Building Climate Justice: Empowering Communities Through Coastal Resilience at Columbia University
State of the Planet
By: Lylia Saurel
Last fall, the Undergraduate Program in Sustainable Development introduced a new course titled “Building Climate Justice: Co-Creative Coastal Resilience Planning,” which aimed to educate students on effective coastal resilience planning and climate justice, using a combination of social science and data acquisition and analysis.
The course was born out of a collaboration between instructors Greg Yetman, Paul Gallay and Kytt MacManus, with support from the Columbia University Collaboratory. The course is grounded in the notion that climate-adaptation planning should not alienate the very individuals resilience planners are seeking to protect. It also allows students to experience firsthand the power of community engagement.
As the director of the Resilient Coastal Communities Project at the Center for Sustainable Urban Development and an adjunct lecturer with the Undergraduate Program in Sustainable Development, Gallay’s past work in government and environmental advocacy has emphasized the importance of effective community participation.
