The Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions at Duke University has awarded funding to six research projects for Fiscal Year 2019–20 through the institute's Catalyst Program.

Now in its third year, the Catalyst Program aims to build on the Nicholas Institute’s mission by increasing engagement with Duke faculty to incubate and advance new partnerships, enhance policy-relevant knowledge, and create innovative policy solutions based on new creative synergies.

A proposal by the electric operator Duke Energy to site a combined heat and power facility on the Duke University campus became a teachable moment for 10 Duke students in a course on the ethical dimensions of environmental policy.

Three Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions researchers are among the recipients of Duke University Intellectual Community Planning Grants. This funding will be used by these researchers—Kay Jowers, John Virdin and Steve Roady—to explore environmental and economic justice in rural America as well as governing the oceans for nutrition and food security.

Researchers at Duke University’s Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions have developed a deep understanding of both the electricity sector’s potential responses to regulatory, market, and technology changes and the emissions consequences of those responses. Our legal analyses and modeling have provided a solid foundation to help states address their own distinct decision-making challenges amid uncertainty, which has only deepened as the Trump administration looks to roll back Obama-era climate policies.

For at least a decade, long-time residents of Old East Durham have witnessed a redevelopment effort that has swelled the city’s population and brought new businesses and jobs but that has done little to protect them from rising housing prices and has even cut them off from some traditional support systems. Many are being pushed out of an area that they no longer find affordable. The concerns of those long-time residents are now part of the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions’ first project on environmental justice. It is in that broad environmental justice context that the Nicholas Institute, along with the University of North Carolina (UNC) and North Carolina State University (NCSU), is engaging with Communities in Partnership, a new East Durham neighborhood non-profit, to document the unintended and collateral impacts of the city’s revitalization. This Kenan Creative Collaboratory project will eventually lead to proposals of policy mechanisms to address those impacts.

The Kenan Institute for Ethics and the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions, in coordination with faculty at the Duke Department of Economics and the Nicholas School of the Environment, invite research paper submissions for presentation at a workshop on new directions in the analysis of environmental justice at Duke University August 23 and 24.