WORCESTER, Mass. - Two graduate students in the Community Climate Adaptation program at WPI are asking residents how winter storms impact them. Their goal is to come up with suggestions on how to make Worcester more climate reilient.

Muhammad Hassan Dajana and Camila Gomez are working with the city of Worcester's Department of Sustainability and Resilience.

The project, called Supporting Winter Climate Adaptation in Worcester, looks at things like how winter storms have historically impacted Worcester, as well as projections done by climate scientists on how the city may be impacted in the future.

They've also been doing research on what parts of the city's infrastructure will be most impacted by climate change.

Gomez and Dajana said their research and the Community Climate Adaptation program is all about helping communities adapt to the challenges of climate change.

"My interest in the Community Climate Adaptation Program at Worcester Polytechnic Institute was driven by my passion to create positive impact in the community and also my desire to help with community resilience in the face of climate change," Gomez said. "Also, this program is a good opportunity to use my engineering and social science skills through this project based learning."

"I think the city of Worcester is a wonderful place. The people here, it's called the heart of Massachusetts for a reason," Dajana said. "The people have a wonderful heart. We've been to the elderly center., we've been to Catholic churches, the Islamic center; the city officials have been really helpful. We want when we were doing this, we realized that the most important stakeholder in all of this, other residents and the people of Worcester."

Gomez and Dajana said the surveys are still open for residents to give their feedback on winter storms. They plan to gather the data and present some possible solutions on how Worcester can improve its climate resilience sometime in December.

Links to English and Spanish versions of the survey can be found here.