Climate Futures Initiative Announces First Pilot Project

Eugene Korsunskiy, associate professor of engineering and co-director of the Design Initiative at Dartmouth, holds a small group discussion with a student team in his Senior Design Challenge class. (Photo by Mark Washburn)

The two-term course, Community Partnerships for Climate Resilience, is being co-taught by Department of Earth Sciences professors Carl Renshaw and Erich Osterberg, and will run in the winter and spring of 2025.

Osterberg and Renshaw are modeling their course on other project-based courses that incorporate community partnerships, particularly Dartmouth Engineering's Senior Design Challenge, a two-term capstone in which multidisciplinary teams of students collaborate with local businesses and organizations to solve real-world problems.

"The impact of experiences like these on students can't be overstated," says Associate Professor of Engineering Eugene Korsunskiy, who leads the Senior Design Challenge. "As they get out into the community to put their skills and knowledge to use on projects that make a real difference in the lives of individuals and organizations in the Upper Valley, our students begin to understand their power and potential to make meaningful positive change in the world. In experiences like these, their self-conception shifts from learner to maker, and that is an immensely important cognitive shift. I'm so glad that Dartmouth is supporting the creation of more courses like these, and I'm excited to see Erich and Carl's new course take off."

CFI is a critical component of the Dartmouth Climate Collaborative, which is investing $500 million in climate-related capital improvements to reduce campus emissions 100% by 2050 and working to make the campus a living lab for new research, teaching, and collaboration.

"CFI was created to foster exactly this kind of innovative teaching, engagement, and leadership regarding the urgent issue of climate change," says Provost David Kotz '86.

"What's wonderful about this project is that it puts students in collaborative dialogue with people in our local community," says Professor of Anthropology Laura Ogden, director of CFI and special advisor to the provost on climate and sustainability. "It's both an opportunity for Dartmouth to be a good neighbor and for students to learn firsthand about what we need to do to respond to climate change."

Renshaw and Osterberg are in the process of recruiting potential community partners to work with students in the course. The professors hope to attract a diverse group of organizations representing a broad range of needs—for example, a local municipality that wants to work on flood risk mitigation, a snowmobile club seeking strategies to cope with decreasing and less-consistent seasonal snowfall, or a grassroots nonprofit or business where a small grant and a team of engaged students could make a big difference.

In addition to Renshaw and Osterberg’s course, CFI will be launching other pilot projects—both curricular and research-based—in the coming academic year, Ogden says.

Ogden describes CFI as "a faculty-driven planning process designed to help us understand what Dartmouth is already doing well on climate scholarship and sustainability and to make recommendations on where we should be going."

Ogden—who with Dartmouth Sustainability Director Rosi Kerr '97 is also co-chair of the Dartmouth Climate Collaborative Advisory Council—is holding listening sessions with faculty at Thayer, Tuck School of Business, Geisel School of Medicine, and Arts and Sciences faculty working in the environmental humanities, and conducting dozens of informal conversations across campus.

"I've already talked to 100 faculty, and by the end of the fall, I hope to have reached more than half of the faculty in all schools," Ogden says. "By the end of it, we'll have had an enormous amount of faculty involvement in saying, 'This is where Dartmouth should sit in terms of climate scholarship. This is how we are unique and what we do well, and how we should tell that story to the world.'"

These conversations are painting a picture of a Dartmouth faculty already "talking about and teaching about climate change in every department in Arts and Sciences as well as at Geisel, Thayer, Tuck, and Irving," she says.

Among the common themes that are emerging include ideas for how to best use the campus and Dartmouth's rural New England environment as a laboratory for teaching and research on climate, as well as a continuing commitment to supporting Native American students and communities.

"I've never seen an issue that is so unifying at Dartmouth," says Renshaw. "You have a coalescence of support from the administration, the faculty, and the students all in agreement that we need to be leaders in this space."

Osterberg agrees. "It's an exciting time to be working on climate at Dartmouth," he says.