About
Supported by the Earth Institute in 2020 a diverse group of researchers and professors at Columbia University came together to form the Environmental Justice and Climate Just Cities network. The network was conceived as an open space, a meeting place for collaboration and dialogue on environmental and climate justice on campus across institutions and disciplines. In 2024, the Network merged with the Environmental and Climate Justice at Columbia (ECJaC) Project, which is supported by a catalyst grant from the Columbia University Provost’s office.
Project Goals
- Lay the foundations for the creation of an Environmental and Climate Justice Initiative at Columbia to serve as an interdisciplinary meeting space, incubator, and laboratory to support and catalyze needed research, education, public service, and 4th purpose work in Environmental and Climate Justice.
- Make Columbia University more responsive to the critical, urgent social and environmental demands of this moment and the future.
Foundational Questions
- How do we assess and implement socially, environmentally and climate just policies, programs, and planning efforts in communities?
- How could the climate crisis help us to envision alternative just futures that support healing from past environmental and climate injustices and race-based traumas while ensuring equity, justice, inclusion and growth for the underserved?
- How might Columbia better discover, create and aggregate critical data, engage, research, and teach about justice, environment and climate, and be part of building just societies?
- How can Columbia University become an accountable and trusted partner in communities such that our research, teaching, and engagement efforts support the most pressing needs of our neighbors, region and global community?
Project Methods
- Engage in dialogues across the university and with partners in government, philanthropy, business, academia and most-at-risk communities to assess Columbia’s current environmental and climate justice initiatives and identify themes for scholarship, education and action, as well as potential partnerships with thought and action leaders in these and other sectors.
- Develop a detailed proposal, based on these dialogues and correlative research, for the goals, organizational structure, partnerships and potential project areas that would make for a truly transformative Environmental and Climate Justice Center.
- Develop a Climate Justice Data Initiative that would focus on the most important issues from a digital data infrastructure perspective that need to be tackled, maximizing the current expertise at Columbia University.
- Analyze the feasibility of establishing a long-term endowment for the proposed center of at least ten million dollars, to provide the resources needed to deliver a truly transformative combination of scholarship, instruction and practice around environmental and climate justice.
Funded Activities
- Organization of small workshops that bring in key external actors including most importantly local community groups and environmental and climate justice organizations with honoraria for their time.
- Organization of larger interdisciplinary workshops involving faculty, staff, students, community leaders, other key partners to collaboratively create a vision, structure & design for centering justice at Columbia and building a center with one of these workshops focussed on Climate Justice Data.
- Hiring a student assistant to help engage in background research into current justice, environment and climate work on campus and any similar initiatives, and funding opportunities, coordination, planning and proposal writing.
- Organization of a public discussion on our findings and ongoing work at Columbia once we have input through workshops and resources for designing a professional proposal and outreach.