2022 Presentations (Communicative Events)

Open for Climate Justice: Conversations with Columbia Climate School Researchers

De Sherbinin, Alexander M.; Tedesco, Marco; MacManus, Kytt; Bielskas, Amanda S.

This panel was presented as a part of Columbia University Libraries' Open Access Week 2022 programming. Read more here: https://guides.library.columbia.edu/OAWeek2022

The term "climate justice" reflects an explicit acknowledgement that the climate crisis has far-reaching impacts that are most often felt by communities with relatively few resources. These same communities often lack the means and the access needed to produce, disseminate, and use knowledge around the climate crisis. Openness in research on climate can create pathways to more equitable knowledge sharing and serve as a means to address the inequities that shape the impacts of climate change and our response to them. This panel discussion will highlight how “openness” factors into the work of Columbia researchers and their connections with the climate justice movement.

Panelists:
Kytt MacManus, CIESIN
Students Take the Driver's Seat in Drone-Enabled Geospatial Data Analysis
https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2022/05/18/drone-enabled-geospatial-data-analysis/
Students in MacManus's “Spatial Analysis for Sustainable Development,” course operated drones in Callicoon, NY to collect data and then map it using ARCGIS. Drones democratize access to data and enable daily high frequency measurements that eliminate the need to hire an external company and wait as long as multiple years for the data.

Kytt MacManus is a GIS Developer at the Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN), Columbia Climate School. He is an Adjunct Lecturer in the Undergraduate Special Concentration and Major in Sustainable Development and the M.P.A. in Environmental Science and Policy. Kytt has extensive experience with global dataset and web application development for the NASA Socio-economic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC), hosted by CIESIN.

Marco Tedesco, Lamont-Doherty
A New Dataset Could Aid Climate Justice Research
https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2021/08/19/a-new-dataset-could-aid-climate-justice-research/
Tedesco developed a free data tool to explore issues at the crossroads of racial, social and climate justice. The Socio-Economic Physical Housing Eviction Risk (SEPHER) dataset integrates socio-economic information with natural disaster risks, other hazards, financial information from real estate databases and ethnicity, race and gender data. This is a case study of how climate change catalyzed gentrification in a Miami neighborhood.

Marco Tedesco is a Lamont Research Professor at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University and Adjunct Scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS). He is also affiliated with the Data Science Institute, he is Affiliated professor at Sant’Anna School of Economics in Pisa, Italy and has been the Resident Scientist at the Columbia Business School for the past two years. He is a fellow of the Explorers Club and a member of the New York City Panel on Climate Change, Equity Working Group. Dr. Tedesco received his Laurea degree and PhD in Italy, from the University of Naples and the Italian National Research Council. He then spent five years as a postdoc and research scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. He moved to CCNY in 2008 as an Assistant Professor where he was promoted to Associate Professor in 2012. During his time at CCNY, he founded and directed the Cryosphere Processes Laboratory and was a rotating Program Manage at the National Science Foundation between 2013 and 2015. In January 2016, he joined Columbia University. Dr. Tedesco’s research focuses on the dynamics of seasonal snowpack, ice sheet surface properties, high latitude fieldwork, dendrochronology, global climate change, its implications on the economy and real estate and climate justice. Dr. Tedesco led more than 10 expeditions to Greenland and to Antarctica, beside fieldwork in many other places, including Iceland, Northern US, Canada, Italian Alps and more. He is the editor of the book “Remote Sensing of the Cryosphere” published by Wiley in 2015 and he is the author of the book “The hidden life of ice” originally published in 2018. The book has been translated in 7 languages and was selected by the Washington Post and by the National Geographic Traveler as one of the best 10 books of the year.

Moderator:
Alex de Sherbinin, CIESIN
Alex de Sherbinin is the Deputy Director and a Senior Research Scientist at the Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN), a spatial data and analysis center within the Columbia Climate School specializing in the human aspects of global environmental change.