The Climate Adaptation Center event focuses on biodiversity, science and emerging technologies.
By Gretchen Cochran
Original Air Date: November 12, 2025
Host: Warming climate, rising water, intensifying storms—and Florida is in the middle of all this and very vulnerable. It’s easy to freeze like a deer in the headlights. But it’s also possible to face the challenge with eyes open and search for solutions. An all-day event tomorrow is trying to do just that. Gretchen Cochran reports.
[Rainfall]
Gretchen Cochran: A climate conference in Sarasota this week is unique in its focus: It will not be dark clouds and stormy skies. Rather, it will be a bit of sunshine, focusing on ways to wrap our arms around the warming seas and growing population using new knowledge and technologies.
Bob Bunting
Bob Bunting: We can impact the future that we want.
GC: That’s Bob Bunting, the founder of the Climate Adaptation Center that launched this annual conference five years ago.
The privately funded center’s difference is found in its name. It’s not pretending to stop climate change but rather to understand and adapt to its continuum.
This year’s conference takes place at the University of South Florida Sarasota-Manatee in the Selby Auditorium—near the Sarasota Airport.
BB: We’ll be looking at the past and looking at the future climate and how it’s going to impact biodiversity and then looking at all the things we’re doing in science and technology that are really inspirational in so many ways that will give us a lot of good options in the future rather than despair.
GC: Bunting offers one example: The Bay Park in Sarasota sustained heavy damage along its seashore in last year’s hurricanes. The park’s managers now talk about maintaining a soft shoreline, rather than a rigid seawall, in a kind of adaptive embrace diffusing a menacing wave’s energy.
Bunting’s been involved with weather since he was a kid experiencing his first bad storm. He followed his fascination with climate first to become a forecaster and researcher at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (also known as NOAA) and a nonprofit consortium of Earth-studying colleges and universities. Most recently, he founded the Climate Adaptation Center to show people how one person can make a difference. Today, he’s teaching about the multiple aspects of climate.
This upcoming conference will focus on biodiversity—that refers to the layers of our environment including humans, land, sea, plants and animals and their interrelationships. Flooding results from several of those layers in conflict.
Sarasota county’s new flood control department and the hiring of a “flood control czar” recently would suggest people are beginning to pay better attention. But Bunting says there’s still lots of work to do.
BB: I think there’s a lot of resistance, in general, to climatizing our community because people can think it’s a cost, not an investment. That’s where they get it wrong. When you invest in the proper kind of infrastructure and you have a resilient city, a lot of good things happen in that city, but if you overdevelop the city for the infrastructure that’s there, you’re asking for trouble. And that’s what we’ve been doing.
GC: Bunting digressed briefly to illustrate how so many areas of our existence are interrelated. Climate people actually keep an eye on wildlife—kind-of like the canary in the coalmine. Florida is one of the most biodiverse states in the U.S., with 144 unique species. They only exist here. How they thrive—or don’t—is a kind of indicator of what is happening to us. That’s how it is that the state of Florida is helping to create wildlife corridors by purchasing swaths of green space dedicated to preserving large areas that will not be developed.
BB: As we develop Florida, we’re also mindful of the habitat—and, by the way, that habitat is a governor on climate warming, too, because these green areas soak up water and provide cooling—they’re not concrete, so they keep the state cooler than it would be if it was paved over—and it refines the water, so if it’s polluted, it acts as a filter so that when, eventually, it gets to our systems, it’s cleaner than it would be. These are natural gems that help our human population.
GC: Individuals can do their part. Bunting focused briefly on our food.
Last year’s conference focused on climate change and human health.
BB: In the whole world, all the food that’s grown, 40 percent of it is thrown away. That doesn’t mean that we’re really just tossing it into the trash can, but when we grow the crops, a certain amount of it doesn’t make it to the store; it rots, so they throw that away, Then it gets into the supermarket, and it doesn’t get bought quick enough, so they throw that away. Then we buy it and we bring it home and put it in our refrigerator, and we can’t eat all that’s in the refrigerator, and every few weeks you go through your refrigerator and you clean out the stuff you haven’t eaten; you throw that away. I have a very simple solution that would make a huge difference to people. Then when you go out to a restaurant, half of the stuff on your plate you don’t eat, and they throw that away.
I have a very simple solution that would make a huge difference if every single person would be mindful of it: Buy what you can eat.
GC: Bunting alludes to the amount of land used to grow our food and the amount of fertilizers used in Florida that then runs off into the Gulf of Mexico, causing Red Tide. And how what we do on the land affects our climate and even the potential extinction of species. There’s a million slices to this onion, Bunting says. His Climate Adaptation Center’s conference will examine a couple of layers.
It is Thursday, November 13, 8 a.m. to 4:45 p.m. at the University of South Florida, Sarasota-Manatee Campus, in the Selby Auditorium, 8350 N. Tamiami Trail, in Sarasota. If it is sold out, virtual tickets may still be available.
This is Gretchen Cochran for WSLR News.
For more information, head to theclimateadaptationcenter.networkforgood.com/events/85027-5th-annual-florida-climate-forecast-conference-climate-and-biodiversity.
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