The climate crisis presents society with confounding pressures of ecological disruption, socio-economic risk, and racial injustice. In response, a premier success of the global environmental movement has been the widespread engagement of grassroots advocates who have taken independent and locally-organized action to educate themselves on climate science and push for preventative and restorative policy change. This project proposes new modes of collaboration with diverse local stakeholders including municipal land holders to investigate alternative futures and to facilitate discussions about just resolutions to historical and present inequities.

Yet, the data to do this work is often not publicly available, expensive to acquire through proprietary providers, and/or requires substantial technical skill and investment of time to analyze and present. For example, to ask questions about whose urban tree canopy has been best preserved in recent decades, urban community activists may have to combine US Census population data, commercial or federal satellite imaging, computer vision machine learning tools, GIS software, and geospatial statistical models, which is infeasible for most organizations.  Similar barriers prevent widespread disparate impact analysis of flooding, heat, air quality, and other climate consequences. Generating greater access to this data and associated analysis tools would benefit communities seeking to understand their present circumstances and possible futures; advocates fighting for change; as well as researchers in climate, sociology, and design.

Through the development of accessible data tools for analyzing the impact of climate and environmental factors and direct support for community organizations and leaders, we seek to generate case studies of climate justice and movements for change. This work requires environmental and socio-economic data that is hard to come by globally, in a uniform way. We envision developing curated datasets on factors such as heat, canopy, availability of green space, soil conditions, access to water, and water pollution, all with geographic resolution sufficient to merge with demographic data at the census block, neighborhood, ZIP, municipality, state, watershed, or national level to facilitate distributional impact analysis. We would seek to build interactive visualizations around this data to empower all community members to form their own understanding and interpretation of the data. By allowing users to curate dashboards and infographics, advocates could produce original communication tools that could generate substantial grassroots impacts on policy development, legislation, and other forms of advocacy. For a select number of targeted issues, we would collaborate with researchers to develop analytical and  spatial scenarios that enable community organizers to explore possible futures and communicate options to their constituencies.