sustainable development41
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Eni Joins the Earth Institute’s Corporate Circle as a Strategic Partner
Eni CEO Paolo Scaroni and Earth Institute Director Jeffrey Sachs announced that the two partners would work together on key projects promoting sustainable development in Africa. The announcement was made at this year’s UN Global Compact Leaders Summit in the presence of Georg Kell, the Global Compact’s executive director. The collaboration is part of the…
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At AGU, Earth Institute’s Columbia Water Center Adds to the Abundance of Scientific Riches
The annual American Geophysical Union (AGU) meeting is an all-you-can-eat buffet of the most current scientific knowledge available on the planet. Name your pleasure: space, climate change, geomagnetism, nonlinear geophysics, volcanology, biogeosciences, etc. You have to be careful to indulge in moderation over the five-day event, or risk unseemly bloating. The Columbia Water Center contributed…
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A Milestone Worthy of a Party: the Municipal Water Plan in Brazil
I recently returned from a trip to visit our project site in Ceará, Brazil. While our project has included infrastructure construction, the heart of our work is a municipal water plan (PAM) for Milhã, an area in the central region of the state.
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The Caribbean’s Growing Disaster Hotspots
The 125 million people of the Caribbean/Gulf of Mexico region are highly exposed to hurricanes, floods and landslides–and it is not only because of bad weather. Increasing numbers of the poor are crowding into confined areas that are most prone to destruction–low-lying flood plains, too-steep hillsides, and the like. Robert Chen, director of the Center for International Earth…
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India’s Water Is Running Out
India is running “the largest water-mining project in the world”–and it cannot be sustained much longer, Columbia Water Center researcher Shama Perveen told an audience on Monday. That is mainly because farmers, who depend heavily on irrigation water drawn from underground aquifers, are using far more water than rainfall can replenish. Perveen’s talk, “Quantifying the…
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Parched for Peace: A Slight Digression, Just for Kicks
Yesterday, FIFA announced that the 2022 World Cup would be held in Qatar, the first Middle Eastern country ever chosen to host the tournament.
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Ceará, Brazil: With Electricity and Water, This Place is Heaven
“With electricity and water, this place is heaven on earth.” That is the opinion of several residents I spoke with last summer during a visit to Milhã, in the center of the state of Ceará, Brazil. In this rural, semi-arid region communities are small and close-knit, and many families have lived there, often in the…
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Plastic Bottles, Compost Toilets and Rainwater Catchment: Simple Solutions for Haiti’s Clean Water Crisis
There are many other low-cost, high-impact approaches to alleviating the clean water crises in places like Haiti, so it’s worth mentioning a few.
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Parched for Peace: The UAE has Oil and Money, but No Water
One of the greatest challenges to sustaining 1.8 million people in an extremely arid locale is water, which in the coastal city of Dubai is abundant but not potable.
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“
