Climate Change

Dr. Tracey Osborne, partnering with Amazon Watch on the Climate Alliance Mapping Project, built a platform that factually and compellingly demonstrates the geographic footprint of Amazonian oil reserves and the human and natural resources its extraction threatens. Specific outcomes of this Switzer Leadership Grant project include:

A University of Maine PhD Candidate is developing policy to build climate resilience. Kimberley Miner is studying earth and climate sciences in Orono. She’s analyzing the threat of pesticides and organic pollutants in glaciers. After completing her dissertation, Miner hopes to develop a model that analyzes the risk of downstream communities which could be impacted by polluted glacial melt waters.

Fellow Joe Rand says research from the Berkeley Lab, Elevate Energy and the Center for Sustainable Energy shows that buyers think solar is a desirable feature, but that they, realtors and appraisers need more help to find and value solar homes.

PEO, the international women's philanthropic educational organization, that awards scholarships, grants, and loans to women around the world, recently awarded two Connecticut graduate students a total of $30,000 through the Scholar Awards Program.

The world is watching how the United States and China, the two biggest carbon emitters and economies in the world, have committed to implementing the Paris Agreement on climate change.

Out-of-work Kentuckians are increasingly turning to farming “out of necessity,” said Martin Richards, who runs Kentucky’s Community Farm Alliance. His group works with eight farmers’ markets in eastern Kentucky, including one Howard helped found with another seventh-generation Kentuckian, Nathan Hall; Richards says twice as many farmers participate as did five years ago.

Scientists predict that by 2100, thanks to global warming, Earth's oceans could swell six feet higher than they are today. If that happens, melting ice caps would inundate southern Florida and huge swaths of Louisiana, where "there's not a lot of land above sea level," says Linwood Pendleton, an environmental economist at the European Institute for Marine Studies.

Cap-and-trade forces the biggest producers of greenhouse gas — including electricity utilities, natural gas utilities and fuel distributors — to pay to pollute. Low-income Californians feel the pinch when gasoline, electricity and natural gas prices increase. And it’s logical to think that the state’s cap-and-trade program might add to those expenses. But this program is generating billions of dollars to provide an array of benefits to Californians, especially those living in disadvantaged communities.

Adults get most of the credit for structuring and managing the world, but researchers are finding that children play a much bigger role in society than we often imagine.