Inaugural Projects
1. Climate Literacy Study
Team Members
Faculty: Dr. Paul Almeida
Student: Justin Barnes PhD Candidate
Project: Working with the Sustainability Office and Living Lab, Justin Barnes helped to synthesize key findings regarding campus priorities from a recent campus wide survey on sustainable, equitable practices. Justin helped to organize and visualize information from this survey to be included on the campus' central Climate Action Plan. Additionally, Justin shared his research with the campus community at the Climate Action Town Hall and helped to facilitate discussions around barriers and opportunities to climate action. This event provided an opportunity to extend the reach of his research and to gather new perspectives which supplement his findings. Justin conducted semi-structured interviews with participants from a variety of US organizations engaged in climate engagement, discussing key challenges when organizations frame climate issues with audiences. Presenting his findings, he focused on 2 key challenges when framing climate issues: 1) Difficulties with clearly communicating the problem and 2) Challenges with managing emotional barriers. To overcome these challenges and move people to engage with climate issues, climate advocates work to personalize and localize how they discuss climate change, often through storytelling, community-building and civic participation opportunities.
2. Sustainalytics Dashboard with I2G
Team Members
Faculty: Dr. Santosh Chandrasekar and Stefano Foresti
Students: Brian Huynh, Isaac Jee, Javon Hudgins, Julian Olaviano, Steven Murillo
Project: A student-led capstone project focused on designing and implementing a campus sustainability dashboard to track, visualize, and communicate key performance metrics. This dashboard will contain many working parts, including: utility tracking, GHG emissions, buildings, reporting, climate justice, and an ARCgis interactive map. Find the project here!
