Connecting Poverty and Climate Change, and Mitigating Both

For Maria Fernandez (MPPA/MBA ’15), the connection between poverty and climate change is clear. And this summer Fernandez is working to mitigate both.

Fernandez is a fellow with the Environmental Defense Fund’s Climate Corps, a national program that places trained graduate students in companies, municipalities and universities to identify potential energy savings for the host organizations.

She is working at the Roanoke Electric Cooperative, in rural north-central North Carolina. It is one of about 900 rural, nonprofit electric co-ops throughout the United States, and distributes energy directly to commercial and residential customers.

Fernandez will spend the summer identifying energy efficiency projects for key commercial accounts at the Roanoke co-op. She will propose strategies to reduce demand for electricity during peak periods of the day and research ways that the Roanoke co-op could make use of the U.S. Department of Energy’s demand response program.

Diminishing the amount of fossil fuels released into the atmosphere is a big motivating factor for Fernandez. And while some argue that reducing energy output would hurt the economy, Fernandez disagrees. By the end of her first day on the job in North Carolina, she already saw specific ways that improving energy efficiency in this high-poverty region could potentially have a positive impact on the local economy.

“In a region where a few dollars returned to members can feel like Christmas, there is great urgency to find ways to reduce wasted kilowatt hours and to prepare an accurate and compelling business case to get customers to say YES to energy efficiency,” Fernandez wrote in a recent Environmental Defense Fund blog post. “Money saved can be reinvested in more retrofits, in improving the local economy, in education…the list goes on, creating a virtuous cycle that can improve the quality of living and reduce carbon emissions.”

Fernandez has seen the connection between poverty and environmental degradation before. During her time at the Chinese University of Hong Kong as part of her business degree studies, Fernandez traveled throughout Southeast Asia. Experiencing the region’s environmental and development challenges first hand “reinforced my commitment to work towards a more fair global economy that is less dependent on fossil fuels,” Fernandez said.

After completing her summer fellowship, Fernandez will return to the University of Massachusetts Amherst and finish her master’s degree in public policy and administration, before embarking on a career to clean up the globe through economic justice.