“I think we have to get a lot more humble about what we can do with our science, and what is actually going to be useful with our science.” — US AID’s Edward Carr talks about the importance of climate services to local communities, for the first in a series of video interviews.
The New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD), a program of the African Union, was launched in Lusaka, Zambia in July 2001. NEPAD offered a fundamentally new approach to development. African leaders set out to pursue new priorities and methods to transform the continent politically and socio-economically, focusing on Africa’s growth, development and participation in the [...]
It’s mid-morning in the Tiby Millennium Village in Mali. Rokia, a community health worker, sits with a young mother in a spare courtyard of the household. Gently she asks the key questions.
African-born, Oxford-trained biologist Lucy King recently won an award for a promising solution to a longstanding problem in Africa—elephants raiding crops.
Video Short: IRI’s Madeleine Thomson discusses the short- and long-term health risks of the East Africa famine
Beginning in Niger in the 1980s, Tony Rinaudo, an African aid missionary, began working with farmers to develop a new approach to reforesting degraded landscape. The practice he developed involved selective pruning of shrub shoots to a main stem, which was then pruned of its lower leaves and branches. Within a few years, new woodlands were growing.
In our latest video interview, climate scientist Tufa Dinku talks about his work on combining weather station data with satellite information to generate high-resolution data sets. These data could be used for making more accurate forecasts and can feed into other climate risk management activities, such as early-warning systems. With funding from Google.org, Dinku and [...]
In a visit to the MDG Centre in Nairobi, Merry Year Foundation delegates discussed their commitment to helping rural African communities extract themselves out of poverty and to scaling up the Millennium Village model
The Earth Institute, in conjuction with several corporate partners, hopes to use mobile technology to revolutionize the way utilities are monitored, metered, and maintained to ensure clean water supplies and reliable energy.
For all its problems, Southern California has been a wonderful home for a lot of people over the past 100 or so years. It has nice beaches, good roads, plenty of places to eat, and, for now, a reliable supply of drinking water. Now imagine the L.A. riots had spread across the entire region, plunging [...]
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.
