Shaina Sadai
Shaina Sadai is a Ph.D. candidate at the Climate System Research Center at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where she conducts research on climate modeling, the Antarctic, and other science-related interests. She received a grant for “Multispecies Climate Justice and Sea-Level Rise,” which will be the first research project that analyzes sea-level rise as an issue of multispecies climate justice. Shaina writes:
As climate change continues to alter the structure and function of Earth it is imperative that the needs of animals be adequately understood and represented in policy and advocacy. Everyone is impacted differently by changes in the climate based on their individual needs, positionality, and geographic location. However, there are shared aspects of climate justice that are broadly relevant. These are the need for a safe and livable home with adequate resources, representation in the political realm to advocate for these needs, and broader societal respect for your existence and wellbeing. Justice theory equips us with the tools to assess each of these by focusing on procedural (equity in decision making process), recognition (existence rights), and distributive (spatial and temporal variability) forms of justice.
In September 2022, Shaina sent us an update to her work. She wrote:
The project plan included doing a literature search, creating an annotated bibliography of the findings, thematic coding of the identified articles, development of a framework interpreting the findings through the lens of climate justice, drafting of a peer reviewed publication, and development of outreach materials. I am pleased to say I have made good progress on this work so far. . . . The justice framework in terms of procedural, distributive, and recognition justice has been developed and an outline created with the specifics of how each form of justice will fit into the manuscript.