The Salata Institute’s Seed Grant Program jump-starts new research, fosters collaborations across disciplines, and invites faculty whose primary work is outside climate and sustainability to apply their expertise to the climate challenge.

The Institute is rapidly growing climate and sustainability scholarship at Harvard. With these five additional awards, the program now backs 50 research efforts that explore emerging and often overlooked climate topics.

Since launching in June 2022, the Salata Institute has awarded more than $14 million in research funding, supporting the work of 101 faculty members from across the university.

Harvard faculty interested in the Seed Grant Program – made possible by a gift from the Troper Wojcicki Foundation – may review the call for proposals to learn more. Applications are considered twice per year, with deadlines on the first Friday of February and of October.

Better outcomes for data center neighbors

Principal Investigator: Jason Beckfield, Department of Sociology

The rapid roll-out of hyperscale data centers is affecting nearby communities, as AI fuels record spending by major tech companies and pushes these facilities closer to homes and businesses. The scale is unlike most previous developments. Single-tenant campuses can cover the same land as many football fields, draw as much power as a city, use millions of gallons of water per day, and produce constant noise. 

This project looks at how this growth creates “fenceline” neighborhoods at the edge of massive sites. Instead of debating whether data centers should exist, the team focuses on the environmental and social sides: how residents respond, what local officials and community groups need to make informed choices, what design and engineering options are possible to change impacts, and which planning and design steps could turn a community’s “no” into a conditional “yes, if.” The main products will be short, practical guides for policymakers, community organizations, designers, and developers that lay out risks, opportunities, and recommendations, tailored for use with local partners and shared widely to help optimize environmental and community outcomes.

Calculating the value of trees 

Wolfram Schlenker, Harvard Kennedy School
Jeannine Cavender-Bares, Organismic and Evolutionary Biology

How do we measure the value of neighborhood trees?

This interdisciplinary study uses remote sensing tools to evaluate tree health and the consequences for property values and tourism. It links local tree mortality to outcomes that matter to communities – air quality, access to parks and forests, and nearby home prices. To capture behavior at scale, the researchers are using a nationwide cellular dataset and home sales statistics.

Overall, this project advances the understanding of environmental amenities and the ecosystem services they provide.

Climate migration in Pakistan

Mashail Malik, Department of Government

Extreme heat, floods, and drought are pushing people to move inside Pakistan, but how? Starting in Karachi – a megacity expected to receive millions of climate migrants in the coming decades – the project team will survey both migrant and non-migrant households to measure the real and perceived costs of relocating versus adapting in place after disasters, how newcomers are received after fleeing climate disasters, and how vulnerable populations rank climate adaptation and mitigation policies. This pilot will pave the way for deeper and more regular polling, including weekly surveys during monsoon season, to help governments and NGOs plan fair, effective responses and treat mobility as a climate adaptation.

The effects of climate change on global migration

Ishan Nath, Harvard Kennedy School

This project will build a worldwide, public dataset that tracks how people move within countries and across borders and how those moves relate to climate shocks. The team will combine three kinds of information – national censuses, government migration records, and household surveys – covering almost 90 percent of the world’s population, then link it to detailed climate data. Using modern statistics and computer models of how people choose where to live over time, they will estimate how climate pressures change migration and forecast future patterns under different climate and policy choices. The goal is to help policymakers plan smarter, fairer responses by recognizing migration as one way people adapt to climate change, and the cleaned data and code will be shared openly so other researchers can use it as well.

Music and Rain, an ethnographic film

Richard Wolf, Department of Music

This grant will help ethnomusicologist Richard Wolf complete an ethnographic film that stresses the value of indigenous knowledge in climate conversations, and shows how art, agriculture, and belief are woven together in one community. 

The film follows the Kota people of the Nilgiri Hills in South India and explores how they have adapted to environmental and social change over the past 90 years. Through short scenes and conversations, it shows how shifts in rainfall, land use, and government policy have altered farming, rituals, and everyday life. A major thread is music and instrument-making, activities which depend on seasonal materials, weather, and calendrical time-reckoning. The film examines how Kotas balance modern life with their role as caretakers of the land, highlighting lessons learned, mistakes made, and responses to new climate challenges.