Environmental Policy & Law

There’s a lot on the line at the climate negotiations in Paris. Fellow Heather Coleman, among others, is there, working to make sure that whatever deal is made, that it’s a fair one for us all.

Jia-Ching Chen is now at Pennsylavania State University as an Assistant Professor of Environmental Governance and Urban Systems.

Countries are loosely interpreting the legal meaning of “rational use” of natural resources to escalate fishing efforts in Antarctic waters and hinder efforts to establish marine protected areas in the Southern Ocean, scientists and legal scholars say.

As the management adage goes, "you can't manage what you can't measure." At Yale's Environmental Performance Index they are all about integrating data and indicators into environmental policy and decision-making. This summer, Ariana Spawn was fortunate to receive an on-the-ground lesson in how the United States government is putting this concept into practice for ocean and coastal management.

Amy Luers is currently serving as Assistant Director, Climate Resilience and Information, White House Office of Science & Technology Policy.

U.S. policy makers are “showing that they really are ready to make some serious reductions at home” and that message will help bring about change in other countries, Kevin Kennedy, deputy director of the World Resources Institute’s U.S. climate initiative. It would be “a mistake” to focus just on the emissions reduction that any particular rule delivers and not the broader effect on the climate talks, he said.

Identifying Violations Affecting Neighborhoods (IVAN) is an innovative program of environmental monitoring, reporting, and enforcement in California. It is intended to improve health and conditions of well-being in disadvantaged communities where residents face high levels of environmental hazards and low levels of the economic, political, and social resources need to address them.

During his two years leading the Roman Catholic Church, Pope Francis has washed the feet of inmates, proposed larger roles for women in the church, and famously shifted the institutional tone toward gay acceptance, saying, “If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?”

The call today by Pope Francis in his transformational papal encyclical on the environment, reminds us that climate change is first and foremost about people, and it’s the poorest among us that will suffer the most.