Climate Questions Are Human Questions

Story by:

• Inga Kiderra- [email protected]
• Melanie Poppel- [email protected]

Media contact:

• Inga Kiderra- [email protected]

Topics covered:

• Climate Change
• Sustainable Energy
• Wildfires
• Urban Studies and Planning
• Critical Gender Studies

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When people think about energy, they often picture power plants, grids and technology. That's part of it, of course. But for Deepti Chatti, the questions are also far more personal: "It's about whether your baby is warm at night, whether you have clean air to breathe, whether somebody has asthma, whether you're able to cook the food that you want to eat."

Her perspective comes from moving between disciplines. Trained first as an environmental engineer and later as a social scientist, she works at the intersection of environment and society. "Environmental questions are always also social questions," Chatti says. "They're always questions about people, too."

Now an assistant professor in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning in the UC San Diego School of Social Sciences and core faculty in the school's Critical Gender Studies program, Chatti studies clean energy transitions in the United States and India.

A 2025-26 recipient of the Hellman Fellowship, Chatti earned her PhD from Yale University and worked at Cal Poly Humboldt for four years, before joining UC San Diego in 2023. At UC San Diego, she designed one of the first courses approved for the Jane Teranes Climate Change Education Requirement.

A key feature of Chatti's work: She conducts grounded research in partnership with communities and colleagues from multiple disciplines. Whether facing wildfires, grid shutdowns, high levels of air pollution, uncertain access to cooking fuels - or other challenges - Chatti said she believes "in the value of understanding and bringing together multiple, sometimes diverging perspectives on the environment."

Fire, smoke and sovereignty

While at Humboldt, Chatti brought her interdisciplinary background to a partnership with her engineering colleagues at the Schatz Energy Research Center, the Karuk Tribe and Blue Lake Rancheria Tribe to assess wildfire impacts and help design potential solutions to strengthen energy and air pollution infrastructure.

Access to electricity is often crucial during wildfires - for running air filters, addressing medical needs and staying informed on safety guidelines. But during wildfire season, electric grids may get shut down to mitigate the risk of fires starting and spreading.

The Karuk Tribe was all too familiar with coping with wildfires without the benefits of continuous and reliable electricity access. As a result, residents of ancestral Karuk territories were exposed to particularly high levels of air pollution during fires. To help design a better system, Chatti and her colleagues worked with Karuk communities to not only monitor air pollution during various fire events including wildfires and cultural burns, but also learn about their knowledge and perspectives on managing smoke and fires.

"We wanted to prioritize tribal sovereignty and knowledge, and create infrastructure that worked for their specific needs," Chatti said.

Chatti and her colleagues also partnered with another Humboldt County tribe, the Blue Lake Rancheria Tribe, who own and operate a microgrid. A microgrid is a small-scaled power grid that generates electricity for a localized area - like a university, hospital or military base. The Blue Lake Rancheria microgrid creates local jobs and gives the tribe control of their own electricity. It also served as an essential resource when the surrounding electric grid was shut down due to fire risk.

"They were able to provide a source of resiliency for the community, not just the tribe, but for the entire community in the county," Chatti explained. "Learning from the Blue Lake Rancheria's experiences with the microgrid helps showcase a way to approach climate resilience in the context of wildfires."

But that doesn't mean adding microgrids everywhere is necessarily the solution. "Process matters to building infrastructure," she said. So does understanding context and the place, its history and politics. "Just because something is a localized infrastructure does not necessarily mean it advances justice or is a more progressive way to do things. Localized infrastructure can be more just, or it can actually hinder that."

Chatti's expertise on sustainable energy and development reaches far beyond Humboldt County. With support from the Hellman Fellowship, she is finishing her first book, which analyzes clean cooking technologies, energy transitions and household air pollution in low-income homes in India, "centering the perspectives of women who are often the focus of household energy projects."

Here in San Diego, she and fellow faculty from Urban Studies and Planning are beginning to tackle water insecurity in the region. Funded by the Yankelovich Center for Social Science Research in collaboration with CatchingH2O, an organization led by engineer and water conservationist Brook Sarson, the project assesses localized water infrastructure solutions. It considers rainwater harvesting and greywater recycling in catchment areas in homes and neighborhoods in the San Diego region as potential tools for climate resiliency.

"Blending the social sciences with engineering is not easy, we don't even speak the same language!" Chatti said. "But in order to find just climate solutions, collaboration across disciplines is essential."

Learn more about research and education at UC San Diego in: Climate Change