Center for Race, Energy & Climate Justice
Designing for just energy, transportation, and agricultural transitions.
Pecan Street’s Center for Race, Energy & Climate Justice combines data and community-centered research to infuse equity into climate innovation.
Climate solutions often fail to leverage the experience and wisdom of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color and stop short of repairing the legacy of health, economic, and quality of life inequity exacerbated by the fossil fuel economy.
Pecan Street’s Center for Race, Energy & Climate Justice brings a decade of data and community-centered research to bear on these critical and complicated challenges. With our partners, we are working to aggregate and visualize data to highlight areas of concern and illuminate new opportunities to achieve fairness and equity in core climate-related areas: energy, transportation and food production.
Energy
Race plays a significant role in energy – who has access to it, how much they pay for it, who works in the energy industry, who lives near power plants, and who has a seat at the table to determine energy choices that our towns, cities, states and countries make on our behalf.
Transportation
Our research can help develop transportation options that not only reduce climate and local air pollution, but also address pervasive transportation equity, like financing options for buying or leasing a car, access to quality public transit, and access to electric vehicle infrastructure
Food Production
To help historically marginalized farmers and ranchers benefit from growing interest in regenerative agriculture, we are creating new information pathways to share technology solutions and financing options and ensuring the availability of open platforms to predict the impact of operational changes.
Off to a Strong Start
Since launching the center in 2021, Pecan Street has integrated climate justice into all areas of our mission and work product.
- We have produced a variety of whitepapers and webinars to shine a light on climate justice and a just transition to clean energy.
- We have expanded our residential research network into Detroit and Puerto Rico to diversify the homes, customers and data our researchers can access.
- With Huston-Tillotson College, we developed a toolkit to help historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) plan for a transition to solar.
- We hosted virtual trainings to help small environmental justice organizations prepare for emerging federal funding opportunities.
- We have participated in an Energy Equity Project working group that is designing a framework for measuring equity across energy programs.
- We secured funding to explore barriers to solar adoption in low-income communities of color (link to press release) and identify the unique perspectives and information needs of BIPOC farmers and ranchers pursuing regenerative agriculture.
This is just the beginning, but we are off to a strong start. For more information about the Center for Race, Energy & Climate Justice, please email Anissa Dickerman.
