Higher Education

OU paid millions to combine racial focus and climate change

August 19, 2024

Ray Carter

The University of Oklahoma is being paid millions in federal funds to tout climate-change theories in a race-based context, according to a recent announcement from the university.

Researchers at the University of Oklahoma, in partnership with the Chickasaw Nation and the University of New Mexico, have received a $4 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for a project to “build climate resilience in tribal communities across Oklahoma and New Mexico.”

The principal investigator of the grant is Elinor Martin, Ph.D., an associate professor and Edith Kinney Gaylord Presidential Professor in the OU School of Meteorology.

“Tribal communities have been adapting [for climate change] and have been at the forefront of this for a long, long time, but they have generally not been included in the research and planning process,” Martin said.

“Every part of our nation has been impacted by the changing climate,” said NSF Director Sethuraman Panchanathan. “We build a sustainable future for all by investing in climate resilience research and solutions across our country.”

The project will include efforts to help tribal officials “monitor and manage their own air quality through acquiring new air quality sensors and training community members on how to deploy the sensors and collect and interpret data.”

The project will also provide water quantity research “that will help enable Indigenous communities to evaluate how changes in water quantity will affect their plans for food sovereignty and cultural practices.”

The project will also fund efforts to “foster a new generation of Indigenous scientists and students in climate change disciplines.”

The grant provides OU and its partners $4 million over two years.

This is not the first time that OU has been involved in efforts that combine the world of climate-change theory with tribal issues.

In 2023, eight officials at the University of Oklahoma released a study claiming Native Americans in Oklahoma face a 64-to-68-percent higher risk of heavy rainfall, two-year flooding, and flash flooding due to projected climate change than their non-Native neighbors.

However, the paper—“Future Heavy rainfall and flood risks for Native America under climate and demographic changes: A case study in Oklahoma,” published in the American Meteorological Society’s Weather, Climate, and Society journal—predicted most of the increased risk is the result of Oklahoma tribal citizens having an ever-increasing number of descendants through the end of the century, more than doubling their current population numbers.

In 2013, the paper noted the total Native American population in Oklahoma was estimated to be 288,801. Researchers projected that figure would rise to 603,034 by the end of this century.

Based on current trends, many of those 603,034 future tribal citizens will also have significant non-tribal heritage.

The paper’s main thesis was basically that as the number of Oklahomans who are tribal citizens increases, so does the likelihood that someone of Native American descent will live somewhere impacted by bad weather allegedly caused by climate change.

The authors conceded that population increases “outweigh climate changes” for heavy rainfall and flash floods “meaning that population growth contributes more to increased exposure than climate change” for Oklahomans of Native American descent. The paper emphasized that “exposures due to flash floods are primarily driven by population growth.”

The OU paper also conceded that there are questions about the reliability of weather-event projections based on climate-change theory, and that flash-flood risk was associated with “those who reside along rivers.”

The Wall Street Journal found that between 2002 and 2022, enrollment at OU increased 15 percent, but tuition increased by 36 percent even after adjusting for inflation. Once student fees were included, the combined rate of growth was even more dramatic and was the highest in the nation.

“At the University of Oklahoma, per-student tuition and fees rose 166%,” the Journal reported, “the most of any flagship.”