
African-born, Oxford-trained biologist Lucy King recently won an award for a promising solution to a longstanding problem in Africa—elephants raiding crops.

From Central Africa to Central Asia, women are helping other women to continue attending school and to begin their own businesses, sometimes in conflict with local customs. Yet what does it really mean to break down cultural barriers to work toward these types of gender equality?

The Earth Institute’s Urban Design Lab and MIT Collaborative Initiatives joined to investigate the issue of obesity through the prism of design. Their conclusion: “No single effort to curb childhood obesity will be sustainable or effective on a broad scale if the larger food system is not addressed.”
The Columbia Climate Center convened a workshop, “Carbon Management Education and Practice” at Columbia University on November 3-4, 2011. Over 30 participants from academia, non-governmental organizations, the private sector and government met to discuss the emergence and contours of carbon management as a new educational and professional field. Two days of panels and presentations provided…

What do climate research and art have in common? How do non-scientists interpret climate change issues?

The American Geophysical Union’s fall conference is coming up! The meeting will be held in San Francisco from December 5th to the 9th — as usual, Columbia Water Center scientists and associates will be giving a number of presentations covering a dizzying array of topics.

Everything that we understand about the rhythms of the Earth’s surface – the slow growth of mountain chains, the creeping expansion of the ocean basins, the abrupt upheaval of a major earthquake, the explosive eruption of a volcano – is viewed through the context of plate tectonics. This simple yet highly successful model for describing…

The first time I felt truly fanatical about coniferous trees was while walking among the great eastern white pine trees in the Adirondack State Park as an undergraduate research assistant and student.

“Natural and Manmade Disasters: Lessons for the Future” kicked off the seminar series on October 18 with presentations about the Haiti Earthquake of 2010, the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico of 2010, and the 2011 tsunami and earthquake that damaged the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan.