Transportation & Climate Change calls

To help build from knowledge to climate action, and to keep momentum between TRB's Annual Meetings, AMS30(2) will organize a regular series of calls.

Tuesday, 20 April 2021: Education

Register for Event

The topic for our first call of 2021 is Education.

This event takes a broad view of “education”, including both formal classroom education at the high school and university level, but also information sharing and engagement with practicioners, activists, and the broader public. How can we reach every person with suitable information about the relationship between transport and climate change, and options and actions towards decarbonization?

The event is aimed to share a variety of ongoing work related to this topic, and thus help everyone working in this space make new partnerships to increase their impact.

Time: 15:00–16:30 UTC (08–09:30 PDT — 11–12:30 EDT — 17–18:30 CEST)

Online, Zoom link provided to registrants via https://lu.ma/trb-climate-1

Agenda

Keynote: Dana Haine

UNC Chapel Hill — ie.unc.edu — @Dana_Haine

“Strategies for integrating transportation energy research into STEM education and outreach to engage and inspire the next generation of transportation professionals” (10 minutes)

As the Transportation Research Board works to advance resilient infrastructure, explore transformational technology, and care for the public’s health and safety, what strategies can be used to engage and inspire the next generation of transportation professionals? A university-based climate and energy educator with research translation experience will introduce the current STEM education landscape, including curriculum standards, and offer ideas for incorporating transportation energy research into STEM education and outreach.

Bio: Dana Brown Haine, MS, is the K-12 Science Education Manager for the Center for Public Engagement with Science at the UNC-Chapel Hill Institute for the Environment. In this role, she partners with researchers from across the university to translate environmental science research into innovative activities for K-12 students, teachers and informal educators.

Lightning talks

5 minutes each.

For Q&A, join the respective break-out sessions.

Chris Knittel

Massachussetts Institute of Technology (MIT) — knittel.world — @KnittelMIT

Topic: The Climate Action Through Education Project (CATE)’s objective is to develop interdisciplinary climate change resources and lesson plans for U.S. high school teachers that make use of place-based learning and align with education standards. Developed by the MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research (CEEPR), CATE aims to bridge the knowledge gap between climate science and policy and climate education. By equipping high school students with the interdisciplinary knowledge to understand and tackle the climate crisis, we hope to further climate mitigation and adaptation.

Call to action: Discuss the needs and opportunities for climate change education with high school teachers and administrators.

Bio: Christopher Knittel is the George P. Shultz Professor and a Professor of Applied Economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Prior to MIT Sloan, Knittel taught at the University of California, Davis, and at Boston University. His research focuses on industrial organization, environmental economics, and applied econometrics.

Alessandra Gorini

Youth 4 Public Transport (Y4PT) — y4pt.org — @AlexandraGorini

Topic: Youth For Public Transport and its 15 years empathic engagement with the youth to raise awareness acting for sustainable mobility to reduce environmental impacts and climate change.

Call to action: Participate in our next hackathon with your projects, start-ups and innovators in your community. Help us search for young voices for our next talk on how sustainable mobility can positively influence our climate.

Bio: A Doctorate in Biological Sciences, Alessandra Gorini created within International Association of Public Transport (UITP) the international NGO Y4PT, a foundation promoting sustainable issues around the world, empowering the youth of the world to take action for their lives and activities, in the fields of sustainable mobility, environment, and healthy and new lifestyles.

Rebecca Dodder

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) — epa.gov

Topic: To engage students and leaners of all ages in understanding energy choices and their economic and environmental impacts, U.S. EPA researchers have developed two “serious games” for outreach efforts reaching local, national, and international audiences. I will briefly describe the development of an electric power grid board game and an ongoing project for a game focused on transportation, energy, and climate.

Call to action: I am working out the final details of a transportation energy game. Help me test the game with additional groups for feedback, and help me find forums for dissemination when it is ready for public distribution.

Bio: Rebecca Dodder manages the Combustion Source Branch of the U.S. EPA's Office of Research and Development, characterizing air emissions from mobile, stationary, and natural sources. She is also an energy system modeler with a focus on transportation fuels and technologies.

Andrew Salzberg

Transit App / MIT — decarbonizingtransportation.substack.com — @andrewsalzberg

Topic: In the winter of 2020, Andrew created a short MIT course titled Decarbonizing Mobility, the first at MIT to focus narrowly on this topic. The impetus was to create a course grounded in the new realities of more ambitious climate politics (hitting net zero emissions globally by 2050 or earlier) and radical improvements in renewable energy technology. How do we help a new generation of transportation professionals guide public policy that is consistent with IPCC objectives, as well as be informed consumers of a wave of new technology being developed in this space (autonomous vehicles, electric vehicles, micromobility, VTOL, etc.)?

Call to action: The course is being turned into a full semester fall course for fall of 2021. The objective is to make the syllabus, content, and all material as open and reusable as possible for coursework elsewhere. I would love feedback on the course syllabus that will be released shortly.

Bio: Andrew Salzberg is passionate about building the sustainable transportation systems of the future. From 2019–2020, he was a Loeb fellow at Harvard, where he created the Decarbonizing Transportation newsletter. Before the Loeb fellowship, Salzberg created and held a unique executive role at Uber, where he created the first teams focused on partnerships with public transportation agencies and environmental sustainability.

Nick van Apeldoorn

Academy for Build Environment & Logistics; Breda University of Applied Sciences (BUas) — LinkedIn — @Nvanapeldoorn

Topic: The Climate Game is a proven concept that has been played around the world at for example PricewaterhouseCoopers, Shell, the London School of Economics, and the Arab Bank. The game aims to simulate the impact of industries on climate change and the tragedy of the commons. The goal is to reach consensus, make binding decisions and work towards a sustainable climate. Within BUas we play this game with all our students and it is at the core of our sustainability course. Within this talk I will show case the added value of games about abstract subjects like climate change and how it complements more traditional ways of learning.

Call to action: My call to action is to build in games like this in your curricula. Contact us— Hans Rakels, the Board member of Perspectivity, if you want to know more about the game; or me, if you want to know how to link this to education.

Bio: Nick van Apeldoorn is a researcher and lecture for Breda University of applied sciences in the Netherlands. In his work, he focuses on inclusive mobility and digitalisation of cities. He is also a board game fanatic and serious game designer. Within Breda University of applied sciences, he combines his passion for board games with his research and education activities.

Break-out discussions

30 minutes. In 3 groups:

  1. Pre-university education (in the main room)—led by Chris Knittel, with Alessandra Gorini, Stephen Zoepf as scribe.
  2. University-level education (in a break-out room)—led by Andrew Salzberg, with Nick van Apeldoorn, possible volunteer scribe.
  3. Informal education and advocacy (in a break-out room)—led by Rebecca Dodder, with Dana Haine, Paul Kishimoto as scribe.

If you are in group (2) or (3) and wish to join another conversation, please return to the main room (1) and if need be, sent a direct message to Stephen Zoepf, who can assign you to group (2) or (3).

Report out & wrap-up

3 groups × 5 minutes = 15 minutes. Please share:

  • What is one thing you learned of for the first time or realized based on today’s discussion?
  • What is one specific thing that you are going to do based on the calls to action from the presenters?

General principles for all calls

Work in progress

There's no shortage of venues and opportunities for researchers to present work that is already finished and headed for publication (or already published); or for practitioners to talk about completed projects.

AMS30(2) events focus, instead, on work that is in progress. This is the point where assistance can have the most impact: by sharpening the focus of work, or pointing to resources that allow it to achieve more.

Our professional training often whispers that we should be silent about work until it is nearly finished. These events celebrate the opposite.

Calls to action

All participants in the calls are asked to share a call to action. Since they are sharing work in progress, this can be as simple as “Help me by doing X!” A call to action can also sound like:

  • Tell me how to frame this for X audience.
  • Point me to a potential collaborator for this study or project.
  • Fill out this form, survey, or petition.
  • Talk to one of your colleagues, neighbours, or relatives about X.
  • Share X on social media to people and audiences who you know will be interested.

A call to action gives everyone attending something to do.

Open and inclusive

There are many roles to be played in addressing climate change through transport—from carrying out basic research to developing new technologies to advocating for and implementing change in the transport system. Considering the scale of the challenge, every one of these roles is understaffed; and success can only be collective, not individual.

Therefore we:

  • Aim to help people find resources and collaborators to increase the pace and impact of action.
  • Welcome presenters sharing any work related to transport and climate change, in the broadest sense of both terms.
  • Welcome your volunteer contributions in joining, promoting, and helping organize the events.