often managed by Indigenous communities for thousands of years. These systems were never meant to go without fire. “These forests were tended to over thousands of years,” and left unmanaged are akin to an unminded child gorging himself on too much candy: the excess biomass buildup that accumulates without frequent grazing or burning is prone to hotter, more intense burns that destroy forests rather than help them thrive.
The most important skill in resilience work, Thomas shared, isn’t ecological modeling, it’s being able to listen and build cultural resilience into communities through empathetic communication and education. The work requires “understanding and listening closely” to community concerns and questions, to ecological history and reality, and the limits of what science can predict.
Managing Watersheds and Fire on the Ground
Rick Duffey brought the conversation back into the field from modelling and planning. His introduction was humble, but the scope of his work is anything but — as a Watershed Keeper Supervisor for SFPUC, Rick manages vast stretches of protected watershed and is responsible for ensuring the water that travels from the Hetch Hetchy reservoir to San Francisco Bay Area residents’ homes is managed correctly. He oversees invasive species management, vegetation treatments, road maintenance, water quality protection, and fire preparedness across thousands of acres.
One of the most effective resilience tools he and his team deploy is grazing to maintain a healthy fire regime. Cattle reduce fine fuels that would otherwise make wildfires more intense. Where grazing can’t reach, Rick’s team uses prescribed fires, but only when conditions align — and with them come air quality concerns and a public misunderstanding of the practice, highlighting the need for better education on the matter. Rick brought the conversation from the abstract to the physical reality of management. A reality that is physical, local, and iterative; built acre by acre through careful management, observation, and adaptation.
Data for Decision-Making
From the world of forests and fire, the conversation shifted to coastlines and data. Chris Lowrie, in his role as Engineering Manager at UCSC Center for Coastal Climate Resilience, translates complex climate models into actionable products and dashboards for local governments and agencies. His team works with researchers to develop “complex atmospheric, hydrodynamic, ocean physics and ecosystem models,” ensuring the conclusions that the researchers draw aren’t lost in a sea of numbers. His work emphasizes that it’s not enough to do the research: the real work is “making it really easy for people to understand… in order [for the right people] to be able to make a decision.”
Chris’ main interests lie in climate adaptation through natural solutions. He shares that a lot of his research “has focused on the benefits of coral reefs and mangroves for coastal risk reduction,” but he’s worked with climate data on a much more broad scale, including with the World Food Bank. Chris and his team, working closely with the UK Met Office, have developed adaptation and resilience plans for agriculture and food distribution in the face of climate change. Chris also founded Whitecap Geospatial, which is an initiative designed to connect talented engineers in the Bay Area who have valuable skills but scarce scientific training with meaningful ecological modelling projects.
Despite their different roles, all four panelists, representing a mosaic of local management, remote monitoring and modelling, emphasized that resilience is rarely about one discipline or one perspective. Whether you’re shaping a city, analyzing a coastline, modeling a forest or patrolling a watershed, the work is about connection — between systems, between people, and between data and reality.
Advice for Future Environmental Managers
To wrap up the structured discussion, David asked the panelists “If you were to give one piece of advice for students that are coming out of these programs — undergrads and graduate students — for being ready for this emerging and fast-evolving field, what would that be?”
John Lim Ji Xiong shared:
“The world is very interconnected now. Part of being employable in the market today is very much about having a very broad horizon of knowledge and an interest in understanding how the world works. Being able to piece all [of the facets of an organization] together [to understand what it] means for me, my team and my strategy. I think for young students, it’s important to get that broader view that a lot of things are at play.”
Thomas Buchholz shared:
“I think a key piece is to be able to listen and to listen to the folks who present this problem to you. It’s so easy for all of us, especially as you get very technical in what you do every day, to fall back to what you did before and repeat that [for every problem]. But being open to how to adjust and find solutions that really meet the needs of the community.”
Chris Lowrie shared:
“Find the things that you’re actually curious and passionate enough about to do for a long time. For me, it’s been about curiosity and community. Spend some time just being curious and chasing that. Also really important is having people around you that can cross-pollinate ideas with, but also get support when things go awry with either funding cuts or the latest natural disaster. Having that community that supports your emotional resilience in these fields, I think, is really important, and reaching to be part of that in a cooperative way, not in a competitive way — I think it takes some learning to really understand how you’re going to lift up in a group of people and grow together for years.”
Rick Duffey shared:
“I came up ‘putting the wet stuff on the red stuff’ and didn’t really pay attention to all the natural resource details until I got to the PUC and started meeting people like David. I’m still learning and I recommend anybody out there getting into the career make sure you research, know the facts, know what’s going on in the world and how the environment’s treating you.”
For students, panels like this offer a glimpse into the scope and impact of the work ahead. Beyond learning science and policy, students in the MSEM program develop the skills to think across disciplines, translate complex data into action and work directly with communities. In a world of accelerating climate impacts, the need for practitioners who can connect local risks to global resilience has never been greater, and students of the MSEM program are being trained to do just that.
If you’re interested in watching a recording of the panel, including the Q&A session that followed the discussion, please click here.
