Jim Fox

James (Jim) Fox is a Senior Resilience Associate. Jim has over 40 years of experience in helping people understand and make decisions in a complex and changing world.

Jim is the past Director of UNC Asheville’s NEMAC, where he led the group from 2005 to 2020. The private company, Fernleaf, was spun from NEMAC in 2014 with the goal of commercializing climate resilience products and services. The NEMAC+FernLeaf team is known nationally for its significant role in the development and ongoing management of the U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit in collaboration with NOAA’s Climate Program Office. Jim led the development of two important site features: the U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit Steps to Resilience, the nationally adopted framework for resilience planning; and the Climate Explorer, an interactive map and graph viewer that allows any community in the U.S. to explore its risk exposure.

Since the development of the public-private partnership, Jim has helped develop and deliver community resilience assessments that include climate for West Palm Beach (FL), Tallahassee (FL), Charleston (SC), Asheville and the surrounding region (NC), North Carolina’s Triangle region (Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill/Cary), and the State of North Carolina Climate Risk Assessment and Resilience Plan.