Listening First: How One Navigator Is Transforming Climate Resilience Across South Carolina
Adelaide Bates did not set out to become South Carolina’s climate connector-in-chief. But since joining the Shi Institute for Sustainable Communities in 2024, she has quietly become a trusted bridge between local governments, state agencies, universities, and everyday people navigating the frontlines of climate change.
As a Navigator hosted by the Shi Institute for Climate Ready America, Adelaide supports communities across the Lowcountry region. Climate experts like Adelaide are the entry point for many communities to Climate Ready America, a nationwide system designed to help every community build climate resilience. Led by Geos Institute and supported by the Walmart Foundation, this groundbreaking pilot in the Southeast is helping local leaders move from ideas to action. Her work helps demonstrate the kind of localized, relationship-based support that will one day be coordinated through Climate Innovation Centers in every state, with Navigators embedded in local communities to keep the work grounded and responsive.
Adelaide works with a mix of small towns and large counties, helping them move from confusion to clarity when it comes to building climate resilience. And her first step is always the same: listening. “I did not come in with a to-do list,” she explained. “I came in to ask what was already on theirs, and how I could help move it forward.”
A Lowcountry native, Adelaide brings deep place-based understanding to the work. Her background spans community-driven sustainability, food systems, urban planning, and environmental communications. But it is her collaborative spirit that defines her impact. “It means a lot to work in the communities I care about,” she said. “But more than that, it is about ensuring they are equipped to define and lead their own climate solutions.”
As a Navigator embedded within a university, Adelaide routinely brings faculty and students into the field to assist with research, planning, and outreach. “I get to be a higher education Navigator,” she said. “It is incredibly rewarding to match a capable student with a community’s resilience project. They learn by doing, and communities get real support.”
Her approach has made a lasting mark. She helped the South Carolina Office of Resilience launch the now-statewide Resilience 101 initiative by identifying a core gap. Many local officials did not fully understand what resilience meant or how their work connected to it. Today, that training has reached more than 130 local officials, appointed leaders, and staff, and continues to expand.
But Adelaide’s work goes far beyond awareness. She helps translate insight into action.
In Bluffton, for example, she helped design and host a climate fellowship focused on heat resilience. Working with community members and students, the team mapped urban heat islands, engaged residents in identifying risk, and developed solutions rooted in local priorities. That model is now being adapted by other towns across the state.
She also helped relaunch the Southern Lowcountry Resilience Collaborative (SLRC), a regional network that brings together dozens of organizations to coordinate on climate resilience planning and funding. SLRC has already supported grant proposals, policy innovation, and shared learning across four counties. Charleston County recently launched its own resilience collaborative, modeled after SLRC and shaped by Adelaide’s guidance.
“They already had the will,” she said. “We helped build the structure and connect them to tools to make it sustainable.”
These efforts are showing what is possible when Navigators build trust, connect existing efforts, and stay focused on what communities need most. “We do not need to reinvent the wheel,” Adelaide said. “We need to connect the people already doing the work and give them the tools and trust to lead.”
The Shi Institute for Sustainable Communities is part of Climate Ready America, a nationwide initiative led by the Geos Institute to help communities build climate resilience through locally rooted Climate Innovation Centers and a Navigator Network. Work like Adelaide’s shows how a nationwide system can adapt to local needs, amplify local leadership, and help communities across the country move from ideas to action.
Robert Macnee, Ph.D. is Deputy Director of Resilience Services at Climate Resilience Consulting, where he helps governments, institutions, and communities reduce climate risk in equitable and practical ways. He holds a Ph.D. in Environmental Management focused on climate change impacts on health and communities, and brings over a decade of experience spanning economic development, resilience planning, and implementation.
Samantha Medlock is President of Climate Risk Advisors, helping communities and organizations advance equity, sustainability, and resilience. Her career began chasing floods as a local official in Texas Flash Flood Alley—a hands-on experience that still shapes her approach to climate and disaster risk management.
Jim is a multilingual world traveler. Based in Bavaria during the 1970s, Jim spent most of this period in India, Afghanistan and Nepal, where he founded and operated a charitable medical clinic serving Tibetan Refugees. He settled in Oregon in 1983 on a forested ranch in the Umpqua National Forest.
Dr. Micah Hahn is an Associate Professor of Environmental Health in the Institute for Circumpolar Health Studies at the University of Alaska-Anchorage. She received her joint PhD in Epidemiology / Environment and Resources from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her MPH in Global Environmental Health from Emory University. Subsequently, she was a postdoctoral fellow for the CDC Climate and Health Program, and in this position worked collaboratively with the CDC Division of Vector-borne Diseases and the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Her research focuses on understanding the health impacts of climate change and working with communities to develop locally-relevant adaptation and resilience-building strategies. Dr. Hahn is also on the Management Team of the Alaska Climate Adaptation Science Center.
Michael is a former Founding Principal of Resilient Cities Catalyst, a global non-profit helping cities and their partners tackle their toughest challenges. He is currently the Executive Director of Climate Resilience Academy at the University of Miami.
Dr. Quintus Jett is a consultant, educator, and strategist for public causes. He has a doctorate in Organizations & Management from Stanford University, and a two-decade faculty career which spans schools, departments, and programs of business, engineering, liberal studies, divinity, and public and nonprofit management. Following Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Dr. Jett launched a volunteer project in New Orleans, which enlisted residents, students from over a dozen colleges and universities, and hundreds of others to field map the city’s Gentilly district, Lower Ninth Ward, and New Orleans East. Dr. Jett is an innovator in higher education, bridging the divide between academic research and the other priorities of the modern university, including student access and diversity, community engagement, and providing foundations for life-long learning in today’s rapidly changing world.
Scott is Monfort Professor of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University. He has written about 100 publications in the peer-reviewed climate literature, is a former editor of the Journal of Climate, and served for five years as founding Science Chair of the North American Carbon Program.
Linda has many years of experience in disaster preparedness and resilience. She has been an elected official on the Linn County Iowa Board of Supervisors, Chair of the Metropolitan Planning Organization, the East Central Iowa Council of Governments, the statewide Mental Health Developmental Disability and the Linn County Board of Health. Langston is a former president of the National Association of Counties (2013-2014).
Ken works with families and organizations as a mediator, organizational consultant, trainer and facilitator. Along with his passion for helping people prepare for and reduce climate change, Ken also volunteers as a mediator through Mediation Works and is passionate about supporting youth through mentoring with Boys to Men of Southern Oregon.
Matthew is a retired high school teacher who was once honored as Oregon High School Social Studies Teacher of the Year. Before his teaching career he was in the restaurant business in Portland. He is also a lawyer who has been a member of the Oregon State Bar Association since 1980.
Andrea is the Resilience Policy Advisor for the North Carolina Office of Recovery and Resiliency. She works across state agencies and with local governments to increase the state’s resilience to the impacts of climate change.