Announcing the New Okanagan CER Climate Justice Award
UBCO’s Principal’s Research Chair in Communities, Justice, and Sustainability, the Institute for Community Engaged Research (ICER) and UBC’s Centre for Climate Justice are piloting a new award initiative in the 2025/2026 academic year.
This award is intended to respond to UBC’s core academic focus of supporting resilient people, communities, economies and environments in support of a sustainable future. To do so, we are launching the ‘Climate Justice Award’ that foregrounds systemic change and transformation.
The awards offer financial support to two current UBC Okanagan graduate students ($1,000 each) whose work will combine the power and knowledge of communities, movements, rights and titleholders, and university researchers to conduct research intended to transform our societies and economies away from extractive systems and towards equitable, sustainable, and justice-oriented futures today.
Climate Justice as a framework recognizes the interlocking nature of systems of power that impact communities. Treating these systems in isolation can often entrench and deepen existing inequalities and injustices. Climate Justice therefore seeks to illuminate connections among common drivers of injustices and supports responses that redress multiple expressions of power at once. UBC’s Centre for Climate Justice has generated four helpful guiding principles that are intended to support and steer climate justice work.
Application Questions:
- With climate justice being a vast and diverse field, briefly explain how your project perceives of climate justice (Max 150 words) /10
- This award is focused on intervening in interlocking systems of power to support more equitable, sustainable, and justice-oriented futures today.
- Please explain in what interlocking systems your research intervenes? Please also describe how these systems operate in relation to your research (Max 150) /10
- How do you see your research responding to climate injustices felt at the local and global level? Please be sure to speak to both scales, even if one is more aspirational than the other (Max 150 words) /10
- Briefly explain how your research has the potential to meet these aims. For instance, how do you hope your research may be used? For whom may this research be of use? And what kinds of material do you hope to share from this work? (Max 150 words) /10
Details:
The application will require completion of the ICER Student CER Award application, and responses to additional questions focused on the climate justice aspects of your work. If the ICER CER Award application questions do not align with your work, explain why not.
Recipients are eligible to receive either the ICER Student CER award or the Okanagan CER Climate Justice Award, not both.
The deadline will be 11:59 pm, Wednesday, Jan. 14, 2026.
For more information, please email: icer.ok@ubc.ca
