Dr. Prabhjot Singh, an international health systems expert at the Earth Institute who helped design community health worker systems for the Millennium Villages Project across 10 African countries, has won a $40,000 Young Leader Award from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
Representatives of the worlds’ cities came to Rio in June for a series of events focused on the problems pressing in on the burgeoning urban population. Mayors around the world already are working on solutions and came out of Rio with concrete commitments for the future.
This year’s Midwest heat wave and some other recent extreme weather events are no fluke of nature, but a consequence of a warming planet, according to an analysis of climate data by NASA scientists.
In an article published in The Lancet, Earth Institute Director Jeffrey Sachs outlines his own ideas for sustainable development goals, and how how these goals can build on the Millennium Development Goals, the UN’s set of targets that aim to reduce extreme poverty and boost social well-being in many other ways by 2015.
An estimated 9 million species of living things inhabit the Earth. But those species are disappearing at an alarming rate, and this loss of biodiversity appears to be a major driver of environmental changes that can affect the biological and chemical processes that humans rely on.
By graduating with an education that has one foot in the business world and another foot in the liberal arts, Bryant students have learned that “business and society walk hand in hand,” Sachs told the graduates.
Two new programs in Ethiopia and Tanzania will adapt modern technology such as an innovative “lab-in-a-box,” smartphones and web-based communications, along with training for agricultural extension workers, to broaden the reach of Africa’s “Green Revolution.”
Earth Institute scientists explore how the physical world works on every continent — over and under the arctic ice, in the grasslands of Mongolia, on volcanoes in Patagonia, over subduction zones in Papua New Guinea, and on the streets of New York City.
As the world population grows toward 10 billion, consumption of water, food and energy is expanding at a rate that cannot be maintained without depleting the planet’s resources. If we fail to address these two issues together, we face a grim future of economic, social and environmental ills, warns a new report prepared by a group of scientists and other experts for the Royal Society.
From fossil teeth to carbon traces of plants in the soil, scientists are studying how changes in climate may have influenced early human evolution in Africa. Researchers from around the world gathered for a symposium held recently at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. Watch the videos.
State of the Planet is a forum for discussion on varying viewpoints. The opinions expressed by the authors and those providing comments are theirs alone, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Earth Institute or Columbia University.
