by Nathan Sanders
The Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS) has just launched a new program to support climate justice throughout the United States through the use of data science and design. This spring and summer, the program will host an inaugural cohort of Climate Justice Design Fellows, to build connections, tools, and collective capacity.
Today we are facing confounding pressures of ecological disruption, socio-economic risk, and racial injustice. In response, a premier success of the global environmental movement has been the widespread engagement of grassroots advocates who have taken independent and locally-organized action to educate themselves on climate science and push for preventative and restorative policy change.
Yet, the data to do this work is often not publicly available, expensive to acquire through proprietary providers, and/or requires substantial technical skill and investment of time to analyze and present. For example, to ask questions about whose urban tree canopy has been best preserved in recent decades, urban community activists may have to combine US Census population data, commercial or federal satellite imaging, computer vision machine learning tools, GIS software, and geospatial statistical models, which is infeasible for many organizations.
The Fellowship program is focused on the belief that everyone deserves equal access to participate in decision making about their environment, and information is key to that participation. Generating greater access to climate justice-related data, and increasing the capacity to analyze it, will benefit communities seeking to understand their present circumstances and possible futures. The Fellowship program is designed to support advocates fighting for change; public agencies serving the welfare of their constituents; as well as researchers in climate, sociology, and design.
Harvard’s Climate Justice Design Fellows will each design a project that generates data-oriented tools to support their own environmental justice advocacy, research, service, or education work with a community anywhere in the US. Fellows are expected to pursue projects that support their existing advocacy and service work. Fellows need not have prior experience with data science or design and will collaborate with technical experts at Harvard and mentors nationwide to develop new skills and implement their project designs.
The Fellowship is open for application to highly motivated climate justice advocates and public servants from across the United States. Fellows may already be engaged in full time occupations in civil society, government, or research; the Fellowship is a part time commitment from June through December of 2022 and is supported by a stipend.
Visit the Fellowship website for more information and to apply.
The Climate Justice Design Fellowship program is being operated as a pilot project of the Harvard-Google Data+Climate initiative, which engages Harvard scholars and Google engineers to uncover novel solutions to climate and sustainability challenges by building on top of tools from the Google Data Commons, the Harvard Institute for Quantitative Social Science, and the data visualization suite Glue. The Fellowship is operated in by IQSS in partnership with scholars affiliated with the Harvard Graduate School of Design and Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. You can follow the Fellowship program on Instagram and contact its leaders at climatejusticedesignfellowship@gmail.com.
