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The Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability has awarded grants to eight new climate research projects working on “understudied and emerging topics in climate and sustainability,” the Institute announced on Tuesday.

The newly funded projects span topics including atmospheric water harvesting, plant productivity and crop yield, the impacts of government-provided weather insurance, public reactions to international climate agreement withdrawals, Kazakhstan’s potential for a green transition, and adaptation frontiers in Brazil.

The research projects will each receive grants of up to $25,000 to help support faculty in the early stages of their proposals.

This series marks the institute’s largest funding round yet. Established in 2022, the Salata Institute has so far funded 45 seed projects and awarded more than $13.3 million in funding to 85 faculty across the University for climate and sustainability research.

History and African and African American Studies professor Emmanuel K. Akyeampong, one of the lead researchers of a project examining Africa’s cocoa industry, said climate change is inextricably linked to cocoa production in the West African countries of Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, where around 60% of the world’s cocoa supply is produced.

“We could not go and work on climate and pretend to be ignorant of the importance of cocoa and how climate change is affecting cocoa,” he said.

According to Akyeampong, as local cocoa farmers face debt and declining crop yields due to uncertain rainfall patterns, reassessing the future of a more sustainable cocoa industry will involve addressing both environmental and economic impacts through “ethical transitions.”

“The very success of cocoa had embedded in it two complications. One was deforestation, but it made cocoa cheap. The other was family labor — but it made cocoa cheap,” he said.

“When ethical transitions happen in a globalizing world, it catches societies at different junctures,” Akyeampong added. “So the emphasis on deforestation, the critique of child labor — these are all salient, these are noble goals, these are laudable intentions.”

Harvard Graduate School of Design professor Rachel Meltzer, the lead researcher of the “Wildfires and the Resilience of Commercial Activity” project, similarly hopes to produce intersectional research that addresses economic “spillover events” in the aftermath of wildfires.

Meltzer said wildfire research has “mostly focused on the residential outcomes — what it means for the homes and people who live there.”

“What we’re trying to do is look at economic outcomes a little more broadly and focus on the commercial side of activities,” she said.

According to Meltzer, the recent Palisades and Eaton wildfires in California serve to “reinforce” the importance of this research, especially surrounding the monetary value of property and asset loss.

“No one really knows how to quantify — again, in a kind of rigorous statistical or empirical way — what those economic impacts mean for the state, for the communities that get hit, versus the ones that don’t,” she said.

“So that’s where the seed grant was actually helpful. I think it’s been a useful injection of money to really push this forward,” Meltzer added.

—Staff writer Ava H. Rem can be reached at ava.rem@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @avar3m.

—Staff writer Iris J. Xue can be reached at iris.xue@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @iris_j_xue.