Environmental Policy and Sustainability Management (MS)

Amazon Watch collaborates with us on public events and research that center the voices, knowledges, and struggles of Indigenous peoples, fisherfolk, rainforest dwellers, and other BIPOC communities defending lands, restoring ecosystems, and maintaining sustainable communities across Abya Yala/the Americas. Together we hosted the webinar Nourishing Communities of Life: Indigenous Resurgence beyond Syndemic Violence & Earth Crisis. We then collaborated on writing a paper on Indigenous and Black coalitions fighting for resurgence, sustainability, and liberation. We have also held other events in collaboration with Amazon Watch, such as Indigenous Resistance & the Crisis of Mother Earth: Paths to Climate Justice and Indigeneity and the Responsibilities of Scholar Activism.

Students in our program's Environmental Justice class have maintained a multi-year partnership with El Puente for Peace and Justice in South Williamsburg to support the Our Air!/¡Nuestro aire! Campaign, aimed at advancing local environmental justice. Students have worked on projects including the implementation of green zones and exploration of potential sources of funding for targeted improvements that would not intensify gentrification pressures in the area. In their report, students discussed the use of Community Benefits Agreements (CBAs), CDFI funding, developer fees, and a state tax imposed on vacant properties that would go to a community mitigation or green fund. Students have also been involved in an air quality monitoring project with El Puente.

The national Environmental Justice Movement Fellowship program, housed at the Tishman Environment and Design Center, is informed by the understanding that the unprecedented speed, magnitude, and impact of climate change require redesigning our global economic, social, and political systems. What the world needs now is solutions that transform the extractive systems that cause environmental harm. This fellowship is a two-year experience made up of four six-month phases. Fellows will participate in a combination of virtual and in-person retreats, group coaching sessions, and project-based collaboration.

GenderCC - Women for Climate Justice is a global network of organizations, experts, and activists working for gender equality, women's rights, and climate justice. Gender CC encompasses women and gender experts working in policy, research, and practical implementation at the local, national, and international levels. The organization's work focuses on the intersection of gender and climate in the areas of agriculture, biodiversity, consumption, disaster, energy, forests, extractivism, health, migration, population, tourism, transport, waste, and water. Our program held a brown-bag event that resulted in research collaborations and capstone projects involving our graduate students and Gender CC.

Our program partners with the coalition of organizations that constitute Hoodwinked in the Hothouse, the group that co-created the exemplary comprehensive compendium Hoodwinked in the Hothouse: Resist False Solutions to Climate Change, Third Edition.

Together we have co-hosted three critical webinars on false climate solutions and stories of people on the frontlines of the climate justice movement:

• Examining False Corporate Schemes Advanced through the Paris Agreement
• Frontline Voices of Indigenous Resistance Beyond Climate False Solutions
• Would Build Back Better Burn Billion$?

We are also working with the coalition to create a public curriculum designed to enhance the capacity of organizers, frontline communities, nonprofit environmental organizations, policymakers, and the public to challenge and move beyond false climate solutions and toward system-transformative and equitable solutions.

Our program partners closely with the Indigeneity, Decolonization, and Just Sustainabilities Initiative at The New School's Tishman Environment and Design Center. This initiative was inspired by the increasing recognition in scholarly, activist, and scientific and policy spaces that biodiversity protection and climate change mitigation depend on the defense and revitalization of Indigenous land governance and knowledges (IKs). Indigenous peoples and allies around the world are organizing to challenge and change policies at the local and global levels, confront powerful interests, defend community lands, restore Indigenous self-determination, and revitalize IKs.

We collaborate with the Indigenous People of the Coastal Bend (IPCB), on the Texas Gulf Coast, with the goal of strengthening their capacity to mobilize against Enbridge's Line 3 and Line 5 pipelines, which will export fossil fuel to Europe. Enbridge is exporting much of the fossil fuel from the Corpus Christi area, on the Gulf Coast of Texas. The IPCB are seeking to strengthen their mobilizations against these transnational export terminals. We hosted a brown-bag event called Weaving Anti-colonial Resistance vs. Climate Destructive Infrastructures Towards Indigenous Land Rematriation, featuring IPCB speakers and facilitated by program alum Sabrina Chapa.

The program's Environmental Justice class has an ongoing relationship with the Ironbound Community Corporation (ICC). In 2022, the class collaborated with the Humanities Action Lab on its environmental justice–related curriculum and, along with Parsons graduate architecture students, worked with the ICC to create content for a traveling exhibition on the issue. This evolving multimedia installation was initially created by a coalition of students, educators, and community leaders in more than 22 cities across the United States and around the world. Learn more at Climates of Inequality: Stories of Environmental Justice and Climates of Inequality: Reclaiming Our Land from the Flows of Global Capitalism.

We have been working with the Northeast Farmers of Color Land Trust to design a curriculum that centers leadership development of and knowledge exchange with Indigenous, Black, Latinx, and Asian American farming and land steward communities in the Northeast. This curriculum design process will result in the creation and delivery of courses that straddle the academic and community spheres by connecting community organizations, practitioners, students, and faculty in learning and knowledge-sharing spaces. It will also involve creating an applied research, information, and knowledge-sharing platform designed to nurture and strengthen BIPOC and QTBIPOC land-based education, stewardship, and food projects. This partnership also includes a research project aimed at supporting the revitalization of Indigenous land care systems through the restoration of Northeastern Indigenous forest garden systems.

The Transnational Institute (TNI) is an international research and advocacy organization committed to building a just, democratic, and sustainable planet. For more than 40 years, TNI has served as a unique nexus between social movements, engaged scholars, and policymakers. TNI’s areas of focus include agrarian and environmental justice, Colombia, corporate power, drugs and democracy, Myanmar, and public alternatives, often involving water, trade and investment, and war and pacification. Our program held a brown-bag event in which graduate students met with TNI’s global research team to learn about pertinent projects and pathways of collaboration. This event furthered their experiential learning and enabled them to apply knowledge they have acquired in the classroom in real-world research projects. TNI is working with a number of graduate students on research projects focused on agrarian justice and climate security in the Global South.

• A Growing Culture
• Alliance for a Green Economy
• Built Ecology | WSP
• BronxWorks
• City of Sarasota Sustainability
• CLARA
• Clean Water Action
• Climate Justice Alliance 
• Coalition for Healthy Ports NY NJ | Clean Water Action
• Commit to Green®
• EcoDistricts
• Educa Oaxaca
• ETC Group 
• Friends of the Earth USA 
• Generation Citizen
• Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives
• Global Forest Coalition
• Global Justice Ecology Project
• Green Light District—El Puente
• Green Tree Textiles
• GrowNYC
• Heinrich Böll Stiftung
• Hudson River Sloop Clearwater
• The Hunger Project
• Indigenous Environmental Network
• Just Transition Alliance 
• Leave it in the Ground (LINGO)
• Los Sures
• Manna Fish Farms
• Navdanya International
• New Jersey Environmental Justice Alliance (NJEJA)
• New York Restoration Project
• North American Megadam Resistance Alliance
• NYC Environmental Justice Alliance
• NYC Government Office of Environmental Coordination
• NYC H2O
• NYSERDA
• Partnership for Southern Equity
• Regional Plan Association
• Start:Empowerment
• Suliver
• Superhero Clubhouse
• Sure We Can
• Time Equities Inc.
• United Neighborhood Houses

• Agritecture
• BankTrack
• Brookhaven Landfill Action & Remediation Group (BLARG)
• Brooklyn Brewery
• Climate Mental Health Network
• The Climate Museum
• ETC Group
• Gender CC
• Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA)
• Global Justice Ecology Project
• Heinrich Böll Stiftung
• Meraki Startup
• The Nature Conservancy
• New Jersey Office of Sustainability
• New York City Expand—NYC 2030
• New York City Panel on Climate Change
• NYC Department of Environmental Protection
• NYC Mayor's Office of Sustainability
• PowerMarket
• Red Hook Initiative
• Rockaway Waterfront Alliance
• Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung NYC
• Samata Foundation
• The Trust for the Americas
• Urban Indigenous Collective
• United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Peru
• Western Queens Community Land Trust
• Women's Earth and Climate Action Network (WECAN) International
• World Circular Textiles Day