May 7—Teams of science and design students from prestigious schools like Harvard, Yale and Cornell will be coming to the Casco Bay region this fall to help these coastal communities find ways to adapt to the impacts of climate change.

The students — including a team from the University of Maine in Augusta — will participate in the Envision Resiliency Challenge, which began in Nantucket in 2021 and has also spent semesters in Narragansett Bay, R.I., and New Bedford and Fairhaven, Mass.

The students from the eight participating universities will be asked to research and design novel ways of living and working in Portland, South Portland and the Casco Bay islands under hotter, wetter conditions next to a fast-warming and fast-rising Gulf of Maine.

“Climate change is the defining issue of our time — but instead of fearing the future, this program asks us to reimagine the future we would like to see and then work toward it,” said Wendy Schmidt, founder of Remain Nantucket, which developed and funds the challenge.

“When we collaborate and approach challenges with creativity, we can work toward a brighter future,” Schmidt said. The “university teams bring the ability to merge spatial and social histories, community input and speculative futures that will become hopeful visions for Portland.”

The professors and teams of graduate and undergraduate students studying architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning and environmental science come from the following universities: Buffalo, Cornell, Harvard, Maine at Augusta, Michigan, Toronto, Virginia and Yale.

The teams will spend the fall semester learning about the region’s challenges from municipal and community leaders, business owners, nonprofit groups and science organizations. They will base potential climate adaptation design solutions on those findings.

The program will maintain a high profile this fall. Locals can expect to see soon-to-be architects, urban planners and environmental scientists touring the area’s storm-ravaged waterfront, sizing up housing stock, leading community workshops, and presenting their final designs at a public exhibition.

Since its launch, 22 teams of 346 undergraduate and graduate students from 13 universities have participated in the program. The students collaborated with 70 community advisers from eight Massachusetts and Rhode Island coastal communities.

Mayor Jon Mitchell of New Bedford, where the program spent the fall of 2023, said his community benefited from this creative and data-informed way of thinking about its most pressing climate and resilience challenges.

“The model of convening design students with key stakeholders to imagine adaptive solutions grounded in local knowledge and history is an asset to any city,” Mitchell said. “I’m sure the city of Portland will benefit from their participation, as we did.”

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