The Climate and Development Lab is a student-faculty think tank informing a more just, equitable and effective climate change policy.
Our Projects
The CDL has ten active projects being advanced by small teams of students working with faculty and post-doctoral research fellows and external partners
The CDL headquarters the global Climate Social Science Network a research network focusing on understanding the organizations blocking action on climate change.
A CDL team is developing methodologies, datasets and web tools to help nonprofits understand who they are associating with when they take grants and gifts and sign contracts.
With support from a Brown alum, the CDL teamed up with Synapse Energy Economics and Climable to hold twelve stakeholder workshops across the region, leading to recommendations for legislators, governors, Public Utility Commissions, and the public.
Postdoctoral Fellow Jared Heern is leading two teams of student researchers in investigating backgrounds, participation, and outcomes in utility commissions, where clean energy policy is being implemented.
The CDL is working with scientists and community members to develop an information hub that answers common questions about the technology, why its needed, how it’s being deployed and likely impacts.
A small CDL team is investigating links between groups opposing offshore wind deployment in the U.S. Northeast, and analyzing their tactics and discourses of climate delay.
A major four-year project of the CDL has been building a multi-state dataset of all lobbying records, and investigating contexts for the energy transition in state-level reports.
Computer Science specialists in the lab have developed an interactive website which allows users to explore millions of records on who is lobbying in a state’s legislature, and with and against whom.
For fifteen years teams of CDL researchers have explored power relations between wealthy and developing countries at the United Nations climate negotiations, focusing on pledges and delivery of climate finances.
Those seeking to slow action on climate change have shifted from denying the reality of climate change to discourses of climate delay. This team is developing responses.
Countermovement Coalitions: Climate Denialist Organizational Profiles
Beyond dark money: Information subsidies and complex networks of opposition to offshore wind on the U.S. East Coast
Manufacturing Delay: How Local Business Associations Argue Against State-Level Climate Policy
Offshore wind energy in New England is threatened not by the physical dangers of broken turbine blades, but by the public opinion of a nascent industry. Brown's CDL is quoted in this article by the Rhode Island Current.
Josh Axelrod shares the CDL's findings on politically conservative groups funding anti-wind rhetoric. There is still more research to be done on potential harm, but there have been zero whale deaths linked to offshore wind since construction began.
CDL's researchers shed light on conflicts of interest preventing Colorado from cleaning their air pollution. Trevor Culhane told reporters: "lobbying is all about relationships — and it can be hard to tease out those intermingled interests even when so-called firewalls between clients are in place."