Earth Institute students took a hard look into financial and administrative problems plaguing the MTA and Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and came up with suggestions for more sustainable financing and more efficient operations.

Earth Institute students evaluated Kentucky’s physical, economic and cultural resources to identify ways to move the economy toward a more sustainable future—and to make recommendations for how the state’s community and technical college system could help.

Students from the Earth Institute’s Sustainability Management and Environmental Science and Policy master’s programs once again demonstrated the broad range of applications for interdisciplinary approaches to sustainable development in their Spring 2014 team capstone projects. The projects provided analysis and recommendations to a range of clients on diverse, real-world sustainability challenges.

Groundwater levels are dropping across a much wider swath of the United States than is generally discussed, according to a new report, suggesting that the nation’s long-term pattern of groundwater use is broadly unsustainable.

Americans are paying more for water than they did a decade ago, even as water utilities fall into debt and water infrastructure deteriorates, according to a Columbia Water Center report.

“Basically, the instinct of civilizations in the past has been to run off a cliff. This time it’s different. We have one global civilization, so we have to be very careful not to run off a cliff.”

As environmentalists have pushed for greater investment in wind and solar energy, critics have insisted that renewable sources of power could never provide more than a fraction of world energy demand. Evidence is mounting, however, that the critics are wrong.

The impact of climate change on New York City could be even more severe than previously thought, putting more people at risk from increasingly frequent floods and heat waves, according to a report by the New York City Panel on Climate Change that was released Monday.

A new report by the Columbia Water Center, produced with Veolia Water and Growing Blue, could help expose the real nature of water risk–even in places that most people think of as having plenty of water.

Last October, Superstorm Sandy provoked widespread frustration and fear after it left more than 7.5 million people in the New York Metro area without power. In the hardest hit areas, outages lasted two weeks or more. These failures led many observers to wonder if America’s aging electrical grid was up to dealing with emerging climate and other challenges.