Poverty / Development44
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UN Secretary-General Makes First Trip to Millennium Village
Key Data Toward Achieving Millennium Development Goals Released
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Matt Berg, ICT Director for Millennium Villages Project, Named TIME’s 100 Most Influential
NEW YORK, April 29–TIME named Matt Berg, ICT director for the Millennium Villages Project and Earth Institute researcher, to the 2010 TIME 100, the magazine’s annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world. Berg has been instrumental in bringing mobile phone based services, computer access and connectivity to some of the most…
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Addressing urban water scarcity in developing countries: Chennai, India
Ensuring an adequate water supply isn’t only an issue for large urban centers like New York or Los Angeles. It’s also a vital concern of the growing populations of cities in the developing world. Veena Srinivasan, of the Department of Environmental Earth System Science, Stanford University, shared her work on ‘The integrated water paradigm: a…
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Some Thoughts About Dust, Rio Gallegos
I’ve been to Stewart Island, off the southern tip of New Zealand, but I’m pretty sure this is the furthest south I’ve been. Cool! We’re here in Rio Gallegos. We’ve just rendezvoused with Dr. Jay Quade, a geologist from the University of Arizona, and his wife Barbara. We’ve got two cars, a bunch of boxes…
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Getting Back on Track: Ending Global Hunger and Undernutrition
One of the targets of the first Millennium Development Goal (MDG) is to reduce the proportion of people who suffer from hunger by half between 1990 and 2015, with hunger measured as the proportion of the population who are undernourished and the prevalence of children under five who are underweight.
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Take MDP Courses in the USA, Practice in Nigeria, Graduate in Costa Rica.
As a student, imagine taking courses from experts at the Earth Institute and the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, living in Nigeria for two months while helping villages problem-solve the complex challenges of sustainable development, and graduating from your home institution in Costa Rica. Picture meeting at a university campus every…
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Ready to Sail
Today we arrived at McMurdo, an American research station that hosts Antarctica’s largest community—about 1,000 people during austral summer. To get here, a US Air Force cargo plane picked us up in Christchurch, New Zealand, and landed us on the ice nearby. Today is a balmy summer day of 30°F, not much colder than the…
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Rebuilding Haiti: The 10-Year Plan
The horrors of Haiti’s earthquake continue to unfold. The quake itself killed perhaps 100,000 people. The inability to organize rapid relief is killing tens of thousands more. More than 1 million people are exposed to hunger and disease and, with the rain and hurricane seasons approaching, are vulnerable to further hazards. Even an economy as…
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Haiti: Physics of Quakes Past, and Future
The earthquake that struck Haiti took place along what is called a strike-slip fault—a place where tectonic plates on each side of a fault line are moving horizontally in opposite directions, like hands rubbing together. When these plates lock together, stress builds; eventually they slip; and this produces shaking. This quake was fairly shallow; it…
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“