Over the past week, the University has hosted three Climate@Brown faculty town halls focused on getting faculty feedback on the future of Brown’s climate scholarship and action.
According to Director of the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society Kim Cobb, Climate@Brown is working to finalize an official plan for the University’s climate strategy, which will be based on student-led focus groups in the fall and input from faculty town halls. They aim to finish before the arrival of the new University president, who will then “be able to put their spin and points of emphasis on it,” Cobb added.
While this new strategy is still in the early stages, Cobb said that “there will be a strong component of this plan which rests on the integration of research, education and facilities.”
Climate@Brown is a “relatively new effort,” Cobb said. According to the town hall event listing, faculty leaders have met for the past 18 months to coordinate on climate-related work on campus.
As their work “matured,” Cobb said, Climate@Brown group noted achievements like the Brown Climate Week. This initiative gathered entities across campus to host events that provided students with opportunities to engage with different lenses of climate work — such as climate policy, engineering and humanities-based approaches.
Cobb recounted these events as having “really strong attendance and engagement,” which gave Climate@Brown’s current work momentum.
“The next step for us was to work with the president, the provost,” Cobb said, “to kind of help them see where we were having early successes as a group, and work with them to think about what's next for Brown.”
According to Cobb, that led them to take up the strategic planning process.
Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine Kyle Denison Martin added that Climate@Brown wants to take advantage of Brown’s uniquely collaborative environment and the interactions between undergraduate and graduate students.
“We want … our students and our faculty to have access to the top resources including funding to pursue research that’s going to really change the direction of our world,” Martin said. While the medical school foundation for climate-forward work, “there’s room for growth,” he said.
To obtain such resources and funding, however, Climate@Brown has had to reckon with federal funding cuts The “political winds right now are not favorable to climate research,” Cobb said. Yet it is “important to realize that Brown has baked into its core mission to be useful to society.” To Cobb, that entails leading on key issues of the day, including climate change.
Cobb added that the Climate@Brown initiative hopes to focus on the “long-term opportunity” for climate research, while remembering the “full scope of the damages that come from turning away from this work.”
Currently, Climate@Brown is turning to the entire Brown community to shape their new proposal. “The direction of (Climate@Brown) will depend on feedback from the community,” Porder added.
“We have a plan in place, but we need the conviction to follow it through to fruition,” Porder wrote.
