Charlie Overton

Fellowship Specialist

Charlie Overton is a Geography PhD Student in the Earth and Environmental Sciences Department at the CUNY Graduate Center. His work focuses on the social dimensions of climate change adaptation in urban areas and small island states. As part of the NOAA RISA Consortium for Climate Risk in the Urban Northeast (CCRUN) he has worked on projects to implement a post-extreme event learning toolkit in communities recently affected by climate-based disasters, and uncovering how resilience is understood and applied in a community context to address the ways in which resilience can worsen inequities that produce climate vulnerability. For his dissertation, Charlie is interested in the relationship between international climate financing and various understandings of justice and vulnerability regarding adaptation and development projects in the Caribbean state of Grenada. He also wants to better understand the role diasporic communities play in the movement of ideas around justice and vulnerability and the impact these communities have in climate adaptation initiatives. Key to these projects is changing historically unjust power relationships which keep some groups more vulnerable than others.

What excites him most about the Climate Justice Hub are the ways in which it aims to address power imbalances when working with environmental justice communities by placing them at the top when it comes to decision making about the direction the hub takes.

Email: [email protected]