Dr. Liv Yoon

BIOGRAPHY: Dr. Liv Yoon's research is at the intersection of climate change, social inequities, and health, with a focus on community engagement work. As a social scientist, she approaches climate change as a sociopolitical crisis. Her research is focused on taking climate change as an opportunity to challenge the status quo and promote structural changes that alleviate social inequities that both led to, and are exacerbated by, the climate crisis.

She is a Fellow with the New York City Panel on Climate Change (NPCC), a member of the Community Engagement Core at the Center for Environmental Health in Northern Manhattan, and a member of Columbia's Environmental Justice and Climate Just Cities (EJCJC) Network.

Her postdoctoral research projects include:
'Addressing the Urban Heat Island Effect (UHIE) through an Equity Lens: A Citizen Science Project'
- This project is in collaboration with South Bronx Unite, and involves local citizen scientists to collect temperature-related data in their own neighborhoods. This project is funded by the Earth Institute's Earth Frontiers Grant and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

'Envisioning Alternative Socio-Environmental Futures: Lived Experiences of ‘Just Transition’
- Exploring the lived experiences of 'Just Transition' in two communities (Tonawanda, NY and Parkland County, Alberta, Canada) at different stages of phasing out coal-fired power plants. A core focus is on how equity configures in this transition, as well as the intersecting and compounding nature of climate change, pollution, health, and social inequities. In collaboration with the Town of Tonawanda, she is producing a documentary to make this knowledge more widely accessible.

Dr. Yoon obtained her Ph.D. at The University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver, Canada, in Sociocultural Kinesiology. Her training in socio-cultural studies informs her to think about bodies in sociopolitical context. Applied to climate change, this means thinking about how some bodies are considered more ‘dispensable’, and in turn, rendered more vulnerable to climate-related risks and pollution. For her PhD dissertation, she investigated the intersections of environmental politics, communication, and social inequities surrounding an Olympic-related development project. As an attempt to do public sociology, she produced a short documentary about the controversial development of a ski hill in South Korea for the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympic & Paralympic Games.