Posts
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Ethiopian Farmers Get First Payouts From New Crop Insurance Project
An innovative crop insurance program that protects small African farmers against extreme weather made its first payouts last week, to growers in northern Ethiopia. The pilot “microinsurance” program gave a total of $17,392 to 1,800 farmers in seven villages, following a drought earlier this year. The HARITA (Horn of Africa Risk Transfer for Adaptation) pilot was…
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Researchers Unravel Origins of Antarctica’s Ice-Covered Mountains
‘This work shows that very old mountains can rise again, like a Phoenix from the ashes’
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Farmers, Flames and Climate: Are We Entering an Age of ‘Mega-Fires’?
For millennia, people have set fires to clear land for cultivation, pastures or hunting; so-called slash-and-burn agriculture is still common across much of tropical Africa, Asia and South America. It has been a useful strategy–but …
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New York State May Soon Suffer Outsize Effects from Climate, Says Report
From Farms to Subways, Many Sectors Could Be Affected
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Increasing Access to Health Care Using a Community-Based Approach
Community Health Workers (CHWs), health assistants or lay health workers who provide a fundamental level of health care for residents in the community in which they live, have been shown to make a tremendous contribution to public health and community development. In Kisumu, Kenya, residents of Manyatta, an informal settlement with nearly 90,000 people that…
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PhD. Ode to a Tree
“I was deeply saddened by the loss of one of our most beautiful trees on campus during the last storm. It had perfect symmetry and such a beautiful color display late in the fall,” wrote geochemist Martin Stute, after a highly unusual heavy October snow felled a 22-year-old Bradford pear at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, where he…
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Winter Extremes: So Last Year?
What are the odds that this winter will be as snowy as the last two? Climate scientist Jason Smerdon and tree-ring scientist Rosanne D’Arrigo are working on an answer, looking at the long-term history of two important weather patterns—the North Atlantic Oscillation and La Niña state in the tropical Pacific—that similar to last year could…
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Larry Burns Elected to the National Academy of Engineering
Larry Burns, director of the Earth Institute’s Roundtable on Sustainable Mobility, was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) on Oct. 16, 2011. A self-proclaimed “engineer through and through,” Burns teaches engineering practice at the University of Michigan and visits New York City regularly to lead the Roundtable.
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Trees on Tundra’s Border Are Growing Faster in a Hotter Climate
Measuring Techniques Improve—But Implications Are Not Certain
