From Hurricane Sandy to flooding in Miami, climate change already poses existential threats to our homes. It fuels the spread of mosquito-borne diseases and exacerbates violent conflicts, threatening our health and our lives. Climate change is a danger as personal as it is global, and it has hurt so many of us. I came to Climate and Society because by friends are beginning to lose hope, and I needed to find a way to keep that hope alive.
Energy has always been a hot topic and with good reason. Historically, access and production of energy has been vital for economic development. But with the increasing threat of climate change, our relationship with energy has been changing. It is important that we focus on our relationship with energy and the symbolic value we have placed on certain types of energy in order to move forward.
Krista Jankowski faced a choice. Discover the wonders of deep history or help preserve and heal the planet for this and future generations. She chose the latter, forsaking dinosaurs to join the C+S program. Since then, she’s gone on to pursue a PhD focusing on sea level rise in Louisiana. Her work has the power… read more
The effects of anthropogenic climate change – specifically sea-level rise due to ice melt and thermal expansion – are likely to threaten already vulnerable coastal wetlands in Louisiana according to a new study published in Nature Communications on Tuesday. The study was conducted by Climate and Society 2010 alum Krista L. Jankowski and colleagues at… read more
These areas can be publicly or privately owned, which often affects public accessibility. The Nature Conservancy’s New York City Program is working on putting together a cohesive data set of open space and land ownership in the city in order to assess which entities the Conservancy must work with to promote increased public access to open space.
This summer, I have been working at the Center for Climate Systems Research (CCSR) on the Adaptation for Development and Conservation (ADVANCE) Partnership—a joint program of CCSR at Columbia University and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). The ADVANCE approach is a method of co-generating climate change information through working with stakeholders and decision-makers from a wide range of backgrounds.
Climate change is real and so are its impacts. That’s why 195 nations from around the world came together last December to sign the Paris Agreement. This marks the first global agreement aimed at keeping the global average temperature increase below 2°C.
Seeing is believing, literally. Videos can help provide female farmers improve agriculture gains in low income countries.
Social media is starting to serve as a new platform for both authorities and citizens to communicate during natural disasters. But there are also open questions with this new form of social media use. What is this communication like? Where are its weak points? And can it become more reliable and standardized?
Geoengineering is a term that climate aficionados and anyone with an opinion on environmental issues tends to perceive with apprehension and mistrust due to the ambiguous, potentially dangerous side effects of manipulating natural processes of the environment.