The Finger Lakes Forecast webinar series brings together regional experts, policymakers, and community leaders to explore how climate change is shaping our region and what we can do to prepare. Originally launched in 2022, the series created space for meaningful conversations about resilience, adaptation and community action.
This Spring, a series of four webinars will address various environmental, health, and economic issues, starting with the significant impacts of the rapid expansion of AI data centers. Stay tuned for updates on topics and registration links.
Upcoming Webinar
Thank you for supporting the Finger Lakes Forecast webinars this Spring! We look forward to resuming the series this Fall.
Media Coverage
- Mar 10, 2026 – Finger Lakes Times: Regional leaders to speak March 11 on AI data center impacts
- Mar 11, 2026 – Finger Lakes Daily News: Regional Leaders To Discuss AI Data Centers In Webinar Today
- Mar 11, 2026 – Finger Lakes 1: Panel to examine Cayuga Lake AI data center impacts
- Apr 7, 2026 – Finger Lakes Daily News: Sustainable Finger Lakes Hosts Wildfire Preparedness Panel Wednesday
- April 14, 2026 – Tompkins Weekly: ‘If it can burn, it will burn’
- May 6, 2026 – Finger Lakes 1: Sustainable Finger Lakes panel to examine climate change impacts on public health
- May 11, 2026 – 607 News: Emily La, Sustainable Finger Lakes, shares information about a webinar about climate change on Wednesday
- June 5, 2026 – Finger Lakes 1: Sustainable Finger Lakes to host webinar on New York grid challenges, rising electric costs
Previous Webinars
Watch past webinars where we held discussions about key climate impacts and their solutions.
Just about everyone is aware of the rapid rise in our electric bills over the past few years. Some want to blame the “Green New Deal” and renewable energy projects, but the real causes involve a combination of an aging grid, extreme weather, rising inflation and equipment shortages, distorted utility business models, rising natural gas prices for peak load generation, and the addition of massive new energy demand from AI hyperscale data centers.
Complicated, right? And all of those pressures may only get worse without serious intervention and redesign of how we provide electricity to our homes, schools, and local businesses. Our first step needs to be widespread public understanding and engagement with the realities of our electric grid system. If we want policymakers to act on our behalf, we need to be informed enough to resist any false solutions or distorted framing that may circulate to our detriment.
Join us at noon on Wednesday, June 17 to hear from our expert panelists as we try to sort through the current issues that are creating reliability issues for our NY grid, and what we can do now to help those at risk while preventing energy burdens from rising even higher.
Our first panelist is Kevin Lanahan, Senior Vice President for External Affairs and Corporate Communications from the New York Independent System Operator (NYISO). Kevin has 25 years of experience in the energy industry and is very familiar with grid operations. NYISO operates New York’s high-voltage transmission system, manages the state’s competitive wholesale electricity markets, and conducts comprehensive power system planning. Kevin will walk us through the basics of how the grid operates and the factors mentioned above that are impacting both cost and reliability of our electric system.
Our next speaker will be Laurie Wheelock, the Executive Director and General Counsel of the Public Utility Law Project (PULP). PULP is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization advocating for universal service, affordability, and customer protections for New York State utility consumers since 1981. Their organization’s mission is to educate the public about its legal rights as utility consumers; engage in research and advocacy; and provide legal representation for low-income utility consumers in electric, natural gas, telephone, and other utility related matters. PULP has been involved in the many rate cases before the PSC (Public Service Commission), advocating to protect consumers from the rapidly escalating electric delivery rates that our investor-owned utilities have imposed.
For additional resources, please visit our event page.
Extreme weather events like hurricanes, floods, and tornadoes might be the first thing that comes to mind when thinking about how climate disruption might impact our health via injuries and fatalities. But the ways that human health is being affected by a changing climate are wide-ranging and sometimes subtly hidden in terms of cause and effect. Extreme heat events tend to create the most fatalities, but we are also seeing growing impacts on health from water quality problems such as harmful algae blooms, rising infections from insect-borne diseases such as Lyme and West Nile virus, and respiratory ailments from increasing air pollution and allergens. Not to mention the mental health impacts from destructive severe weather and environmental degradation.
At the federal level, the CDC had created the BRACE (Building Resilience Against Climate Effects) program, but we will need to have state and local leadership to create new policies and build new infrastructure to mitigate climate impacts (e.g. cooling centers and enhanced water treatment), while also deepening the capacity of the health care sector to cope with higher patient loads from the diverse impacts of a warming climate.
Hear from state and local leaders on how climate disruption is affecting public health, and what we should be doing to prepare our communities. Dr. Neil Muscatiello is the Director of the Bureau of Environmental and Occupational Epidemiology at the NYS Dept of Health. Bryon Backenson is the Director of the Bureau of Communicable Disease Control at the New York State Department of Health, and an Assistant Professor at SUNY Albany’s College of Integrated Health Sciences. Dr. Danielle Eiseman is the Associate Director of the Cornell Health Impacts Core in the Department of Public and Ecosystem Health. We will also hear from Douglas Barnes, a Senior Environmental Health Specialist at the Tompkins County Health Department.
For additional resources, please visit our event page.
For most people in the Finger Lakes Region, the threat of wildfires has typically been something far away in the western states. But the infamous red dawn of June 7, 2023, caused by forest fires up in Quebec, had people scrambling to protect themselves from smoke inhalation – suddenly we had to consider our growing risk on this side of the continent. The very next year, wind-driven fires across NY and NJ after a very dry fall surpassed records for acreage burned. It is time to take wildfire risk seriously, understand the dynamics at play, and get to work on several fronts to reduce risk to homes, communities, and our forests. There are many tools available to help every local leader make a difference in how prepared and resilient their communities are.
The panelists included: Prof. Flavio Lehner, Cornell Atmospheric Science, about the intersecting trends that will affect frequency and intensity of wildfires in the Northeast; Prof. Alistair Hayden, Cornell Public and Ecosystem Health, on their Climate Disaster Health Policy Lab’s work on wildfire smoke inhalation; and Christina Rust, the Wildfire Policy Specialist at the National Fire Protection Association, who will share mitigation strategies and policies for homes, communities, and nearby forestlands.
For additional resources, please visit our event page.
This is the first of four Finger Lakes Forecast webinars since our first series in 2022. On March 11, 2026, we held a panel discussion on Protecting Local Communities from AI Data Center Impacts. Across the country, local communities are organizing to protest plans for massive AI data centers in their neighborhoods that drive up electricity prices for everyone, while threatening water supplies and disrupting lives. New York needs to get ahead of the problem by imposing a temporary moratorium on data center development while we figure out how, and if, their negative impacts can be eliminated. Hear from Eric Weltman, Senior Organizer for Food & Water Watch, who helped push for a moratorium in NYS, Assemblywoman Anna Kelles, sponsor of the moratorium bill in the Assembly, and Allison DeSario, member of the FLX Strong citizen group protesting the creation of a 400 MW hyperscale AI data center on the shores of Cayuga Lake.
For additional resources, please visit our event page.
April 27, 2022: How is our changing climate affecting food production and security in our region? The webinar included a screening of Uplifted Ithaca’s short documentary, “Our Farmers in Flux: Adapting to Climate Change”, which featured interviews with four regional farmers who are starting to experience new constraints and challenges to their production practices as they adapt to a new climate regime.
Panelists include: Graham Savio, Cornell Cooperative Extension Tompkins County; Katie Hallas, Tompkins Food Future; Klaas Martens, Lakeview Organic Grain; and Chaw Chang, Stick and Stone Farm.
Panelists include: Graham Savio, Cornell Cooperative Extension Tompkins County; Katie Hallas, Tompkins Food Future; Klaas Martens, Lakeview Organic Grain; and Chaw Chang, Stick and Stone Farm.
May 25, 2022: Upstate New York has been experiencing more frequent storm events and heavier downpours and flooding for the past few decades, and this trend will amplify in the years ahead as climate disruptions increase.
Speakers presented on the projected flooding patterns, what options for flood insurance are available to us, and how we can prepare our homes and reduce our flood risk and damage. They include Scott Doyle, Former Associate Planner for Tompkins County, on new FEMA maps and flood forecasting, followed by a panel discussion with Sally Hoyt of Tompkins Insurance and Alan Springett, Geologist and FEMA Mitigation retiree.
Speakers presented on the projected flooding patterns, what options for flood insurance are available to us, and how we can prepare our homes and reduce our flood risk and damage. They include Scott Doyle, Former Associate Planner for Tompkins County, on new FEMA maps and flood forecasting, followed by a panel discussion with Sally Hoyt of Tompkins Insurance and Alan Springett, Geologist and FEMA Mitigation retiree.
June 29, 2022 – The cyanobacteria that create toxic algae blooms are ancient organisms that have been in our waters since life on Earth began to blossom. So why have they recently become such a problem in the Finger Lakes? Years of research have documented two main causes: climate change and nutrient runoff from the land into the creeks and streams that feed our lakes. In the short run, we can’t do much to stop the warming of our waters that accelerate their growth, or the heavy downpours that push manure and fertilizer into our ditches and waterways, but we can start to develop better land-use practices and policies to slow down nutrient runoff and stop feeding the blooms.
Our panelists include several experts on the topic: Jessica Swindon is the Chair of Sustainable Finger Lakes and will share an overview of the factors that have led to our repeated widespread outbreaks of harmful algae blooms (HABs); Andy Zepp, Executive Director of the Finger Lakes Land Trust, will talk about ways to address the plumbing and revegetation issues in riparian zones; Brett Chedzoy, Senior Resource Educator for Schuyler Cooperative Extension, has experience with forestry management and regenerative agriculture techniques such as rotational grazing and silvopasture that can keep nutrients out of the water while improving soil health and carbon storage; Hilary Lambert is the former Steward of the Cayuga Lake Watershed Network where she was involved in monitoring the growing threat of HABs and can share what other groups have been doing to address nutrient pollution in the lakes.
Our panelists include several experts on the topic: Jessica Swindon is the Chair of Sustainable Finger Lakes and will share an overview of the factors that have led to our repeated widespread outbreaks of harmful algae blooms (HABs); Andy Zepp, Executive Director of the Finger Lakes Land Trust, will talk about ways to address the plumbing and revegetation issues in riparian zones; Brett Chedzoy, Senior Resource Educator for Schuyler Cooperative Extension, has experience with forestry management and regenerative agriculture techniques such as rotational grazing and silvopasture that can keep nutrients out of the water while improving soil health and carbon storage; Hilary Lambert is the former Steward of the Cayuga Lake Watershed Network where she was involved in monitoring the growing threat of HABs and can share what other groups have been doing to address nutrient pollution in the lakes.
September 28, 2022 – Where should we put the solar and wind farms we are going to need? Every day around the world escalating climate disruption is taking lives, property and economic stability from communities. It will get much worse if we don’t reduce emissions by transitioning to cleaner sources of power. NYS has set a goal of providing 100% of our electrical demand from carbon-free sources by 2040. How much land will be needed to site that much solar and wind energy? Who should decide where it goes? What are our options?
Our panelists explore these topics and more to help you understand how this may impact our food and energy security, and what public investments we should plan for as we face the challenges of climate change.
The speakers include David Kay of Cornell’s Dept. of Global Development provides a look at the numbers involved and what NYS is crafting around policy and programs. Kaitlin Stack Whitney of RIT’s Science and Technology Studies shares insights into where we might place solar arrays other than farmland, while Graham Savio, Agriculture Leader at CCE Tompkins reviews the potential of agrivoltaics – the production of crops and livestock within solar or wind arrays.
Our panelists explore these topics and more to help you understand how this may impact our food and energy security, and what public investments we should plan for as we face the challenges of climate change.
The speakers include David Kay of Cornell’s Dept. of Global Development provides a look at the numbers involved and what NYS is crafting around policy and programs. Kaitlin Stack Whitney of RIT’s Science and Technology Studies shares insights into where we might place solar arrays other than farmland, while Graham Savio, Agriculture Leader at CCE Tompkins reviews the potential of agrivoltaics – the production of crops and livestock within solar or wind arrays.