Posts
-
How China Is Dealing With Its Water Crisis
Recently I traveled to Southeast Yunnan in China to see the spectacular Yuan Yang rice terraces, flooded and ready for spring planting. Rice is a very water-hungry crop and China is the world’s largest producer of rice and grain. Yet China is facing a perilous water crisis.
-
Switchyard Project: Rescue Operation
Four people who tried to ski from the North Pole to Greenland got stuck on the ice and ran out of food. Since our team was out on the ice for sampling close to their location, we stopped sampling and picked them up.
-
A Warm Welcome to the New Baby Zebra at the Bronx Zoo
Terri, a baby zebra born earlier this year in the Bronx Zoo, made her public debut this week, strutting her pale brownish stripes in the Wildlife Conservation Society’s African Plains exhibit.
-
Switchyard Project: It’s all about the weather
One can only imagine what kind of a pilot one has to be to fly in the arctic regions and land on sea-ice under weather conditions as we have experienced already – fog above the ice and clouds covering the area with very low visibility.
-
Reusing Dirty Water
Columbia Water Center guest lecturer Raymond Farinato talks about increasing water supply by reusing wastewater in industrial applications.
-
Here Comes the Flood: The Army Corps Prepares to Blow the Levees to Save Cairo, Illinois
The US Army corps of Engineers is preparing to blow up levees on the Ohio River near Bird’s Point Missouri in order to save the town of Cairo, Illinois.
-
Making Peace: New Book Provides Tools for Solving Intractable Conflicts
Five percent of all difficult conflicts end in a destructive quagmire. Think of the current debate over global warming or the Israel-Palestine conflict. How can we overcome these? An Earth Institute psychologist, Peter T. Coleman, offers tactics in his new book, The Five Percent: Finding Solutions to Seemingly Impossible Conflicts. Coleman, who also heads Columbia’s…
-
A chorus of bloggers passes the 1,000 mark on the Earth Institute’s State of the Planet
As the State of the Planet blog surpassed 1,000 entries, we decided to take a look at the numbers and compile a list of the 10 most visited pages. Some are individual postings; others are pages that highlight our coverage of conferences, expeditions or programs. Since our launch, we’ve brought you posts from expeditions in…
-
How to reduce weather risk (and make a little green)
People understand that weather can affect certain markets — especially energy prices and other commodities — but its impact on portfolios more broadly might surprise. Just last week, a new study was released that estimated $485 billion of annual weather-related economic impact in the United States alone. Another calculated the effect at nearly 10 times that amount…
