Jess Ryan-Smith

Rethinking urban flood management: Residential micro-green infrastructure adoption for urban flood resilience: a Chicago case study

Jess Ryan-Smith (she/her) is a DPhil student and Black Academic Futures Scholar. Her research interests include green and natural infrastructure’s role in urban community flood resilience, the climate emergency, and closing the sustainability value-action gap.

Jess’s research seeks to identify a viable and cost-effective alternative to incentive-based behaviour change approaches that elicit widespread and sustained adoption of quality green infrastructure on residential properties to mitigate urban flood risk. Her research combines mixed-methods social research and green infrastructure modelling and focuses on black and brown communities in Chicago, USA.

Before starting her academic career, Jess worked for ten years across various industries, most recently as a senior consultant and divisional lead working with global technology companies. In 2023, she decided to quit her job and dedicate herself fully to finding solutions to the climate crisis. She completed her MSc in Sustainable Cities at the University of Leeds, where her dissertation focused on public perceptions of household-level garden management and their impact on local flood risk in Sheffield (supervised by Dr Martin Dallimer). She then worked on a DESNZ-funded project as a research assistant in low carbon heat network policy within the Geosolutions Leeds Research Centre.