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What do databases, ChatGPT, and solar panels have in common? They all play a role in Loyola University Chicago research into climate change.
Tofigh Maboudi, an associate professor in the Department of Political Science, is working to create a global climate policy database. Urooj Raja, an assistant professor of public communication and advocacy in the School of Communication, is analyzing the accuracy of ChatGPT responses to common climate change-related prompts. And Gilbert Michaud, an assistant professor of environmental policy in the School of Environmental Sustainability, is researching community acceptance of solar energy across the U.S.
Setting a standard
When it comes to how the nations of the world are responding to the challenge of climate change, there are two areas to consider: how nations are mitigating their emissions and how they are adapting to the consequences of our global failure to address the problem.
On the mitigation side, nations can be assessed quantitatively on their emissions, but there is no equivalent measure that is widely accepted for adaptation. This limits the ability of policymakers and environmental advocates to track progress and hold governments accountable for their climate actions.
Maboudi is working to change that. In collaboration with a colleague at American University, Maboudi received $558,000 in National Science Foundation grants to fuel a database that will rely on expert surveys to measure the effectiveness of the climate policies of over 80 different countries. He hopes to publish a public dataset in early 2027, with follow-up datasets to ideally follow every three years.
“If there are countries that are overpromising with their climate policies and the dataset shows that they’re actually underperforming, this will be very important for NGOs and policymakers to know,” Maboudi said. “And for our second phase, we want to know not only how countries are doing, but also how they are doing compared to the previous year and the year before that to show how much progress they have made over time.”
Calling Chat’s bluff
As a professor, Raja already knew that many of her students were relying on generative AI platforms like ChatGPT in class to break down complex topics like climate change. What she wasn’t so sure of was whether ChatGPT’s climate responses were actually helping students understand the issue in a meaningful way.
Raja’s question led to a study co-authored with two University of Colorado Boulder researchers and published last year in the journal First Monday. The trio entered 100 common climate change-related queries into the chatbot and found the responses generally emphasized individual responsibility over industrial responsibility, encouraged passive learning, lacked emotional resonance, and didn’t clearly cite sources.
Despite these shortcomings, Raja was impressed by ChatGPT’s speed and admitted that the chatbot is getting better at citing sources and generating more comprehensive responses. Given lingering concerns like ChatGPT’s environmental impact, however, the tool warrants further “tinkering,” she said.
“It does have potential as an educational tool,” Raja said, “but it needs oversight and a little bit more development. It just needs a little bit more tinkering.”
Talking solar
The Midwestern U.S. has rapidly become a hotspot for the development of solar energy projects thanks to its abundance of flat, sunny land, but this progress can face pushback as local residents question what changes a new solar project could bring to where they call home.
This presents a hurdle for solar uptake nationwide, which prompted Michaud and researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and Indiana University to embark on a project studying what factors contribute to a community accepting (or rejecting) solar.
The project was awarded a $2.5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Solar Energy Technologies Office in 2024. That funding has allowed researchers to conduct site visits, interviews and surveys of residents across 24 solar project sites in the U.S. The project has shown that, in many communities, solar still has its skeptics.
“We’re trying to decarbonize and see more renewable energy, which is good for the environment, good for air quality and good for job growth,” Michaud said, “but there are still some disconnects in how [solar] projects unfold and when people learn about them.”
