By Chelsea Kinsman Patty Mechael, Nadi Kaonga, and Hima Batavia, researchers at the Earth Institute (EI), assisted in designing the first ever mHealth survey module as part of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Second Global Observatory for eHealth (GOe) Survey.

Forecasts can play an invaluable role in helping humanitarian agencies and governments plan for and prevent disasters, according to a new report published by Earth Institute’s IRI and its international partners.

18th June 2011 Lima, Peru Our 2011 field season is underway. After a full day’s travel from New York, we arrived in Lima, the capital of Peru. This sprawling city perched on the edge of the Pacific Ocean is home to more than nine million people and, after Cairo, is the largest desert city in…

In rural Uganda a bicycle is the key to many destinations. It can take you to be an entrepreneur offering delivery and taxi services, it can also increase the revenue from the crops since you will be able to transport your “Matoke” bananas to the nearest town and boost the price. A bicycle here means…

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers battles an encroaching ocean, but how long will their funding hold out?

The first component of our program is to deploy seismometers onshore around the Alaska Peninsula. These instruments are very sensitive, so they can record small, local earthquakes, distant large earthquakes and (importantly for our project) the sound source of the R/V Langseth. However, there are no roads connecting towns on the Alaska peninsula, so one…

High above the tropical lowlands, the Andes form a formidable topographic barrier separating the coastal deserts in the west from the Amazon rainforest to the east. The Peruvian Andes are the highest peaks in all the tropics and, despite their proximity to the equator, are mantled with snow and ice. However, the glaciers clinging to…

Two tectonic plates converge along a 2,500-kilometer-long subduction zone offshore southern Alaska. Stress builds up at the contact between these plates, which is released in large, destructive earthquakes like the recent event offshore Japan. One of the big conundrums about these settings is how large of an area locks up on the contact between these…

California re-embraces carbon market, Reuters, June 13 After a court ordered California to consider alternatives to cap and trade, the Air Resources Board published a 120-page policy analysis on Monday, examining five approaches to cut emissions, including a carbon tax, direct regulation of power plants and big factories, and a cap-and-trade system. The report concludes…