Research

Our research examines the interactions between environmental, social, and technological systems, focused on: (1) understanding cooperative action across scales, (2) designing robust decision strategies under uncertainty, and (3) ensuring environmental justice in an era shaped by algorithms and big data.

1. Understanding cooperative action across scales: What drives coordinated and cooperative environmental action between individuals, jurisdictions, and sectors? How do institutional arrangements and governance structures shape climate and biodiversity policies and their outcomes? We investigate these and related questions using a combination of simulation-based approaches and large-scale observational analyses.
2. Designing robust decision strategies under uncertainty: How can we translate the vast amounts of information about our biosphere into effective and equitable decisions? Our research uses computational approaches to explore and design decision strategies and policy interventions that are robust to biophysical and sociopolitical uncertainty. We work to integrate the social and political dimensions of environmental decision-making (e.g., governance structures, diverse societal values) into computational approaches, ensuring that derived strategies are more actionable and equitable.
3.  Environmental justice in an era shaped by algorithms: What role should algorithms and digital technologies play in shaping environmental futures? We critically examine the use of decision-making technologies in the environmental domain, grounding our work in broader societal discussions about accountability, transparency, and bias in data and algorithms. Our work explores how to develop resilient and equitable data ecosystems and computational infrastructure that support coordinated environmental governance, while also investigating the conditions under which technology refusal is both warranted and realized. Our goal is to understand and help build systems in which digital tools and information support just, accountable, and enduring forms of environmental governance.