Posts
-
A Tentative Year for REDD+: Placing Value on Forests
Forests, particularly tropical forests, are economically valuable for their biodiversity and, especially relevant for climate change, their ability to store carbon within their vegetation and soil. Alternately, destruction of forests releases carbon into the atmosphere. Deforestation and forest degradation account for 12-20% of GHG emissions. REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) is a…
-
Knowledge is Power: ChildCount+, mHealth in Tanzania
Collecting data is difficult. Collecting data in low resource settings is even more difficult. In my epidemiology courses, I have the luxury of generating correlation coefficients and p-values with cleaned, robust data sets. I was oblivious, however, to the process of getting information into this organized and beautifully coded package. That is until I was…
-
Sustaining Life, Securing Our Future: A Symposium Celebrating the Diversity of Life on Earth
On March 1st, 2011, CERC will host Sustaining Life, Securing Our Future, a day-long symposium that brings together leaders in biodiversity research, conservation, and education to present on the extraordinary diversity of the natural world and its role in securing a sustainable future. The day’s panels will discuss the range of efforts to study, conserve,…
-
Columbia Climate Center Co-hosts Screening of HOME
On Monday, January 31st, the Columbia Maison Française and the Columbia Climate Center co-hosted the American pre-screening of “HOME”, a film directed by world-renowned photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand, well known from his “Earth from Above” series. A panel discussion, moderated by science journalist and author David Berreby, followed the film. The panelists included Mr. Arthus-Bertrand, Olivier…
-
Widening the World for Students
The following is a guest blog, authored by David Homa, an anthropology and economics teacher at Los Gatos High School in California, one of MCI’s School2School partners. As the world shrinks through the use of technology, it is possible to widen the world to students all over the world. During the past week, I have…
-
How Plants Could Impact Global Warming
Biodiversity influences climate at local, regional and global levels, yet most climate models do not take biodiversity into consideration because its variables and effects are too diverse and complex to compute.
-
Climate News Roundup: 2/6-2/11
Droughts, Floods and Food, NYTimes, Feb. 6 Extreme weather events in 2010 are linked to the current global food crisis, in which the prices of wheat, corn, sugar, and oils have exploded. In combination with growing demand from developing nations and increased competition for crop land, extreme weather events such as droughts in Brazil, wildfires…
-
Record-Breaking Amounts of Snow Raise Problems for Cities
These record breaking amounts of snow have caused numerous concerns both economical and environmental and as snowfalls pile up cities run out of room to put the snow. One suggested solution was to dump the snow into waterways even though it became a mixture of many pollutants including, but not limited to, motor oil and…
-
Floods in Eastern Sri Lanka and North-Eastern Australia: Contrasts in Disaster Risk Management
Due to the ongoing floods in Sri Lanka, more than a million people are affected, 185,000 were displaced and 16 had died by February 5, 2011. The impact has been most severe on Eastern Sri Lanka a “Disaster Hazard and Vulnerability Hotspot”. The purpose of this post is to publicize information resources to help target…
