Malcolm Araos is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Public Service at NYU’s Wagner Graduate School of Public Service and Associated Faculty in the Department of Environmental Studies. His research examines the governance and politics of adapting to climate impacts. He studies how governments and communities collectively plan and implement responses to climate threats such as sea level rise and water scarcity, with a focus on democratic participation, contested expertise, and equity in planning processes.
Recent projects include a study of participatory democracy processes in New York City’s coastal adaptation planning after Superstorm Sandy, an analysis of the climate politics surrounding efforts to save the shrinking Great Salt Lake in Utah, and a series of collaborative global assessments of progress on climate adaptation across sectors and scales.
His work has been published in Environmental Science & Policy, Nature Climate Change, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Global Environmental Change, One Earth, Theory and Society, Annual Review of Sociology, and Sociological Forum, among others. He holds a B.A. from McGill University and a Ph.D. in Sociology from NYU, where he was also a Fellow at the Institute for Public Knowledge. Before coming to Wagner, he completed a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at the Wilkes Center for Climate Science & Policy at the University of Utah.