IMAP welcomes 2 new researchers for the summer

IMAP is hosting two summer fellows as part of the IGS Graduate Student Summer Fellows program. Sakshi Sharma will be building a database for the Corporate Carbon Risk project and Claudia Diezmartínez will be piloting a method to assess and compare climate finance across US cities.

Sakshi Sharma

One of the most important goals of the Corporate Carbon Risk project is to develop a reliable methodology for predicting the likelihood of companies achieving their future carbon targets. As companies and investment firms commit to targets for reducing their carbon emissions, there is a growing desire to understand the risk associated with these future target statements.

Sakshi, a master’s student in BU’s Department of Computer Science, will be building a database in MongoDB for the Corporate Carbon Risk project, enabling the project to efficiently grow both its data and analyses. To do this, she’ll import and analyze historical data on carbon emissions, future carbon target statements, progress on capital investment projects, emissions reduction initiatives, and other unique circumstances of each corporation and industry sector.

Claudia Diezmartínez

New research is needed to identify the finance strategies that are either being piloted or proven to be successful to address climate change in cities and to understand how climate finance shapes the implementation of urban climate action.

Claudia, a PhD student in BU’s Department of Earth and the Environment, will be conducting a content analysis of municipal budgets and capital finance plans of ten selected cities in the United States that have explicitly incorporated justice into their climate action planning. She’ll pilot a method to systematically assess and compare climate finance across those cities. By analyzing how these cities are funding and financing climate action, whether and how they incorporate justice into budgeting planning, and the types of climate programs and policies to which investments are being directed, this research will explore the role that climate finance plays in the implementation of just urban transitions.

Find out more about both research projects here.