Associate Professor Meredith Franklin, Assistant Professor Vianey Leos Barajas, and Associate Professor Tanhum Yoreh were awarded a $100,00 Data Sciences Institute (DSI) Catalyst Grant for their research project A Data Science Framework for Quantifying Environmental Action in Faith Communities.
The Greening of Religion Hypothesis posits that faith communities are in a process of transformation to become environmentally responsible. Understanding the role that places of worship in this shift is critical, yet few empirical tools to assess faith-based environmental action exist. This project introduces a data science-driven framework to systematically measure such action across thousands of places of worship. Leveraging automated web scraping and Large Language Models (LLMs), we will extract structured data from websites across diverse regions and faiths to search for keywords from a checklist of environmental actions that places of worship undertake. With the constructed database, we conduct spatial analyses to analyze how environmental engagement varies by geography, demographics, political context and religious affiliation. This reproducible pipeline enables a quantified understanding of environmental action across and within faith traditions. The resulting database offers an innovative, scalable, and equity-focused approach to understanding the greening of religion.
The Catalyst Grant program is a competitive seed funding program for multidisciplinary teams forming a Collaborative Research Team (CRT) which supports two tiers of awards. All Catalyst Grants are expected to align with the Data Sciences Institute (DSI) mission to catalyze the transformative nature of data sciences across all disciplines, in fair and ethical ways, to drive positive social change.