Natural Disasters45
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Fund Pledges $2.5 Million for Disaster Preparedness Center
The National Center for Disaster Preparedness at the Earth Institute maintains a strong working partnership with the Children’s Health Fund, a national organization that supports pediatric care for underserved children. Over the past decade, the center has engaged in a number of projects funded by the fund, which recently announced its renewed support with a…
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Project Aims to Strengthen Climate Resilience
The Caribbean, Asia’s Indo-Gangetic Plain and West Africa are three regions known to be extremely vulnerable to climate variability and change, particularly to droughts, extreme weather events and stresses on food production, water resources and coastal areas. A new five-year project jointly led by the International Research Institute for Climate and Society and the University…
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IPCC Says Managing Risks of Climate Change is Critical
Among the key findings of the WGII AR5 Report chapter on human security, a topic highlighted in the Report for the first time, is that societies in conflict are more vulnerable to climate change.
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Keeping an Eye on Coastal Erosion
Searching for a fast, simple and low-cost way to monitor Earth’s changing coastlines, a team of scientists, including Lamont-Doherty Observatory postdoctoral researcher and marine scientist Alessio Rovere, has found an innovative use for drones.
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Bricks, an Archeological Site and Home
It was time to pack up and leave. Shofiq, who is from Sylhet, was dropped off near his home and the fellowship of the rocks was broken. We settled in for another long drive. We made an impromptu stop at one of the numerous brick factories scattered across Bangladesh. Here, the workers immediately started snapping…
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Field School: Sylhet Tectonics
Most field trips have a “death march” hiking a long way through forest, swamps, hills or deserts to get to a remote outcrop. We have a “death bus ride” instead.
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Mekong Delta and Three Gorges Dam: World’s First Climate Change Resettlements?
Many resettlers are economically better off, but the dislocations remain significant, especially for older resettlers, who have a harder time getting work in the newly developed industrial sector. Although the plight of some resettlers has been quite difficult (one older man competed fiercely to serve as a porter for us for the royal sum of…
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A Life Well Mapped
Mark Becker believed in the power of geospatial data and analysis to motivate our stewardship of the environment and guide development of sustainable approaches that balance human and environmental needs.
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Field School: The Brahmaputra River
The first day was very light for the jet-lagged students, just a short introduction to the field school and some background, and then introductions all around as we started to get to know each other. The final group of nine students finally arrived around 9 p.m. They were the most worn-out, bedraggled bunch of travelers…

By studying thousands of buildings and analyzing their electricity use, Columbia Climate School Dean Alexis Abramson has been able to uncover ways to significantly cut energy consumption and emissions. Watch the Video: “Engineering a Cooler Future Through Smarter Buildings“
