Posts
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Identifying Capacity Building Needs for the Government of Haiti
The Earth Institute’s Haiti Research and Policy Program at the Center on Globalization and Sustainable Development welcomed two distinguished speakers as part of the Spring 2013 Haiti Dialogue Series to discuss government capacity building and national monitoring systems for government funded programs.
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Students Work on Net Zero Energy to Adaptation Planning Projects
By Noah Morgenstein This past May, seniors in the Capstone Workshop in Sustainable Development delivered their final presentations to fellow students and faculty at Columbia University. The workshop is a required course for students in the Sustainable Development major or special concentration. Unlike traditional courses, the workshop requires students to work collaboratively on a client project…
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M.S. Student Learns the Importance of Form and Function through Sustainable Design Courses
Being able to model solutions visually is a critical component for managers’ intent for solving environmental problems. For that reason, perhaps, advancing the way we design the built environment has always been my keenest interest. Sustainable design requires more than just the ability to create spatially: it requires expansive considerations—materials, energy, water-use, financial feasibility, new…
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Settling in to Work and Life in Barrow
While I arrived in Barrow, Alaska on Tuesday, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory scientists Andy Juhl and Craig Aumack, and graduate student Kyle Kinzler from Arizona State University, got here one week ago.
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Measuring the Effect of China’s Arctic Interests
Of non-Arctic states, China has shown the most interest in the Arctic as climate change opens up the region to new economic development. The ways in which China attempts to balance its economic interests and environmental responsibilities within its energy policy may provide a predictor of its future behavior in the Arctic.
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The Microgrid Solution
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…
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Of Cow Dung, Cook Stoves and Sustainability in Practice
When the Environmental Defense Fund asked me to measure how biogas cook stoves were changing the lives of farmers in rural India, there wasn’t a word in that question with which I was comfortable. Having just graduated from the Undergraduate Program in Sustainable Development, I had never done fieldwork; and the concept of a biogas…
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ESP Student Craves Career in Sustainable Food Systems
In a career that has already spanned the roles of farmer and corporate sustainability professional with ARAMARK; current MPA in Environmental Science and Policy (MPA-ESP) student Kendall Singleton knows that her niche in the sustainability sector lies in designing and implementing sustainable food systems. As her time in the MPA-ESP program comes to a close,…
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Investigating Life in Arctic Sea Ice
Andy Juhl and Craig Aumack, microbiologists from Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, are spending a month in Barrow, Alaska studying algae in and below sea ice, and how our warming climate may impact these important organisms.
