Climate Change

To assess the presence of organochlorine pollutants (OCP) in Alaskan sub-Arctic latitudes, Fellow Kimberley Miner analyzed ice core and meltwater samples from Jarvis Glacier, a polythermal glacier in Interior Alaska. Jarvis Glacier is...

Editor's note: The following opinion piece by Fellow John J. Berger first appeared in The Seattle Times. Hot, dry conditions linked to climate change parched California this summer, setting the stage for 17 simultaneous blazes that consumed more than 800,000 acres. The state’s largest inferno ever, the Mendocino Complex fire, alone burned more than 460,000 acres and is still not fully contained.

The Clean Energy Solutions Center, in partnership with United Nations Foundation’s Energy Access Practitioner Network, hosted a webinar on mini-grids and interconnection to highlight the challenges and possible options for mini-grids after the main grid arrives. Participants learned about various country-specific case studies from Asia and Africa, and panelists discussed the potential requirements—policy, technical, and commercial—needed to achieve a relatively seamless interconnection of mini-grids with the main grid.

A few days after Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico, a single mother of two escaped the disaster that left Puerto Rico in chaos and without electricity. Through her informal social networks, and with only a three-hour notice, she and her family boarded a humanitarian plane with a western physician and patients from the local hospital.

How do we ensure funds are available on a national or even international scale when climate disasters strike? Daniel Morris, who is currently Advisor to the U.S. Executive Director at the World Bank, has spent recent years thinking about how to make communities and countries more financially resilient in the face of catastrophic disasters in the future.

How can social capital and social media benefit communities experiencing climate shocks or extreme events? Meredith Niles, an assistant professor and faculty with the University of Vermont Food Systems Program and Department of Nutrition and Food Sciences, examines food systems sustainability and policy with a focus on food security and climate change.

From Fellow Bridie McGreavy, editor of the new volume Tracing Rhetoric and Material Life: Ecological Approaches: The book draws from interdisciplinary approaches within the field of rhetoric to explore the relationships between communication and the world. The book is organized around themes in rhetorical studies of the environment, including dynamic change, ecological engagements, ethics and attunement, and commitments to justice and care.

China is the world’s No. 1 polluter. It burns more coal than the rest of the world combined. It produces more than a quarter of the world’s human-caused global warming gases, nearly as much as North America and Europe put together. On Tuesday, the country set out to claim another title reflecting its ambitions to change all that: keeper of the world’s largest financial market devoted to cleaning up the air.

The impulse to help rebuild Puerto Rico — an often neglected corner of the nation that has struggled after the storm — has rippled through many corners of America. But in the world of electricity research, which has staked out a place of geeky global dominance here on the West Coast, an equally powerful idea about the island has resonated: It is a chance to work on a blank canvas. ...