Upcoming events
Clean Energy and Climate Series
The Climate and Clean Energy Series is hosted by the Schatz Energy Research Center at Cal Poly Humboldt. All webinars are free and open to the public. For questions or accessibility requests, contact schatzenergy@humboldt.edu or call 707-826-4345.
Thursday, April 6 @ 5:30 pm (webinar)
The justice conundrum in coastal adaptation: should we retreat or invest in floating climatopias?
Dr. Jola Ajibade is an associate professor of geography and a scholar activist who applies both environmental justice and political ecology lenses to study the intersections of climate risk, urban disasters, resilience planning, coastal management, and societal transformations. Broadly speaking, her research focuses on how individuals, communities, and cities respond to global climate change and their different capacities for adaptation and transformation. In her recent research, she examines how climate adaptation solutions such as managed retreat programs, floating cities, tree planting, blue-green infrastructures, and utopian development projects intertwine with exclusionary planning practices to reproduce structural and historical injustices, thereby exacerbating racial, gender, and class-based inequalities and undermining the capacities of marginalized communities to respond to climatic and socio-economic crises.
In her works, Dr. Ajibade advances ideas about just urban adaptation through embracing feminist, decolonial, and antiracist approaches as well as care ethics that can lead to more just, livable, and sustainable urban futures. Her work also explores unconventional approaches such as partnering with social entrepreneurs, grassroots coalitions, cooperatives, and small businesses in promoting a shareable economy, sustainable lifestyle changes, low-carbon development, and socially just resilience planning in cities. Dr. Ajibade’s work has been featured in many academic journals and media outlets including Science Friday, NPR, Yale Environment 360, Science, New Internationalist, and Vice.
Recordings
Schatz Center Research
California offshore wind
- Seabirds in 3D: a new framework for assessing collision vulnerability with floating offshore wind (April 2023)
- Transmission Alternatives (May 2022)
- Energy Production and Delivery, and Economic Development (September 2020)
- Ecological and Geological Environment (September 2020)
- Port and Coastal Infrastructure (September 2020)
- Community Perspectives on Regional Impacts and Opportunities (October 2020)
- Reflections and Next Steps
(October 2020)
Microgrids and resiliency
- Redwood Coast Airport Microgrid Grand Opening Celebration (June 2022)
- Local Governments Leading the Way through Resilient Microgrids (Statewide Energy Efficient Collaborative, September 2020)
- Redwood Coast Airport Microgrid: Advancing a resilient and clean energy future (Clean Coalition, September 2020)
- Innovations of the Redwood Coast Airport microgrid (Cal CCA, April 2020)
Off-grid energy access
- IEC quality standards for pico-solar products & SHS kits (VeraSol, May 2020)
Sustainable Futures
- Preparing frontline communities for climate disruption: Lessons from community-embedded research – Gabrielle Wong-Parodi (November 2, 2022)
- Children’s fundamental rights and the climate crisis: the call for judicial branch engagement – Andrea Rodgers (April 28, 2022)
- What can we still do? – Bill McKibben (October 7, 2021)
- Building a net zero energy system that protects biodiversity – Grace Wu (September 23, 2021)
- Cántaro Azul: An organization’s journey to contribute to the human right to water and sanitation in rural Mexico – Fermín Reygadas (March 18, 2021)
- Energy transitions in a time of intersecting precarities: from reductive environmentalism to antiracist praxis – Myles Lennon (October 29, 2020)
- Redwood Coast telecommunications resilience – Karen Eckersley and Jana Ganion (October 22, 2020)
- Safer breathing: reducing the risk of airborne COVID 19 infection – Mark Nicas (September 3, 2020)
- Thwaites Glacier Research: On board the Nathaniel B Palmer -Julia Wellner, Al Hickey, and Tim McGovern (July 29, 2020)
Additional Sustainable Futures recordings are available here…
