International Conservation & Development

In October 2013 Fellows Melissa Nelson and Susannah McCandless convened an event called the North American Community Environmental Leadership Exchange. The event focused on indigenous engagement in efforts to protect and restore biological and cultural resources of Native American lands. Watch a video report about the event, which Switzer helped fund with a $15,000 Network Innovation Grant.

In the middle of the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument, situated nearly 1,000 miles south of the Hawaiian Islands, Palmyra Atoll is an ocean wilderness teeming with rare animal and plant life.

Heather Coleman was recently quoted a The New Yorker article about climate trades.

Tavis Forrester has signed on to an initiative in Costa Rica to create the first regional network of citizen science supported camera traps to monitor big cats and their prey's activities. From National Geographic:

Dave Kramer and a colleague were recently invited to speak at Darmouth about what it takes to make green development stick in Latin America: Resilience. It certainly wasn’t the first word we ever uttered at Dartmouth as very green undergraduates, but it defined our time there in different ways. From the survival lessons brutally served up by first New Hampshire winters to the taste of a whole new level of academic rigor and competition, Dartmouth has a way of forcing people to step up to the plate.

Resilience. It certainly wasn’t the first word we ever uttered at Dartmouth as very green undergraduates, but it defined our time there in different ways. From the survival lessons brutally served up by first New Hampshire winters to the taste of a whole new level of academic rigor and competition, Dartmouth has a way of forcing people to step up to the plate.

Young researchers could soon be helping to shape science policy in developing nations, with a number of them contributing to the UN's recent prototype Global Sustainable Development Report - a planned one-stop shop for science advice. The report's 'science digest' section provides overviews of subjects such as ocean acidification for senior government officials and policymakers. It was compiled and peer reviewed by young researchers, with input from more experienced scientists.

The proportion of land used to cultivate shade grown coffee, relative to the total land area of coffee cultivation, has fallen by nearly 20 percent globally since 1996, according to a new study by scientists from The University of Texas at Austin and five other institutions. The study's authors say the global shift toward a more intensive style of coffee farming is probably having a negative effect on the environment, communities and individual farmers.

Tony Haymet, former director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, has heard hundreds of ocean cleanup plans. Late at night, over many beers, he's come up with a few dozen of his own. None of them, he says, has seemed likely to work. That includes this spring's offerings. A Dutch engineering student, Boyan Slat, envisions a contraption with massive booms that would sweep debris into a huge funnel. Songwriter and music producer Pharrell Williams wants to fund the monumental cost of any cleanup by turning recycled ocean plastic into yarn and then clothes.