How can data help communities take meaningful climate action? 

For college campuses across the country, measuring and understanding their carbon footprints is a critical first step. This summer, students from Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs) came together for the MS-CC Carbon Footprint Hackathon, an innovative, hands-on event designed to empower the next generation of climate and data leaders. Hosted by the Minority Serving - Cyberinfrastructure Consortium (MS-CC) as part of their annual meeting, the hackathon challenged students to analyze and visualize their own carbon emissions using real data and open science tools. As a proud partner, the Environmental Data Science Innovation & Impact Lab (ESIIL) supported this effort by providing mentorship, training resources, and technical expertise with help from The Black Codes. This collaboration helped students strengthen their data science skills and advanced ESIIL’s broader mission to build a more inclusive and capable environmental data science workforce.

The MS-CC Carbon Footprint Hackathon took place at Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee, May 29-30, bringing together students, faculty, and staff from across Minority Serving Institutions to tackle a timely and meaningful challenge: understanding and reducing campus carbon emissions. Student teams worked collaboratively to explore real-world data and develop actionable strategies for measuring and managing their individual carbon footprints. The hackathon focused on building environmental data science capacity by immersing students in open science tools and workflows. Participants used Python, Jupyter Notebooks, and GitHub to clean, analyze, and share their code — and many leveraged ChatGPT to troubleshoot problems, refine their analysis, and accelerate their learning. While the event was held on site, ESIIL contributed virtually, with Education Director Nathan Quarderer providing remote mentorship and supporting student teams throughout the event. Glenn Dixon of Black Codes provided in-person mentorship to hackathon participants. 

Curriculum for the hackathon event are free and shared openly on the ESIIL Education GitHub organization: https://github.com/cu-esiil-edu/ms-cc-hackathon-template.

One standout project from the hackathon came from the winning team, which developed an interactive dashboard to explore an individual's carbon footprint. Their final product, hosted openly on GitHub Pages, integrates data visualizations, emissions estimates, and clear, actionable insights — all presented in an accessible, web-based format. You can explore their project here: https://diwashpatel.github.io/ms-cc-hackathon-template-DiwashPatel/

Built using Python, inside Jupyter Notebooks accessed using GitHub’s cloud-based Codespaces, the dashboard not only highlights the team's technical skills, but also demonstrates the power of open tools to support real-world decision-making. Throughout the process, students used GitHub for collaboration and version control, and many turned to ChatGPT for on-the-fly help writing and debugging code and interpreting data. Participants were also asked to share their conversations with ChatGPT so that hackathon judges could assess how participants used the coding assistant to develop their workflows. The result was a polished and practical prototype that reflects both climate awareness and data fluency. 

One particularly thoughtful aspect of the winning team’s project was their inclusion of the carbon footprint associated with digital tools — including the use of AI platforms like ChatGPT. The students explored how cloud-based technologies, while incredibly powerful for learning and analysis, also consume energy and contribute to carbon emissions. By incorporating estimates of these impacts into their calculator, the team highlighted the importance of considering the environmental trade-offs of the tools we use and sparked valuable discussion about responsible innovation in the age of AI.

While the concept of a carbon footprint is a useful tool for raising awareness and promoting behavior change, it’s important to acknowledge its origins. The idea was heavily promoted by major oil companies in the early 2000s as a way to shift focus toward individual responsibility, rather than addressing the outsized emissions produced by industry and large-scale polluters. During the hackathon, participants discussed this history and explored how campus-level emissions data can be used not just to drive personal behavior change, but also to advocate for broader institutional and systemic shifts. You can learn more about how big oil has helped to push the idea of the carbon footprint here: https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2023/12/19/how-big-oil-helped-push-the-idea-of-a-carbon-footprint

ESIIL was honored to be invited to participate in the MS-CC Carbon Footprint Hackathon and grateful for the opportunity to support such a thoughtful, high-impact event. The creativity, technical skill, and commitment demonstrated by the students were truly impressive — from their data-driven insights to their ability to communicate complex findings with clarity and purpose. Events like this reflect the future of environmental data science: collaborative, inclusive, and focused on real-world change. ESIIL looks forward to continuing to partner with the MS-CC and its member institutions to support emerging leaders in data science and climate action. And a special thank you to Teni Agbesanwa and Alexia Jones from MS-CC and Internet2 for all their hard work pulling together such a wonderful event. 

 All images sourced from sourced from the MS-CC LinkedIn page.