I have a new paper Nature Climate Change, “Future-making beyond (Im)mobility through tethered reilience,” led by Bishawjit Mallick, that introduces a concept of tethered resilience, related to people’s attachment to their native communities and place, and argues that this concept provides new and useful ways to think about connections among climate change, migration, and adaptation.
I am co-author on a letter to Science discussing the need to protect transgender and gender-nonconforming (GnC) scientists in the face of politicized attacks by the Trump administration.
In February, I gave the opening keynote talk at the Planet Texas 2050 symposium at the University of Texas Austin. UT has uploaded a video of my talk, “Sustainability across the University: Expanding the Disciplinary Range of Teaching, Scholarship, and Artistic Expression Responding to Environmental Change”, to YouTube.
I have a new paper, with Kelsea Best and Bishawjit Mallick, in which we used pattern-oriented agent-based modeling to study environmentally-driven migration in rural Bangladesh and found that economic inequality in rural villages plays a crucial role.
Mariah Caballero, Mike Vandenbergh, Elodie Currier, and I have a paper analyzing the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) and the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). These laws include incentives for households to take voluntary actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, such as buying electric cars and performing energy-efficiency home renovations. We found that these incentives account for only around 11% of spending, but the household actions they stimulate are expected to produce around 40% of total emissions reductions.
These results confirm previous studies which found that incentives for individuals and households to voluntarily adopt energy efficiency actions can make powerful contributions to climate and energy policy, and should be emphasized in future policy proposals.
I have a new paper, led by Jess Raff, that analyzes sediment transport and sediment budgets in the Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna delta, and assesses the implications of sediment flow for sustainability in the face of sea-level rise and the diversion and damming of major rivers.
I am very excited to announce that I have been selected for a Fulbright Scholar Award, which will allow me to spend a large part of the next academic year at the University of Calgary’s Werklund School of Education as the Fulbright Canada Research Chair in Digital Technologies and Sustainability.
In June, I gave the keynote talk for a webinar and panel discussion at the National Socioenvironmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC) about incorporating behavior change into socio-environmental systems models. The video of the event has now been posted to SESYNC’s YouTube channel
I have a new paper in the journal Energy Efficiency, co-authored with Alex Maki, Emmett McKinney, Mike Vandenbergh, and Mark Cohen, about employers who offer employee benefits to promote energy efficiency.