A professor at Indiana University’s O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs was awarded a national prize for her work on climate change disruption.

Professor Sanya Carley was awarded the World Citizen Prize in Environmental Performance by the Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management.

Award committee members said Carley’s work called attention to current and future climate change problems, who is being affected most by those problems and who needs to act to fix them.

“Sanya Carley has taken a lead in addressing justice and equity considerations using a serious academic lens,” said prize committee member Daniel Matisoff of the Georgia Institute of Technology. “Her research has become highly influential in this literature.”

“The massive decarbonization that the world economy so badly needs is unlikely to happen if many people are against it,” said committee member David Peyton. “The series of publications led by Dr. Carley demonstrates how to understand and manage this transition from a human perspective.”

Recently, Carley and Professor David Konisky led a team of researchers that investigated how the COVID-19 pandemic affected energy insecurity in Indiana and across the U.S.

The researchers found that the economic difficulties caused by the pandemic and lapsing economic protections led a growing number of Hoosiers to have difficulties paying their energy bills.