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Research

Research, Innovation, and Collaboration that Provide Solutions

The world is changing. Quickly. Now more than ever there is a need for science-based solutions and independent analyses that address overlapping economic, environmental and social challenges. With our multidisciplinary and innovative team, HARC is positioned to address the most pressing sustainability challenges and opportunities.

Air

HARC’s work in air quality research and management includes air quality modeling, emission reduction technologies, emissions monitoring technology and policy. The air research program is multi-disciplinary, multi-institutional, objective, and non-partisan.

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Energy

HARC provides research, planning services, tools and technical assistance on the implementation of energy technologies to generate economic development and mitigate risks.
We advise policymakers, community stakeholders and industry leaders on resilience, energy efficiency, distributed energy resources and sustainable facilities planning.

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Water

One of today’s greatest challenges comes down to three critical words: enough clean water.
HARC has worked in the areas of water quality and availability for more than 25 years and helps city, county and state leaders understand the scope of the challenge and the solutions that can overcome them.

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Resilience

We work with communities and leaders to design and implement economic, environmental and social solutions grounded in sustainability research. These solutions strengthen communities, generate good jobs, improve health outcomes and expand opportunity.

HARC’s Resilience

Geospatial

When it comes to data, sometimes seeing is believing. HARC uses a variety of geospatial and analytical tools to help our partners better understand air, water and energy data. Through our geospatial platform, we create private and public applications using maps, charts and other visualization methods that bring data to life.

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Explore Our Research

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Regional Air Quality Data & Research Community Health
Clean Energy Energy Resilience Building Optimization
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Powering Texas’ Digital Economy: Data Centers and the Future of the Grid

In partnership with the University of Houston, read HARC's two-part policy brief exploring how data centers are evolving across Texas.

Hurricane Harvey Datasets

Explore HARC’s data and story map on Hurricane Harvey’s environmental impacts, including flood-related pollution, Superfund site disruptions, and air and water quality issues. Features data, maps, and infographics from 2017, maintained for historical reference.
Texas Solar for All

The Texas Solar for All Coalition received $249.7 million from the EPA to expand solar access for low-income and disadvantaged communities in Texas. As a partner, HARC supports solar deployment, energy efficiency, technical and financial assistance, workforce development, and community outreach to help residents transition to clean, reliable energy.
Weatherization Solutions in Texas

Learn more about home weatherization solutions to reduce utility costs, enhances home safety, and strengthens community resilience.
Texas Litter Database: Track, Report, and Prevent Litter Statewide

A Story Map highlighting the work between HARC and Keep Texas Beautiful showcasing a state-wide litter database to track and leverage the litter collection efforts across Texas. The STOP Texas Litter Database is an essential step towards greater collaboration between organizations cleaning up litter and the organizations researching litter impacts, sources, pathways, and removal.
State of the Bay

The State of the Bay Report summarizes monitoring data, research findings, and management actions along with information describing historical resource use and modern social and economic features of the lower Galveston Bay watershed in a simple to use StoryMap.
Policy Brief: The Energy Permitting Reform Act 2024

HARC's latest policy brief, Understanding the Energy Permitting Reform Act of 2024, summarizes and analyzes the legislation, comparing it to the Clean Electricity and Transmission Acceleration Act of 2023 and recent federal rules. The brief also proposes recommendations to lawmakers.
Houston Harris Heat Action Team H3AT Mapping Campaign

The Houston Harris Heat Action Team's H3AT Mapping Campaign is a community heat-mapping project that brings together local volunteers, public and private organizations, universities, and non-profit organizations to co-produce heat maps.

HARC’s Expanded Vision and Priorities

Learn more about HARC's expanded vision and priorities to help improve the quality of life for all citizens of Texas and the world.
Growing Community Resilience Through Urban Forestry in Houston

Discover how ForUsTree is expanding Houston’s urban forestry, growing tree canopy, creating green jobs, and building climate resilience across Harris County.

DOE Southcentral Onsite Energy ​Technical Assistance

HARC hosts the U.S. Department of Energy's Southcentral Onsite Energy Technical Assistance Partnership, providing technical assistance and hosting webinars and workshops for industrial facilities and other large energy users (across Arkansas, Louisiana, Texas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico) to increase the adoption of onsite clean energy technologies.

A Case for Cool Trees: Advancing Houston’s Tree Equity Report

Funded by the Mitsubishi Corporation, HARC's report, "A Case for Cool Trees: Advancing Houston’s Tree Equity," provides guidance on how to plan and conduct urban tree plantings equitably to reduce climate and health risks, and makes the evidence-based case for increasing tree canopy and improving tree equity in cities, especially for urban heat mitigation.
Galveston Bay Regional Monitoring Database

The Galveston Bay Regional Monitoring Database is a centralized, interactive portal that provides a significant amount of quality-assured data to support conservation, management, and research communities who are interested in the Galveston Bay.
Houston Gulf Coast Area State of the Birds

The Houston Gulf Coast Area State of the Birds StoryMap is aimed at understanding the health of the region’s bird population and the environments in which we all live.
HARC’s Strategic Plan

The new Strategic Plan includes new Mission and Vision statements, and comprehensive Strategic Initiatives and Actions that detail how we will develop and implement programs that address the challenges related to sustainability, resilience, and climate equity.
Texas Power Sector at the Crossroads: Challenges and Opportunities in a Changing Climate

Investors, regulators, insurance companies, and rating agencies recognize the risks associated with climate change impacts and call for greater transparency. Beyond the growing push for decarbonization of the energy system, extreme weather increasingly affects business operations and the bottom line. HARC's Climate and Resilience series will feature reports and date meant to better prepare communities for climate change impacts.
Leading with Equity in Adaptation Practice (LEAP)

The Houston Advanced Research Center (HARC) is looking to hire a consultant to work on the Gulf of Mexico Leading with Equity in Adaptation Practice (LEAP) program to further develop training materials from the perspective of Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (JEDI).
Powering the future: Texas power sector pivoting to climate resilience

HARC’s team announces the first in a series of white papers providing an analysis of the risks within Texas’ power sector, Powering the future: Texas Power Sector Pivoting to Climate Resilience. This position paper provides keen insight into the changing landscape of climate risk disclosure and climate change impacts on the power sector in Texas while highlighting key opportunities for resilience during this crucial time.
Impacts of Assimilative Capacity of Reservoirs StoryMap

An Esri StoryMap demonstrating the impacts of Assimilative Capacity of Reservoirs on Coastal inflows project assesses assimilative capacity of the Lake Livingston reservoir and related impacts on freshwater inflows to the Galveston Bay estuary.

2020 Annual Report

HARC's 2020 Annual Report highlights the successes of the organization and is the result of ongoing partnerships and innovative collaborations.

Resilience Science Information Network (RESIN)

The purpose of the RESIN portal is to develop and share a comprehensive set of data describing future climate impacts to the Greater Houston-Galveston Region.

Know your Aquifer

The Know Your Aquifer Story Map provides information on what an aquifer is, how aquifers are used, how we get drinking water, and what entities govern their usage.
ENERGY FELLOW – A Community Energy Systems Planning Tool

HARC, along with project partners University of Houston and Fugro are creating a user-friendly webtool to promote the deployment of District Energy Systems (DES) and community microgrids.

A Vegetative View: Harris County, TX

A Vegetative View: Harris County, Texas is a mapping application that presents a series of data layers describing structural characteristics of the urban vegetative canopy within Harris County, Texas
Headwaters to Baywaters: A Future of Urban Resilience

The goal of the Headwaters to Baywaters initiative (launched by Bayou Land Conservancy (BLC), Buffalo Bayou Partnership (BBP), Galveston Bay Foundation (GBF), Houston Audubon Society (HAS), and Katy Prairie Conservancy (KPC) ) is to ensure healthy lands, healthy waters, and healthy communities for the greater Houston region.

Winter Storm Uri’s Impacts & Pathways to Resilience in Texas

Winter Storm Uri moved across North America from February 13–17, 2021, causing blackouts for over 9.7 million people in the U.S. and Mexico, most notably in Texas where power supply and grid failures led to prolonged outages, culminating in an energy and water crisis. This application connects the water, energy, and air impacts of Winter Storm Uri and highlights strategies that could lead to more resilience in the future.

What You Can Do Tool

The What You Can Do tool is how individuals can help the Galveston Bay, in ways that fit interests and the amount of time volunteers have. In 2020, the Galveston Bay Foundation added more links and resources to learn about the bay and help safely from the comfort of home.
Toward Wetland Protection in the Houston-Galveston Region

This report assesses wetland mitigation in the Houston-Galveston metropolitan region and enhances a regional decision support tool to provide information to local governments and citizens, allowing them to access information describing potential development impacts to watersheds, wetlands and the ecosystem services that they provide.
Galveston Bay Wetland Mitigation Assessment and Local Government Capacity Building

This report evaluates the USACE wetland mitigation program records and serves as a regional decision support tool to provide information to local governments and citizens, allowing them to access information describing potential development impacts to wetlands, floodplains, and water quality.
ERCOT Interconnection Dashboard

The ERCOT Interconnection Dashboard helps track investment in new generation across Texas and to identify trends that will facilitate further investment decisions.
Clean Energy Hub

The Clean Energy Hub, funded by the State Energy Conservation Office (SECO), houses a variety of interactive tools, podcasts, webinars, guides, and case studies to help accelerate the adoption of distributed generation and energy efficiency projects in Texas.
Regional Groundwater Science Partnership

HARC is partnering with multiple organizations to provide a science-based review of groundwater in the Houston-Galveston Region.
2019 Annual Report

HARC's 2019 Annual Report highlights the successes of the organization and is the result of ongoing partnerships and innovative collaborations. Thank you to our supporters, especially our partners and the funders that make HARC’s work possible.
Funding Resilience in the Greater Houston Region: Synopsis from a Public-Private Sector Workshop

HARC’s most recent Green Paper offers specific examples of how communities can fund recovery along with considerations that should be given to communities and the natural environment.

Building a Legacy

At HARC, we are fortunate to conduct our research and undertake this work out of a living lab that showcases green building design, technology, and operations in action.
Impacts of Assimilative Capacity of Reservoirs

The Impacts of Assimilative Capacity of Reservoirs on Coastal Inflows project assesses assimilative capacity of the Lake Livingston reservoir and related impacts on freshwater inflows to the Galveston Bay estuary.
DOE Southcentral and Upper West Combined Heat and Power Technical Assistance

DOE Technical Assistance Partnerships (TAP) program promotes CHP technology solutions for the industrial and manufacturing sector, critical infrastructure, institutions, commercial facilities, and utilities.
Find Your Watershed Tool

This application is a tool to find out what watershed you live in, and how your watershed fares in terms of overall environmental health.
COVID-19 Impacts

HARC's COVID-19 research studied the regulatory measures enacted by local governments to slow the rate of infection and also the effects stay-at-home orders had on infrastructure systems, communities, and the environment.
State of the Bay: A Characterization of the Galveston Bay Ecosystem

This website provides data describing Galveston Bay and its surrounding watershed, use the navigation area to explore the status, trends, and indicators of bay health that interest you.
Don’t Trash a Good Thing

The goal of this project is to envision a region, free from trash and plastic pollution that impacts our bayous, lakes and rivers that lead to Galveston Bay.
Double Bayou Watershed Protection Plan

The Double Bayou Watershed Protection Plan (WPP) is a locally-developed, voluntary watershed management plan that helps to restore and protect water quality.
Forests and Floods

HARC’s Forests and Floods project is funded by the Texas A&M Forest Service. The initiative compiles and develops data to investigate the role that trees, forest, and canopy cover play in flood mitigation.
City of Houston Climate Action Plan

HARC worked in partnership with the City of Houston to develop the city’s Climate Action Plan, a roadmap to bring Houston closer to a carbon-neutral future.
Galveston Bay Report Card

The Galveston Bay Report Card is a citizen-driven, science-based grading system supported by Houston Endowment and the EPA Gulf of Mexico Program.
Aquatic and Marine Litter and Debris

HARC research team will work with innovative technology methods utilizing Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) and spatial analysis to analyze feasibility of debris patterns and hot spots within the region’s waterways.
Sustainability of Engineered Rivers in Arid Lands (SERIDAS)

SERIDAS studies both the benefits and risks of river engineering and how physical and and social drivers of change may predict an engineered river's functioning in 2040 and in 2060.
Flaring Issues, Solutions, and Technologies (F.I.S.T.)

HARC launched the Flaring Issues, Solutions and Technologies (FIST) 2019 project in late 2018 with the objective of evaluating the current state of technologies addressing flaring of natural gas at wells sites.
Powered for Good

Powered for Good is an initiative to design and assist in the implementation of clean, cheap electricity offerings for the approximately two and a half million low income households in Texas that can choose their electricity provider.
Texas Environmental Research Consortium

The TERC Air Quality Research Program (AQR) was established in 2002 by stakeholders who were focused on getting the best available science to identify cost effective solutions to the ozone problems in the Houston-Galveston-Brazoria (HGB) area.
Pythias | Climate Risk Analytics

Pythias is a tool to improve the ability of governments, businesses, and communities to anticipate future climate impacts.
Planning for Community Resilience

This toolkit includes recent examples of Climate Adaptation Plans and information includes strategic directions to apply to the City of Houston as a model.
Texas Solar Calculator

HARC, in partnership with the State Energy Conservation Office (SECO), has developed the Texas solar calculator to help you find out. It is easy to use and requires only a few inputs by you
Distributed Generation Interconnection Tool for Texas

This tool is a step-by-step guide on how to interconnect a 10 MW or larger distributed generation or “generation resource” to the ERCOT transmission grid. This tool can help ensure a successful and timely interconnection process from beginning to end.
PM2.5 Reduction Scenarios

This application provides information about primary fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and includes the amounts and sources of PM2.5 that can be found as well as various controls that can be applied to achieve the desired reductions.
TX-PACE Energy and Emissions Tracker

TX-PACE is a voluntary financing tool that helps owners of existing commercial, non-profit, industrial, and multifamily (5+ unit) properties invest in energy efficiency, water conservation and distributed generation improvements.
Texas Residential Passive Survivability

In partnership Texas’s State Energy Conservation Office, this online tool serves home owners as a resource to maintain, build, or renovate homes to increase energy efficiency and sustainability.
Summarizing Hurricane Harvey’s Environmental Impacts

After Hurricane Harvey, HARC mobilized swiftly to acquire and process data about the flooding and related environmental impacts, such as storm-related spills, pollutants, Superfund site impacts, water quality, air quality, and power generation.

Texas Energy-Water Nexus

This story map features a discussion of Texas energy and water resources, how the 2011 drought became the driest on record, presented with interactive content and dynamic maps.
Analysis of the Hurricane Ike Storm Surge and Waves

After Hurricane Ike in 2008, HARC researchers conducted an analysis of storm surge and wave impacts on land and studied ways to use breakwater islands to mitigate these effects.