Meet Dr. Kevin A. Reed, the 2025 Daffodil Lecture Speaker

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On March 12th at 5 p.m., Commonwealth Honors College will host the annual Daffodil Lecture, a celebration of research and collaboration on sustainability and green development. The lecture aims to highlight groundbreaking research, visionary leaders, and forthcoming work in this field.

This year’s lecture will be delivered by Dr. Kevin A. Reed, Associate Provost for Climate and Sustainability Programming and Professor at the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences at Stony Brook University. Along with his work at Stony Brook, Dr. Reed is also the Chief Climate Scientist for the New York Climate Exchange.

His talk, titled “Climate Change and Extreme Weather: What Does It Mean for You?”, will explore how climate change has fueled extreme weather events and the strategies we can implement on campus and in our communities to increase our resilience.

Read on to learn more about Dr. Reed and what to expect from his lecture.

How did you become a climate scientist? What was your journey like?

Reed: Growing up, I enjoyed watching the Weather Channel instead of going home and watching MTV or anything like that. When most of my friends would go home to watch whatever TV they’d watch, I’d go home and watch 10 to the Top of the Hour, which was the Weather Channel’s tropical update. I've always been interested in weather and I went to university initially as a physicist. 

Even though I had been fascinated by weather and climate, I didn't actually know that my own university (the University of Michigan) hosted a department that focused on those topics. I discovered the Atmospheric, Oceanic and Space Science Department and started taking courses there. I had a couple of formidable research experiences to help me find what aspects of climate I was interested in.

I ended up going to graduate school in that department and I got into the climate as an academic, as a graduate student. I explored how well climate models are at representing high impact events like hurricanes. Ever since I finished my PhD, I've continually expanded into the application side. This consists of trying to understand how extreme weather changes with climate change, how it's already changed, and how it will change in the future. This research aims to better communicate the fact that climate change is here and it's impacting our day to day life, and it's doing that most predominantly through changes in extreme weather.

What are the challenges you face in communicating the urgency of this message?

Reed: Our weather today is different than it would have been in a world without climate change. And so that's hard to kind of grasp when it's a midwinter day but it’s a little sunny and a bit warmer than it's been. But the impacts of climate change on today's weather isn't necessarily as noticeable to you or I, but it really comes through in the most extreme events. In events like hurricanes, in extreme flooding, in extreme heat – oftentimes the challenge there is communicating the fact that climate change impacted those events. However, communities, governments, and emergency response are focused on just getting through the disaster. 

We have this challenge in which climate change is most clearly impacting extreme weather events. It's the primary way in which most humans will experience climate change. But that's convoluted with the fact that these are extreme weather events that are impacting our livelihoods or impacting our way of life for a set time period. So it's really hard to take a minute, interpret what's happening and recognize how it's different.

While an impact is happening somewhere else around the globe, it’s not impacting you or I directly. We can use what’s happening elsewhere to start conversations about climate change. 

A hurricane shown on a weather forecast map. Photo: The Weather Channel

It’s tough if a hurricane hits, or your house is flooded, and having that conversation about climate change directly after. It’s not priority one through ten, but on a day where it’s happening elsewhere it’s an opportunity to educate the public about the real impacts of climate change.

Speaking of extreme weather events, why choose this topic for the lecture?

Reed: This affects folks living in Massachusetts, in New England, and throughout the United States – extreme weather is the main way we’ll experience climate change. This depends on if you live along the coast or in communities focused on the food system, you’ll see sea level rise or a change in fish stock. But predominantly, most of us will experience extreme weather. 

That’s the focus of the talk, where we ask how the weather in the Northeast has changed already, what is driving that, what tools are scientists using to quantify impacts and where you can get more resources to learn about how it’ll impact you, your community or your family.

What can audiences expect from this talk?

Reed: One thing I’m hoping people will take away is knowing that there are resources out there in which you can better understand what the physical risk of climate is in your area. Also that you know that we live in an uncertain time and that there is no time to lose in making sure that we're more resilient. 

There's a certain amount of climate change that's essentially baked into the system. So whether or not we go net-zero in the next ten years, the fact of the matter is that we live in a degree and a half warmer world than it would be without human induced climate change, and that is going to expand to two degrees in the coming decades. It's important now more than ever, that we start to prepare for that reality. 

That doesn't mean that all hope is lost – we have the opportunity to make our community, our campuses, more resilient to climate change and rethink the ways in which we build our campuses, and design our communities.

 We can make them resilient to climate change by also making them resilient to other things that impact our livelihoods.

What are some of the strategies you foresee where we can become more resilient?

Reed: First and foremost I would start with science-informed decision-making. We have decades and decades of international scientific community efforts working to understand the risks of climate change. We should be using that information to inform decision making, whether it be at the campus, community, state or regional level.

It can't only be science informed. We have to work together to co-develop the solutions because the solution for a neighborhood that's constantly flooding in New York City might be different than the solution for Boston. The people that make up that individual neighborhood are different and there is no one-size fits all solution. 

We have to work together to co-develop solutions that are not only science informed but also community informed. It takes time, takes building relationships and a sense of community around these issues.

Another aspect – I don’t know how much I'll mention in the talk – but this is an all hands on deck situation, in the sense that we all need to be part of the solution in some way. Not only individually but we need to hold corporations and governments accountable. We live in a world in which these bodies have had a disproportionate amount of impact on climate change and they need to be held accountable. 

I might talk about some things we can do like co-developing community-based solutions, but it can't be done by itself. We need to do these things in the larger context of a net-zero economy, holding people accountable to pay for the solutions we need. Of course that’s a larger geopolitical issue that I won’t bring up, but I don’t like talking about individual solutions without acknowledging the elephant in the room.

What do you, as a professor, want to take from this experience?

Reed: One of the best things about being a professor is that I’m continually around students – students are where some of the best and most innovative solutions are coming from. Students are particularly passionate about ensuring that the world they are going to continue to grow up in is a more sustainable and equitable place. They are really passionate about finally making the changes we have been discussing for decades. 

Every opportunity I have to come to a new campus and meet the students that are going to be the leaders in 10, 20 years is an opportunity I look forward to.

A bit of a lighter question, what is this climate scientist’s favorite season?

Reed: Fall, hands down. You’ve got football, some of the most pleasant weather where I live in the New York City area, low humidity, temps in the 60s and 70s and it also means that the end of the year is coming. You get to look back at what you’ve accomplished and what you still have got left to do.

The Daffodil lecture, sponsored by the Commonwealth Honors College will take place on March 12th at 5 p.m. in the Student Union Ballroom. We hope to see you there!