Aarti Arora: Connecting Agriculture, Climate and Social Vulnerability
Aartia Arora, graduating Columbia Climate School, will spend her summer internship at NASA.
Columbia Climate School inaugural students will don blue caps and gowns for graduation school day this week. But while classes may be over, students will take part in a variety of exciting internships this summer before officially graduating in August.
Aarti Arora, a student at Climate School Climate and Society Program, will spend her summer internship at NASA Headquarters working on a project to measure societal vulnerability to climate change. Below, she tells us more about her internship and post-graduation plans.
Can you tell us a little bit about your background and how you got interested in studying climate?
Before joining the Climate and Society project, I obtained a degree in archaeology and independent research in geoarchaeology and geochemistry. I am very interested in the way humans affect our soils and landscapes through agriculture. Soils are a potential climate mitigation strategy and I want to learn more about the climate system so I can connect soils and agriculture to climate.
Where are you interning this summer? What does the job entail and what attracted you to this field of work?
This summer, I interned with a team at NASA Headquarters focused on international water strategy. In this role, I will work on studying social vulnerability and measuring the outcomes of their work. What drew me to the internship was that they were grappling with the current impacts people are facing due to climate and how vulnerability data can be translated into policymakers.
How does the Climate and Society program help you prepare for this role?
There are several experiences that have helped me prepare for this position.For my graduate research assistant, I worked with International Institute for Climate and Society About their final impact report ACToday Project; In that role, I learned how to build data collection systems that make it possible to show the impact of humanitarian work. I also took the Climate and Society elective on Climate Mobility, where I wrote a paper and presented a poster on social vulnerability around Lake Victoria and its impact on regional migration in 2050 . Finally, in our Climate and Society Applications course, we had speakers one day talking about ethics in humanitarian work, and I learned a lot from them that day, and in my ongoing conversations with them.
What do you hope to learn or gain from your internship?
Two things I hope to gain from this internship are a better understanding of how climate information and data can be translated into policymakers, and how to focus research on addressing the current societal impacts of climate and potentially preventing future impacts.
How does this internship relate to your career goals? What do you hope to do after graduation?
My plan is to apply for a PhD this summer, and I want to do work that connects soil, agriculture and climate. Soil mitigation technologies are already informing climate policy, and this internship will really help me do my science-to-policy translation work better. This internship is also an opportunity to continue studying social vulnerability: agriculture is highly sensitive to climate change, and I think we should simultaneously ensure better livelihoods for the more than a billion people working in the sector, address food security, and address food security Methods. Agriculture and soil help mitigate climate change.
