Yale Daily News

Yale Planetary Solutions, or YPS, awarded more than two million dollars in funding for 22 Yale research projects to confront environmental challenges. 

The projects are divided into three themes: biodiversity and ecosystems, climate change and communities and society. This is the third year that YPS has allocated such grants.

“Projects must be interdisciplinary and offer a clear pathway to impact,” said Tanya Wiedeking, interim director of the Planetary Solutions Project.

The News spoke with three researchers about how the YPS funding will facilitate their research.

Improving electric vehicle charging accessibility

Kenneth Gillingham, a professor at the School of the Environment, works on improving the accessibility of electric vehicle charging, preparing a model for charging station placement that the Department of Transportation can use.

Gillingham works with the Connecticut Department of Transportation, analyzing data about electric vehicle usage in the state. His team uses tax data from the state to determine which addresses have electric vehicles and uses cell phone data to see where electric vehicle drivers travel. 

“All of this data… allows us to better understand both the current lay of the land… but also allows us to develop a model that tells us what might happen as the charging infrastructure changes,” Gillingham told the News.

This is the second year that Gillingham has received a grant from YPS. The funding largely goes towards paying a data scientist who helps with research. 

The team has been collecting data for the past year; now, they hope to complete their model and publish some of their findings.

Creating music out of environmental movement

Matthew Suttor, program manager at the Center for Collaborative Arts and Media, conducts research to translate movement in nature into music. Suttor has long thought there is music in animal movement, and is now working to make this a reality.

Suttor and his fellow researchers obtained data from the University of Oxford tracking the movement of a set of pigeons around Oxford, England. 

“[The pigeons] were able to fly around a virtual pitch space, and that would trigger these complex chords, and it sounded really cool,” Suttor told the News.

However, Suttor and his colleagues are not solely collecting data on animal movement. The network AmeriFlux collects environmental data, including carbon and gas emissions. With data from AmeriFlux, Suttor and his colleagues could create music out of environmental conditions, which frames the climate in a new way.

The researchers are looking to bring their research into local schools through a partnership with Music Haven, a New Haven organization that encourages young people to engage with classical music. They want to present the data to students in elementary and middle school, who could use it to create their own music. 

The grant from YPS is going towards a number of areas of the research, including paying a developer who helped the team create their movement-to-music application, and graduate students who are assisting in research and working with local students.

“There’s a lot of anxiety around climate issues,” Suttor said. “It’s one thing to show people bar graphs and data around climate change — it’s another thing to be able to sonify that. Something that really communicates [this] directly is music.”

Analyzing climate displacement and migration

Maya Prabhu, professor at the Law School and School of Medicine, is part of a team of researchers studying climate migration and displacement. 

Looking at case studies in international and domestic regions, she and her colleagues will examine the extent to which climate causes displacement and how this migration affects countries receiving refugees.

“We are looking at the significant effects of climate change, and what that refers to is the mass displacement of, by some estimates, over a billion people by 2050,” said Prabhu.

Prabhu and her fellow researchers all approach this work slightly differently. 

Prabhu will focus on the mental health impacts on displaced people, while other colleagues will look at legal gaps in climate migration and the many effects that climate migration can have on receiving countries. In particular, Prabhu and her colleagues plan to conduct a case study in New Haven, to learn how to support climate migrant communities.

The team will use the YPS funding to hire researchers, execute fieldwork and create a graduate class at Yale about this project. 

The Planetary Solutions Project was launched in 2020.