Africa5
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Linking Climate Forecasts, Soil Testing for Smarter Farming
A new project combines cutting edge climate science and mobile soil labs for African farmers and service providers.
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Photo Essay: Seeking Humanity’s Roots
East Africa’s rift valley is considered by many to be the cradle of humanity. In the Turkana region of northwest Kenya, researchers Christopher Lepre and Tanzhuo Liu of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory are cooperating with colleagues to study questions of human evolution, from the creation of the earliest stone tools to climate swings that…
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Seeking Humanity’s Roots
Who were our earliest ancestors? How and when did they evolve into modern humans? And how do we define “human,” anyway? Scientists are exploring Kenya’s Lake Turkana basin to help answer these questions.
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Global Philanthropy and Inequality
Recent trends now point towards global philanthropy becoming the new norm. Global philanthropy aims to reduce inequality in developing countries through many forms. But inequities persist, and different manifestations of global philanthropy will be challenged to increase impact and achieve a demonstrable shift in areas such as poverty, health, access to opportunity, and beyond.
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Connecting the Dots with a Summer Placement in Lesotho
The Masters of Public Administration in Development Practice “offered a program that allowed me to explore potential paths in a career of development by having the flexibility to connect the dots with my previous experience.”
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Taking Flight (Remotely) over East Africa
“Despite an early love affair with technology encouraged by my computer scientist, Silicon Valley-based parents, even I had a hard time envisioning a world in which I would spend a summer flying fixed wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) over pastoral East Africa.”
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Filling a Climate Gap and Helping Rwandan Farmers
Agriculture makes up a major portion of Rwanda’s economy, and employs eight in 10 Rwandans. Of course, farmers are hugely dependent on the climate, and a new project hopes to ensure they get timely information so they can plan for both good times and bad.
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Finding Microfossils off Southern Africa
Expedition 361’s newest sediment cores brought up spectacular foraminifera—translucent, glassy and “very pretty” throughout the ocean sediment.
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A Surprise from the Zambezi River
Sidney Hemming and her team aboard the JOIDES Resolution got a surprise when they began taking sediment cores from their first river site off southern Africa—about 10 times more sediment than expected.
October 28, 2026 is Columbia Giving Day! Your gift to Columbia Climate School helps advance interdisciplinary research, educate the next generation of leaders, and transform bold ideas into real-world solutions for climate, Earth, and society.
