Seed funding TU Delft Climate Action Programme awarded to TPM researchers

Camilo Benitez Avila receives Seed funding for the project ‘Making “Colonial Risk” visible in Critical Raw Materials for Climate Transitions’. Another project titled: ‘But what should we do? Ethics of Climate Action’ of James Hutton has also received funding.

Benitez Avila’s project enables a meaningful engagement between researchers committed to climate action and grassroots organizations with a first-hand understanding of colonial practices around critical raw materials extraction. That includes producing a “colonial risk” as a third axis complementing the EU critical assessment only based on “supply risk” vs. “economic importance.” We aim to conceptualize the (de)colonizing responsibility in climate transitions research and education, and the avoided extractive damage from circular solutions. Other researchers involved in the project are: Andrea Gammon, Fatima Delgado, Trivik Verma, Aashis Joshi, Anna Melnyk, Luis Cutz (3mE Faculty), Klaas van der Tempel (Studium Generale).

In the other awarded project, Hutton together with Behnam Taebi, will bring a series of the world’s top climate ethicists to TU Delft’s Climate Action Hub to present their ideas about the ethical obligations the climate crisis creates for different societal actors—for private citizens and families; for groups and organisations; and for governments. The outcome will be a series of talks and videos, accessible to a wide transdisciplinary audience.

About Seed Fund grants
The call "Climate Action Research and Education Seed" is open to proposals for research and education projects related to the TU Delft Climate Action Programme, its themes (science, mitigation, adaptation, governance) and/or its flagship projects. Proposals from all fields of knowledge are welcome, as well as interdisciplinary proposals. Proposals can be funded up to EUR 30,000. The call is granted two times per year. For an overview of other Seed Fund grant winners in this round click here.