Dr. Anthony Socci is the senior lead for international resilience and adaptation policy at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of International and Tribal Affairs (OITA) in Washington, DC. For nearly a decade, Dr. Socci has helped coordinate and facilitate several international efforts aimed at building capacity to become more resilient and sustainable, and to adapt to compound changes principally in urban and local settings in developing countries.
More specifically, Dr. Socci worked with a host of international partners to make actionable, the principles of the Durban Adaptation Charter (DAC), a pledge on the part of nearly 1000 elected local/urban government officials, largely from Africa and Asia, to take local action to build urban resilience and adapt. He also served as a long-standing member of the DAC steering committee.
Later, at the invitation of the UN Global Adaptation Network (GAN), Dr. Socci agreed to become a member of its Steering Committee. From this vantage point he, along with several international partners and other steering committee members, helped to formulate and implement an effort on the part of the GAN to deliver actionable, demand-driven information to regions and communities in developing countries deemed most vulnerable to the impacts of climate and other changes, through a process referred to as “adaptation learning exchanges.”
For the last several years Dr. Socci has been working with a host of international partners to introduce the EPIC (Educational Partnerships for Innovation in Communities) model to local governments and universities in developing country cities eager to enhance their capacity to adapt, become more sustainable, and build resilience in the face of complexly intertwined physical, natural and social forces. Thus far regional networks of implementers of the EPIC model have taken root in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. The EPIC model systematically matches city and local government needs with the innovation of students and academics to address a broad spectrum of sustainability-related issues, with lasting impacts for all involved.