Building Climate Justice: Co-Creative Co

This course will educate students and support effective coastal resilience planning and climate justice through social and data science learning and data acquisition and analysis, making use of emerging technologies and best practices for collaboration with environmental and climate justice practitioners.  

Instruction is provided in two areas: i. Climate adaptation planning & climate justice; and, ii. Data science: acquisition, analysis and visualization. Students and  instructors will work with participating community-based climate and environmental justice organizations to collect and analyze biological, geographic and socio-economic data  relevant to local resilience needs. Once this data has been acquired or generated and quality-assured, the students and community partner organizations will prepare it for presentation to federal, state and local planning officials, to help ensure that the resilience goals and related concerns identified by our community partners will be fully reflected in future planning by those officials.  

Upon completion of the course, students will better understand the challenges involved in creating and implementing collaborative, data-informed, multi-stakeholder plans for coastal resilience and ecosystem restoration in today’s increasingly climate-disrupted world. Successful completion of this course will partially fulfill the Analysis and Solutions to Complex Problems coursework requirement within the Undergraduate Major in Sustainable Development.