climate adaptation10
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Helping Communities Respond to Climate Change
A new tool helps scientists communicate better with communities on global climate change issues, increasing awareness and stakeholder engagement.
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Optimism, But Also a Hard Bottom Line for Island States
“Reaching an agreement would firstly mean an increase in awareness for the particular situation faced by small island developing states. States such as Kiribati are on the front line of climate change since they are already experiencing its effects, and an agreement would enhance recognition of [their] vulnerability.”
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From Copenhagen to Paris: Moving From Talk to Action on Climate Change
Globally, individual nations have volunteered greenhouse gas reduction targets in anticipation of the Paris meetings. Unlike Copenhagen, where calls for mandatory reductions and transfer payments to the developing world caused the collapse of any potential agreements, the world community seems more realistic as it approaches the Paris meetings.
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Growing the Global Economy Without Destroying the Planet
We need to focus our attention on the existing systems of management and influence now in place and attempt to turn them toward sustainability. This includes national, state and especially local governments, corporations and nonprofit organizations.
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Before Paris, Cause for Optimism
If the international community were to fully understand the threat of climate change, and the likely cost of mitigation and adaptation, perhaps we would commit to continued tax breaks and incentives, and propel the renewable energy transition toward completion. In the long run, I am sure this would be less expensive than coping with the…
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Climate Through A Different Lens: Poverty, Inequality, Sustainability
Technology has brought us low-cost global communication, and also enabled a global economy. It has also brought us closer and further from each other. We now know more about other cultures. We also see the differences, and sharpen our sense of inequities. Perhaps, this, rather than a control of greenhouse gases, needs to be the…
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The Paris Climate Summit: Resources for Journalists
Many experts at Columbia University’s Earth Institute are attending or closely watching the Paris climate summit. These include world authorities on climate science, politics, law, natural resources, national security, health and other fields, who can offer expert analysis to journalists. Here’s a guide to resources that journalists covering the summit can tap.
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Symbolic Politics, the Keystone Pipeline, and Climate Policy in the Real World
The Clean Power Plan, the renewable energy tax credit, and state and local sustainability initiatives may not have the glamor of climate conferences in Paris or the media currency of the fight over the Keystone XL Pipeline, but they are the real, operational policies and programs that actually reduce fossil fuel use and speed the…
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Getting Sustainability on the Agenda of Our Dysfunctional Federal Government
What is needed politically and in reality is a positive vision of a sustainable society. In the case of this country it will need to be built on the traditional values that have always attracted people to America: freedom, rewarding individual achievement, a love of the new and novel, innovation, and acceptance (even if reluctantly)…
By studying thousands of buildings and analyzing their electricity use, Columbia Climate School Dean Alexis Abramson has been able to uncover ways to significantly cut energy consumption and emissions. Watch the Video: “Engineering a Cooler Future Through Smarter Buildings“
