Empowering a more just and sustainable world requires interdisciplinary coalition-building and collaborative action. The University of Michigan is pursuing multidisciplinary approaches and initiatives built around social justice to ensure that work strengthens and supports Black, Indigenous and people of color (BIPOC) and all communities. No outcome is a true solution unless everybody benefits.
U-M was the first university to offer Environmental Justice as an academic field of study in the U.S., and remains on the forefront of educating leaders who make real impacts across the spectrum of EJ challenges. In partnership with communities throughout the region and world, U-M experts, from a wide range of disciplines, are pursuing inclusive, responsive, and equitable solutions to real-world problems. Some of our key initiatives in environmental justice include: Poverty Solutions, the Urban Energy Justice Lab, the Urban Collaboratory, the Center for Sustainable Systems, the Center for Local, State and Urban Policy, and the Sustainable Food Systems Initiative.
To LSA Collegiate Fellow and anthropologist Alyssa Paredes, the banana narrative is a parable for commerce, environmental degradation, and disparity. By uncovering the complex paradoxes and disconnects in the banana industry, Paredes reveals how industrialized food production shapes the fate of many rural regions in our world.
The White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council (WHEJAC) was established by President Biden’s Executive Order on Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad to fulfill his and Vice President Harris's commitment to confronting long standing environmental injustices and to ensuring that historically marginalized and polluted, overburdened communities have greater input on federal policies and decisions.
Larissa Larsen, associate professor of urban and regional planning and director of the urban and regional planning doctoral program at Taubman College, faced a skeptical audience when she started sounding the alarm on climate change and particularly the issue of extreme heat in 2000. In 2006, she co-authored an article that was the first to document that lower-income and communities of color were disproportionately impacted by the urban heat island.
The President’s Commission on Carbon Neutrality at the University of Michigan has submitted its final report, which contains recommendations to help the university achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions. The report includes 50 recommendations that U-M could take to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions across the Ann Arbor, Dearborn and Flint campuses.
U-M researchers will enlist the help of citizen scientists in a new project to digitize thousands of historical records—some dating back more than a century—about Michigan inland lake conditions and fish abundances. Scientists will feed the digitized data into computer models to study the impacts of climate change and other factors on the fish in Michigan’s inland lakes.
Co-producing climate information improves Great Lakes cities' adaptation to climate change, but how can these partnerships be sustained long-term? One successful model, according to a Gala learning case, is through the Great Lakes Climate Adaptation Network (GLCAN), which has linked a number of organizations together to provide Great Lakes cities with the information they need to adapt.
