by Kaci Fowler “Environmental politics is a part of who I am,” said Robert Eshelman, an aspiring journalist in Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism. Robert used an Earth Institute travel grant to learn and write about sustainability in his senior thesis. “I am telling stories that will have a true impact on the environment.” Robert [...]
A video interview with climate scientist Bradfield Lyon, who explains his latest research on what’s driving rainfall patterns in parts of East Africa.
For more than 50 years, Sanchez has worked on agriculture and hunger issues throughout the developing world. Since 2005, he has helped to establish and direct the Millennium Villages Project to promote policies to bring a green revolution to Africa and achieve the Millennium Development Goals by 2015.
The Africa Soil Information Service has upgraded its website with a new layout, easier navigation and updates on project activities. A growing set of features provides information for managing soil and land in Africa, including an interactive map tool that allows you to choose layers and areas of interest that can be downloaded.
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.
The Undergraduate Program in Sustainable Development will offer a course in Global Food Systems (SDEV W3200) in Fall 2012, taught by Dr. Cheryl Palm. Concerns about food shortages, land use, climate change and biodiversity have created an urgent need for interdisciplinary researchers, practitioners and policy-makers focused on agriculture. Developing sound solutions that improve agricultural production [...]
Soil is the source of all life. Yet “we know more about soils of Mars than about soils of Africa,” says Pedro Sanchez, director of the Earth Institute’s Tropical Agriculture and the Rural Environment Program. To remedy this situation, the Earth Institute is taking part in an ambitious undertaking to map the world’s soils.
Columbia has welcomed a composting machine to campus, a first at a New York City university. Accepting food scraps, such as banana peels, coffee grounds and egg shells, the composter will provide a way to recycle the urban campus’s food waste while also serving as an educational tool.
The new Africa Monitoring System aims to help land managers and policy makers identify and tackle tradeoffs between intensified food production on the African continent and the vital services provided by healthy ecosystems.
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.
