/ Environmental advocates celebrated the creation of a chief resilience officer. Now they have doubts. For almost seven months, Florida had a dedicated leader on climate change. Then she left for another job. The state has now gone longer than that without a full-time replacement. Environmental advocates celebrated Gov. Ron DeSantis’s hiring of Julia Nesheiwat for the newly created position of chief resilience officer in summer 2019. They saw the move as a declaration his office would accept, and try to address, the realities of climate change in a vulnerable state. Now some wonder about that commitment. “We were so excited about it because it acknowledged what we were doing,” said Hank Hodde, Pinellas County’s sustainability and resiliency coordinator. “If the position isn’t backfilled, it just seems like it’s business as usual, and it was for show.”