Climate Impacts Group welcomes new director, optimistic to meet priorities of five-year strategic plan (2025)

After nearly three years of searching, the Climate Impacts Group (CIG) welcomed new director Susan Dickerson-Lange.

Dickerson-Lange comes to the CIG as a UW alum who has worked on climate adaptation projects with various organizations in the private sector, such as Indigenous tribes, nonprofit organizations, and cities for over eight years.

“I've always had a really good impression of the work that is being done in [CIG] and of the scientists and staff there,” Dickerson-Lange said. “So when the position opened up, I saw it as an opportunity to work at a larger scope and scale relative to climate adaptation.”

CIG is a member organization of EarthLab that focuses on interdisciplinary climate adaptation research. Their goal is to provide everyone, from individuals to state organizations, with the tools, data, and resources they need to make smart decisions about their future in a changing climate.

“Climate adaptation is kind of the other side of the coin from climate change mitigation,” Dickerson-Lange said. “We don't focus on the side of reducing greenhouse gasses. We really focus on thinking about what changes we are seeing, and [what] do we expect to change, and how can we prepare for those.”

In 2024, CIG developed a five-year strategic plan to support an equitable climate change adaptation in the Northwest and beyond. They developed the plan after their initial hiring campaign failed and they were unable to find a suitable candidate for director. This prompted CIG, led by interim director Jason Vogel at the time, to assess their values and vision for the future so they could better understand themselves and what they needed from an executive director.

“As we were going through that plan … we realized that we had largely worked in service to people who could afford to pay us,” Vogel, current deputy director of CIG, said. “That looked like well-resourced local governments like King County or Seattle or Portland … but we hadn't really done a lot of work for or with communities who were going to be hurt first and worst by the impacts of climate change. And that was a real shortcoming.”

The CIG is not a traditional research group at UW; they have no faculty director, they do not teach classes, and they have no students. Rather, they are external-facing, serving as a bridge between the research and education occurring at the university, and the community organizations and agencies they serve. This allows them to work directly with communities under the established UW brand.

“What we needed out of a director was a lot different from what you might need for other research programs that are run out of conventional university departments by research faculty,” Vogel said. “We needed somebody that could coordinate and collaborate across all these smart and capable people [on the CIG team] and help each of us be better at what we do … I think Susan brings that kind of ability to listen deeply, understand where people are at, to look out and see opportunities. That's going to make her a great leader for our organization.”

With their new director, CIG is working to define the timeline of implementation for their strategic plan.

“We're working right now behind the scenes on developing a timeline that makes sense, and thinking through how that fits with our current efforts,” Dickerson-Lange said.

During this transition time, CIG continues their progress on several priorities of their strategic plan such as expanding a communications team, working with the City of Seattle to develop climate resilience hubs and updating their website with relevant data on forecasted sea level rise and its effect on extreme precipitation events and flooding.

Reach writer Anouk-Belle Janess at science@dailyuw.com. X: @la_belle_anouk

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