Imagine creating an affordable product and a sustainable industry tailored to both meet urgent demand and use native materials. This is what the Bamboo Bike Project (BBP) is doing in Kumasi, Ghana. We’ve honed our bamboo bike design to be suitable for road conditions in sub-Saharan Africa, and created a system by which these bikes…
A $125,000 gift from longtime donor and Benefactor Dr. Betsee Parker will benefit the crucial work of the Earth Institute’s Haiti Program. Tatiana Wah, a professor at the New School in New York (on leave), where she is a renowned scholar and practitioner of Haitian economic and social development, leads the Haiti program with Earth…
My prior post about the “The Dead Sea Dilemma” summarized the current condition of the Dead Sea and the ecological value of the region. In this post I will briefly describe two solutions that have been suggested. The Red Sea to Dead Sea Water Conveyance project – a conduit to transport water from the Red…
Urgent call for universal primary and secondary school education and donations to provide scholarships, especially for girls, in Africa, Asia & Latin America
We all watched the earth move at State of the Planet (SOP) 2010 literally and figuratively. The backdrop on the main stage in New York was a giant rotating earth, spinning from continent to continent as we connected leaders from around the globe who urged action on issues of climate change, poverty, economic recovery and…
Taking off amidst snow flurries we are headed completely across the Greenland ice cap to the northeast corner of of the country. This flight will differ from most of the DC-8 flights during the Ice Bridge 2010 Greenland campaign. The DC-8 flights are mainly used to measure sea ice or surface mapping with high altitude…
On March 20, the Columbia Water Center and the Punjab Agricultural University (PAU) celebrated Punjab Water Day. Don’t be looking for a water slide or balloons or information booths. This was a recognition of the seriousness of the water crisis in Punjab, and of the commitment to find solutions.
Thanks to a recent gift of $250,000 from a generous Columbia University alumnus, the Earth Institute will be establishing an innovative master’s level program in carbon management. The program will provide interested students with the interdisciplinary knowledge and skills needed to address the complex and competing challenges of achieving a low-carbon economy.
In an April 1 Columbia Water Center Seminar, two researchers from the Center for Sustainable Water Resources, Bureau of Economic Geology, University of Texas Austin, Bridget R. Scanlon and Laurent Longuevergne, spoke on their work with GRACE data and subsurface tracer studies, and what they bring to the climate science field.