Unveiled last month, YSE’s new “Urban Climate Leadership Certificate Program” started accepting applications for its first cohort on March 1. The nine-month virtual certificate program — focusing on the relationship between urban spaces and the climate crisis — joins two others aimed at supporting mid-career professionals in the Global South.

“We really hope that this is an opportunity to both learn about the myriad ways that cities contribute to climate change and are impacted by climate change,” said Cameron Kritikos DIV ’23 ENV ’23, Urban Climate Leadership program manager. “The speed and scale of urbanization, and the concurrent deterioration of our planetary system, demands swift and scalable solutions.”

Kritikos explained that the 36-week curriculum will encompass five themes: urbanization and climate change, adaptation solutions, carbon accounting, governance and implementation. The fully remote program will guide its 50-member cohort through a survey of current urban climate challenges, policy initiatives and new opportunities.

According to Colleen Murphy-Dunning, a School of the Environment lecturer and program staff member, the coursework will consist of 36 weekly modules, each of which involves faculty-led seminar discussions paired with an hour of asynchronous lecture by climate leaders from around the world. Intended to offer students a variety of perspectives, the program’s slate of lecturers ranges from IPCC authors to nonprofit leaders and Yale professors.

After nearly a year of development, the program looks to address a growing area of climate interest.

“Urbanization is one of the megatrends of the 21st century, and cities are at the front lines of climate change,” Karen Seto, School of the Environment professor and director of the Hixon Center for Urban Sustainability, wrote in an email to the News. “There is an urgent need to develop leaders who can help cities both mitigate and adapt to climate change.”

Asha Ghosh, Urban Program manager at the School of the Environment and a lecturer at the School of Management, said that the program’s emphasis on urban spaces navigates the complex dynamics between our urban centers and the warming climate. Urban spaces are the largest contributors to global carbon emissions, but they also present some of the foremost opportunities for new climate solutions, she added. 

“Cities hold the opportunity to make the biggest impact, in terms of addressing these climate challenges,” Ghosh said.

Equity — questions about how climate differentially impacts urban communities, for instance — will be a key “thread” throughout the program, Ghosh added.

Urban forestry — currently one of the most promising nature-based solutions to climate adaptation in cities — will also receive significant instructional attention, Murphy-Dunning added. Murphy-Dunning, who is leading one of the program’s urban forestry modules, explained that trees can mitigate heat island effects but must also be considered in the context of other urban infrastructure.

The Biden administration’s 2022 Inflation Reduction Act has bolstered city greening efforts, bankrolling urban forestry efforts across the country with its record $1-billion investment. Now, according to Murphy-Dunning, urban foresters must consider the challenges posed by uncertain precipitation, temperature changes and potential conflicts with housing.

“It’s not just using trees as a vehicle for mitigation, but it’s also recognizing that the urban forest itself has to adapt to climate change,” Murphy-Dunning said.

Sustainable development can be especially challenging in developing nations, Ghosh explained. Many cities in the Global South undergo a process of repeated upgrading from informal to formal settlements, rather than relying entirely on planned development. Buildings and large infrastructure projects are often developed without accounting for city-mandated plans or the environmental features of the land.

Kritikos emphasized the program’s relevance to any potential students working in governance, nonprofits or the private sector. Given the complexity of cities — spaces where infrastructure, nature and communities interact — advancing urban sustainability is a “messy process” that will need to engage all stakeholders involved, Kritikos said. The program expects to offer something for applicants from a diversity of professional specializations. 

The first of the School of Environment’s certificate programs was launched in 2022 following a donation from the Three Cairns Group, the largest-ever gift in support of the school. The slate of online courses are designed to support emerging, mid-career professionals throughout the Global South.

“[The program] is going to allow us to bring the latest science to practitioners, which I think is really important,” Murphy-Dunning told the News. “[It] allows for the possibility of more people to participate in learning through the university.”

The School of the Environment’s two other certificate programs, “Financing and Deploying Clean Energy” and “Tropical Forest Landscapes,” invite students to explore green technology policies and conservation initiatives, respectively. 

Applications for this program will close on April 30. Accepted applicants will matriculate later this August. Applications for the forest landscapes program will close on April 5 and for the clean energy program on March 10. 

Ghosh and Murphy-Dunning were both hopeful the program might provide students the opportunity to connect, share ideas and generate new solutions. 

“We need to very rapidly make change because of the pressure of climate change,” Murphy-Dunning said. “I think there’s a sense of urgency … that we can’t continue to build cities the way we have in the past.” 

According to UN estimates, urban centers currently account for 75 percent of global CO2 emissions.

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Organized by its Committee on Canadian Studies, the MacMillan Center’s “Smoke from Canada” conference explored the aftermath of the fires earlier this month. The hybrid event included presentations from School of the Environment researchers and a keynote presentation delivered by guest speaker Pierre Minn, an anthropology professor at the University of Montreal.

“We conceived of our symposium in the aftermath of last summer’s wildfires in Canada and the ensuing smoke that blanketed much of the eastern United States,” Brendan Shanahan, MacMillan Center postdoctoral associate and panel moderator, wrote in an email to the News. “But as we saw with the wildfire smoke last summer, the effects of climate change in Canada are not confined within the country’s geographical boundaries.”

The interdisciplinary event invited School of the Environment researchers to speak about the relations between climate change, wildfire and public health.

Jennifer Marlon, a lecturer at the School of the Environment, addressed the ongoing gaps between wildfire impact and their perception. Even though the Canadian wildfires contributed to roughly 25 percent of global carbon emissions last year, she explained that recent work by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication suggests growing but still largely inadequate responses from the public. Per Marlon, only 47 percent of Canadians and Americans believe that climate change would harm them personally.

Sebastian Block-Munguia, a research affiliate at the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy, discussed how wildfires can also initiate deadly ripples throughout the ecosystem, as their pollutant can be toxic to vegetation by inhibiting plant photosynthesis.

Beginning as early as March 2023, Canadian wildfires picked up during the summer months. Wildfire smoke drifted across America and brought days of hazy smoke throughout stretches of the Northeast and the Midwest. Farms across states hard-hit by the wildfire smoke reported slower-than-usual corn growth last year.

Researchers added that prolonged exposure to smoke comes with a steep toll on human health as well.

“The wildfire smoke is really a public health problem,” Kai Chen, a professor at the School of Public Health, said at the event. “We need government policies to help regulate and help reduce the air pollution.” 

Chen, who studies the impacts of climate change on human health, explained that wildfire smoke is rich in fine particulate matter, or PM 2.5. These 2.5 micrometer-sized particles — ranging between 1/20 and 1/30 the diameter of a human hair — can have deadly effects on the nervous system and lungs, he said. Chen added that previous studies have linked PM 2.5 exposure to diseases such as asthma, lung cancer, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

While long-term health assessments have to follow subjects for years and decades after the wildfires, Chen said that preliminary work is already revealing high costs to public health. Research Chen conducted in collaboration with Columbia University — which has access to records of New York City’s near real-time emergency system asthma visits — detected a 44-percent increase in asthma syndrome visits across all age groups during the days when smoke blanketed the city.

“Climate change is making forest fires worse by extending the length of the fire season, making the weather warmer and drier,” Block-Munguia said. “But also, fires contribute to climate change.” 

Per Block-Munguia, fires kickstart a vicious cycle: they release significant amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, which compounds global warming effects and contributes to drier, less predictable weather conditions. Plants — which rely on CO2 for photosynthesis — could also grow in excesses due to this increase in CO2 release, making them more vulnerable to catching fire.

Even so, he added that fossil fuels remain the overwhelming contributor to PM 2.5 exposure, and enable some of the climate change-related effects responsible for last year’s wildfires. In 2019, PM 2.5 was responsible for 4.1 million global deaths — roughly 1 million of which were caused by fossil fuel combustion, according to Block-Munguia. By comparison, that smoke was responsible for 0.2 million deaths, Block-Munguia said.

Despite its forest growth and natural resources, Canada has been lagging behind peer nations in climate mitigation efforts, Block-Munguia added. He cited recent reports that revealed chronically underreported CO2 emissions from the nation’s oil centers.

According to the panelists, last year’s El Niño cycle likely compounded the scale of the Canadian wildfires. El Niño, during which a warm Pacific Ocean shifts the flow of jet streams, often leads to drier, hotter weather across the Pacific Northwest — perfect conditions for a wildfire, Marlon said. Marlon added that Canada might not expect fires of last year’s size for at least another five to seven years.
Roughly 7,300 forest fires burn through Canada each year.

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Founded in 2022 with grant funding from the Planetary Solutions Project, the Bird-Friendly Building Initiative has researched ways we might reimagine urban spaces to better accommodate birds. By assessing policy proposals for more bird-friendly cities and tracking bird deaths across the University, the project has started making an impact on campus building projects.

“[Bird collisions are a] bigger issue than people think often,” Viveca Morris ’15 ENV ’18 SOM ’19, executive director of the Yale Law, Ethics and Animals Program, said to the News. “With the initiative, we’ve tried to create a data-driven plan for what the university can do.”

According to Morris, urban spaces are significant — and often overlooked — contributors to wildlife deaths. Since birds struggle to perceive glass, building windows results in an estimated 365 million to one billion annual bird deaths nationwide — a figure that may only grow with the construction of large, reflective structures.

One of the initiative’s priorities has involved research on the effectiveness of local bird-friendly policy efforts.

Released last August, the initiative’s “Building Safer Cities for Birds” report compared the success of local bird-friendly policy across regions such as New York City and Arlington, Virginia. The report cited the need for state and national standards to complement local policy and concluded that bird-friendly window material was compatible with green design principles and cost-efficiency.

The initiative has also kept a close focus on home by treating Yale’s campus as a laboratory, Morris explained. By tracking bird-building collisions across Yale, the project seeks to spearhead building standards and demonstrate the effectiveness of retrofitting solutions that might offer a bird-friendly model for other campuses.

In partnership with the Peabody Museum, Morris added that the initiative has monitored collisions during peak bird migration in fall 2022, spring 2023, fall 2023 and soon in spring 2024. Every day over an eight-week period, student volunteers collect fallen birds along three routes across campus.

Peabody collections manager Kristof Zyskowski explained that the bird casualties are sent to the Peabody Museum, where they are photographed, sampled for muscle tissue, prepared and added to the ornithology collection. The frozen tissue samples provide researchers an opportunity to study genetic composition and climate-related geographical shifts of certain species over time. 

“These kinds of specimens document the occurrence of a particular species at a particular place and time and can serve for all sorts of projects — morphology, anatomy, pathogen emergence, pesticide presence,” Zyskowski told the News. “With the state-of-the-art archival conditions provided by the museum, these specimens are expected to last for centuries.”

 According to Zyskowski, the white-throated sparrow and dark-eyed Junco have been especially vulnerable to building collisions. Other common victims include the mourning dove, black-capped chickadee and ruby-throated hummingbirds.

Zyskowski, who has lived in the New Haven area for 22 years, acknowledged that the scale of bird collisions on campus has been “progressively increasing” over the decades since the construction of new glass-rich buildings. He estimated that Yale’s campus — along with some downtown New Haven buildings — has experienced over 700 bird casualties in 2023. Based on the data collected by the Yale Bird-Friendly Building Initiative, the School of Management’s Evans Hall and certain buildings on West Campus have been responsible for the greatest number of casualties on Yale’s campus.

However, Morris added that the initiative’s data collection has helped pave the way for more thoughtful building design on campus.

In 2019, the Yale Office of Facilities adopted a bird-collision mitigation design standard. In an email to the News, Cathy Jackson, director of planning administration for Yale’s Office of Facilities, said that the University has since been working to “[apply] bird safety measures to more of its existing buildings.”

Jackson added that a growing market for bird-friendly products has helped make more options available. Bird-friendly windows involve fritted, or patterned glass that increases their visibility to wildlife. Recently, safety film has also introduced designs that break up reflections.

The building standards have impacted a suite of buildings across campus. 87 Trumbull St. — the University’s latest home for its economics department — featured all bird-friendly windows in its design. The Peabody Museum — which opens later this spring — incorporated fritted windows into its renovation plans as well.

According to Jackson, the Office of Facilities has piloted the use of a patterned safety film at the School of Nursing and just wrapped up a mitigation project on the Collection Studies Center at West Campus, a building with “high collision levels.” She added that the Bird-Friendly Initiative helped track some of their initial mitigation projects to assess their success.

The initiative has also brought changes to the School of Management.

In an email to the News, School of Management media relations director Rosalind D’Eugenio explained that a 2022 pilot project successfully tested the effects of bird-friendly film on one side of the building. During a later eight-week monitoring period, the treated face reported no collisions.

Since then, the school has settled on a horizontal-striped pattern that “will maintain the aesthetic of the Evans Hall building design” and “reduce the heat load of the building.” The retrofitting project will begin once “the weather allows for another installation.”

Zyskowski said that the bird-friendly retrofitting projects at both Evans Hall and the West Campus buildings have already started paying dividends as these buildings have seen a significant collision reduction. Similarly, new university building projects that used bird-friendly glass, such as 87 Trumbull St., have reported “zero mortality” thus far, per Zyskowski.

“What’s really exciting is we’ve made a lot of progress in getting some of the worst buildings — in terms of bird kills — retrofitted, and that progress and work continues,” Morris said.

Morris added that the Bird-Friendly Building Initiative plans to release its data analysis in a publication later this summer.

Jackson said that inexperience was one of the construction industry’s initial challenges to addressing bird-building collisions. However, that changed after a “watershed moment” in 2019 when New York City adopted Local Law 15, requiring buildings to use bird-friendly materials on their exteriors.

Bird-building collisions have coincided with a decades-long decline in common bird species across North America. According to a study, the continent has seen the disappearance of roughly 3 billion birds — or 29 percent of the population — between 1970 and 2018; human development, pesticide use and deforestation could all be to blame.

The Yale Peabody Museum ornithology collection currently houses more than 152,000 bird specimens.

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The Yale chapter of the International Society of Tropical Foresters hosted its 30th annual conference at the School of the Environment on Feb. 2 and 3. Starting Friday morning and ending on Saturday, the hybrid, two-day event invited attendees to reflect on the challenges tropical forests face while turning an eye to their restoration and preservation. 

Nonprofit directors, economists, policymakers and researchers delivered talks on the current state of forest health and offered potential solutions from their work. The presentations were followed by networking opportunities, a poster presentation session and the conferral of their Innovation Prize Award.

“When you’re thinking about ecosystem restoration and conservation, it’s really so much of a holistic approach that we need to be taking,” event organizer Sophia Roberts ENV ’25 said. “It’s about everything that’s connected and being able to disseminate those co-benefits to the local community.”

Speakers at the event sounded the alarm on current rates of tropical forest loss.

Keynote speaker and Wildlife Conservation Society Executive Director Daniel Zarin explained that the majority of tropical forests could currently be compromised or lost. According to the Forest Landscape Integrity Index — a measure of a forest’s overall well-being produced by data aggregation and algorithms — almost 60 percent of all the world’s forests are in either medium or low integrity, meaning that they are partially or completely destroyed. Zarin added that these losses would come with steep costs to ecosystem resilience and biodiversity.

Recent destruction of the Amazon — the world’s largest tropical forest — has accounted for some of these declines, speakers said.

Ane Alencar, panelist and director of the Amazon Environmental Research Institute, noted that Brazil is among the top ten countries that have reported the greatest tropical forest loss.

Alencar added that almost half of the nation’s domestic emissions have been related to deforestation, primarily related to illegal logging, land use, agriculture and mining.

She said that her research suggested that rural areas contributed to roughly 68 percent of all emissions.

Other presentations directed attention to the scope of agriculture-driven tropical deforestation. According to Peter Umunay, senior environmental specialist at the Global Environmental Facility, commodity and resource-driven cultivation has cost 6.4 to 8.8 million hectares of tropical forest cover each year — an area that falls roughly between the size of West Virginia and Indiana, and accounts for up to 83 percent of all annual tropical forest loss.

Though forest declines continue, speakers also said that the past year has experienced some noteworthy slowing in deforestation rates — many of which were enabled by stronger government intervention. Alencar praised the “strategic enforcement” of conservation laws under Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s presidency, which she said has seen a 50 percent reduction in deforestation over this past year.

“We need one thing, that is political will, to [stop deforestation], and we need engagement of society and also [the] private sector to support that,” Alencar said.

Speaker Kimberly Carlson noted that the same trend had happened in Indonesia, though recent decreases in deforestation rates might be attributed to a wider range of factors. Carlson traced the nation’s regulation efforts to a 2011 moratorium on new permits for palm oil, mining and other agricultural activities across one-third of the tropical forest.

However, these measures also coincided with new land-tenure security programs and a reduction in palm oil prices — all of which could have “cumulatively” resulted in a more significant drop-off, Carlson explained.

In their solutions to current conservation efforts, speakers presented visions of public policy coupled with financial incentives.

In the absence of a “silver [bullet]” for supporting forests, Zarin added that preserving healthy tropical forests will require as much financing as the carbon offsets market. Per Zarin, high-integrity forests still remain at risk of destruction and often lack the necessary resources to protect them.

Unlike carbon offsets, which must definitively yield results, financing forests could operate like healthcare, where money is spent not just for prevention but also proactive support, Zarin said. In this model, money would go towards restoration but also into interventions that could slow the degradation. Zarin noted that 750 million hectares of high-integrity forest are still unprotected by the market, with no finances dedicated towards their preservation, leaving them at risk of disappearing.

“Today, there is no clear-cut blueprint for tackling social issues about the environment,” Frederick Addai ENV ’23 said. “We just need to keep on learning and engaging with people to collaborate on how best to go about with the world.”The International Society of Tropical Foresters was founded in 1950.

Correction, Feb. 12: This article has been corrected to fix several misspellings of Kimberly Carlson’s last name.

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As carbon offsets grow in popularity, the University has also made an entrance into the market over recent years. Starting in 2020, the University retired 47,604 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent to reach its emissions target that was set for the University to meet in 2005. Yale has continued acquiring credits — tradable carbon-eliminating permits — for every year it fails to meet that standard. Last year, it retired 47,282 metric tons of CO2 equivalent. While its 2025 Sustainability Plan acknowledges that such offsets are stopgap measures, it anticipates that these measures will continue helping the University reach its emissions goals.

According to Amber Garrard, director of the Office of Sustainability, the University started exploring the use of offsets after setting its emissions reduction goals in 2005. Under the plan, the University aimed for a 43 percent reduction in 2005 emissions levels by 2020.

“Each year, if our annual reductions are not below our 2020 target, we retire additional offsets from our existing portfolio to maintain that commitment,” Garrard wrote in an email to the News.

Carbon offsets are purchasable certificates that allow industries to compensate for their emissions by investing in removal efforts elsewhere. Once registered and verified by third-party programs, they can be purchased as credits that are withdrawn from the market — or “retired” — following acquisition.

Kenneth Gillingham, a professor of environmental and energy economics at the School of the Environment, explained that carbon credits promise to “[reduce] emissions at a lower cost” compared to pursuing more expensive reductions initiatives. By purchasing carbon credits, industries temporarily reduce emissions as they transition toward longer-term capital investments.

Critics of carbon offsets have objected to what they say are misleading accounting practices in certain unregulated markets where carbon credits are claimed to be generated even in the absence of any real change. A study published in March by researchers from Yale and the University of California, Berkeley, found that 11 percent of all carbon offsets ever issued had overstated their climate-saving benefits.

The University’s current carbon offset portfolio has focused on projects that capture or reduce methane emissions.

As the second-most abundant greenhouse gas, methane is over 28 times more potent than CO2, though it also degrades significantly faster. Agriculture, fossil fuels and landfill waste are the largest contributors to human-caused methane emissions.

One of Yale’s six methane projects is the Laurelbrook Farm in East Canaan, which composts its manure by adding wood chips and frequently aerating it. Doing so reduces the methane emissions that would have been otherwise produced by regular anaerobic breakdown.

The University’s five other carbon offset sites are landfills.

At both the Greater Lebanon Refuse Authority Landfill and Greenville County Landfill — another two of the University’s project sites — methane reduction has involved setting the gas on fire. Per James Zendek, Lebanon Landfill’s senior staff engineer, the largest source of landfill methane comes from leachate — the wet liquid, or runoff, that flows through solid waste.

By collecting that methane, the landfill can convert the greenhouse gas into a potential energy source. Steve Pineiro, Greenville County Landfill regional operations supervisor, explained that pipes drilled throughout the landfill pile help funnel the gas to an engine for burning.

Pineiro added that the quantity of collected methane gas diminishes as the landfill ages. At its peak, methane from the Greenville County Landfill had produced enough electricity to power 2,500 homes. The site has collected 2,000 to 3,000 tons of methane annually since 2013.

According to Zendek, methane conversion to electricity produces significantly less CO2 but is not entirely emissions-free.

“[The gas] still has emissions, but they’re much, much cleaner than if you just let the gas go to the environment without running it through that layer first,” Zendek told the News.

Garrard wrote that current offset projects underwent a research and vetting process that involved faculty, staff, students and administrators across the University. The University’s five-person Carbon Offsets Program Oversight Committee worked alongside an eleven-member Carbon Offsets Working Group to evaluate project proposals, visit sites and make recommendations. Per Garrard, the process accounted for factors such as costs, permanence, campus proximity and environmental justice.

As outlined in the University’s Climate Action Strategy, carbon offsets are intended to “supplement, not replace” on-campus emissions reductions.

Gillingham said that one “downside” of offsets is “additionality” or the idea that purchasing carbon credits is not enough to prove that emissions reductions “would not have happened otherwise.” Even if investment in reforestation does lead to reduced emissions, he explained, it is impossible to ensure that the offsets were solely responsible for them.

However, Gillingham added that the offsets market is expected to continue growing. Though global demand for carbon offsets dipped in 2022, supply will likely increase through 2050. The offsets market is poised to grow from $2 billion to roughly $250 billion over the coming decades as industries seek to decarbonize.

Under the University’s current target for net-zero emissions by 2035, it will likely have to increase its reliance on offsets. Turning the campus completely carbon-free is expected to cost $1.5 billion across the next three decades.

“Based on current projections, we will need to retire significantly more offsets at that point in time to reach that target,” Garrard wrote. “As part of our larger decarbonization strategy, we will be working to reassess our approach to offsets.”

The first attempt at carbon offsetting started in 1997 after the release of the United Nations’ Kyoto Protocol.

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The Conference of the Parties — the supreme climate governing body formed by the United Nations’ Framework Convention on Climate Change treaty, or COP — is holding its 28th annual summit. The conference, which began Nov. 30 and will run until Dec. 12, brings UN member states from almost 200 countries together to refine climate action plans.

“If you take a look at the universities who will be present at COP, I think Yale really punches above its weight,” Paul Simons, a senior fellow at the Jackson School of Global Affairs who teaches courses on energy and climate change policy, told the News.

According to Simons, many of Yale’s “top-level experts” and policy researchers are attending this year’s conference, including Dan Esty LAW ’86, a professor of environmental law and trade policy at the Law School, and Anthony Leiserowitz, the director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and a professor at the School of the Environment. Julie Zimmerman, the vice provost for Planetary Solutions and a professor at the School of Environment, is also at COP28. Representatives from the Yale Emerging Climate Leaders, a group of young climate professionals from the Global South, are also attending. 

Additionally, many students are participating in the conference. These include 11 undergraduate representatives who are part of the Yale Student Environmental Coalition. These undergraduate representatives have joined other stakeholders to help address climate issues. 

Peter Boyd, a resident fellow at the Center for Business and the Environment, said that many graduate students are also at the conference. Boyd told the News he is even having roughly 10 students enrolled in his “International Organizations and Conferences” class at the School of the Environment visit the conference as part of the course.

Yale students at COP28

Peyton Meyer ’24 is one of the 11 undergraduates representing the Yale Student Environment Coalition. For Meyer, COP28 gives students the opportunity to engage with climate policymakers, world leaders, NGO staff and other students from around the globe at one of the most important international climate conferences. 

Meyer also said that students who receive official “observer” status can attend most of the events at COP28.

“These include side events at pavilions run by various organizations and countries throughout the venue on a ton of different climate-related topics, COP presidency events on the daily themes like health or finance, and multilateral negotiation sessions with country delegates,” Meyer told the News. 

Meyer gave a presentation at the Higher Education Pavilion on the intersection of climate change and mental health as a part of the Yale Planetary Solutions Series, a Yale project that seeks to raise awareness about climate issues and spark innovative solutions.

Nevertheless, students cannot contribute to any negotiations between parties. 

“I’ve dreamed of attending a Conference of the Parties for a long time. I keep describing it as like Disneyland for climate activists,” Rose Hansen ’25, an environmental studies major and co-president of the Yale Student Environmental Coalition, told the News. “They are just thousands and thousands of really brilliant, really hard-working people all in the same place.”

Hansen, who works with World Bank Director of Global Resources Valerie Hickey and Coral Vita, a coral regeneration start-up, said that Yalies at the event had formed a “really active and enriched network” to support each other.

For Marco Marsans ’24, getting to participate in COP28 has confirmed his plans to dedicate his life to climate change. He said he believes the knowledge he has gained from the conference will help him pinpoint how and where he can do the most good.

Marsans also mentioned how “exhilarating” it is to attend the conference as an undergraduate.

“You keep bumping into your idols,” he said. “I really wanted to meet Bill Gates — reading his book is what started me on this whole climate journey — and I’ve met him twice now, which has been deeply moving.”

Gates, former CEO of Microsoft and author of “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need,” is just one of many philanthropists attending and contributing to COP this year. 

A one-of-a-kind conference

According to Boyd, this year’s climate conference may have many firsts. The UN expects over 70,000 attendees, an increase of over 20,000 from last year. Boyd also noted that more private corporations, indigenous people and youth groups are participating in the talks.

Hansen said that this is the first conference to have a Global Stocktake — a comprehensive, collective inventory of all carbon emissions. Mandated by the 2015 Paris Agreement, this assessment was established to help countries set future carbon budgets and inform their future climate goals.

Both Boyd and Simons voiced concerns over the current pace of climate action and expressed doubt on the feasibility of reaching the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement’s goals. 

“We have to realize that we’re not as far ahead on progress as we should be,” Boyd told the News.

Under the 2015 Paris Agreement, 194 states pledged to limit average global temperatures to two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and ideally to no more than 1.5 degrees. However, a recent UN emissions gap report, which was issued weeks in advance of COP28, suggested that, at the current rate, temperatures could increase to roughly three degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. According to the report, greenhouse gas emissions reached a record high in 2022, and states would have to cut their carbon emission by 28 to 42 percent by 2030 in order to meet the Paris Agreement’s goals.

Simons said that many of the member nations’ “high levels of ambition” have not translated to significant execution. Even though nearly 90 percent of global emissions were accounted for by net-zero targets from last year’s conference, he said that the world’s total emissions have yet to peak.

The report also found that per capita emissions in the U.S. and Russia have risen since 2020. As of 2018, all the existing mines and fields were projected to produce enough coal, oil and natural gas over their lifetimes to emit 3.5 times the world’s total allotted carbon budget under the 1.5-degree Celsius increase temperature scenario.

Debate over the future of fossil fuels

Several Yale faculty members attending COP28 told the News that they expected the debate over fossil fuel phaseout to take center stage in the discussions. 

The COP28 host nation, United Arab Emirates, is among the world’s top ten oil producers and generates an average 3.2 million barrels of petroleum a day. 

“The greatest challenge is finding a middle ground between two powerful groups: those who consider fossil fuels as an inevitable part of the medium-term energy mix and those who are pushing for an extremely rapid phase-down of all oil and gas consumption,” Kenneth Gillingham, a professor of energy economics at the School of the Environment, wrote in an email to the News.

Still, Boyd also said that it might be a “tall ask” to make states end fossil fuel extraction given the “interests in the room.”

“It’s sad but not surprising that there are people that could be using the gathering to sustain the old way,” Boyd said. “But I’m hoping now that it’s out in the open, there are enough loud voices to talk about what needs to be done.”

COP28 Chair Sultan al-Jaber has drawn criticism from environmental groups. As head of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, he has claimed that fossil fuel companies must have a part in the sustainable transition. During the first days of the conference, Jaber opened with calls to phase down fossil fuel production, rather than advocating to eliminate fossil fuel use.

Jaber’s efforts to fold the oil industry into climate talks “has not really been attempted before,” said Simons. Despite the presence of gas and oil executives at this year’s conference, Simons added that the UAE has also boasted a “strong track record” of investments in renewables around the world. 

Simons and Boyd both emphasized that fossil fuel phaseout targets are inseparable from efforts to accelerate the rollout of sustainable technologies. 

Though many news outlets cover its international dealmaking, COP28 offers an equally important opportunity for private industries in the corporate, philanthropic and civil society sectors to showcase their work, said Simons.

“I feel like this COP has really taught me a lot about how to work with […] people who might not immediately line your interests,” Hansen said. “In this transition, we have to build bridges […] and this transition is going to take all of us.”

Berlin hosted the first Conference of the Parties in 1995.

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With its second year in operation, the West Campus Farm — a community-managed space led by farm manager Jordan Williams — is connecting researchers and students through tending to the farm. Though still in its infancy, the growing pilot program has been teaching the community about farming, sustainable food systems and responsible land management.

“I’m just trying to make sure that this is more of a public space, more of a welcoming space,” Williams told the News. “Part of what I’m trying to do is make [the farm] more accessible and to make people aware that it’s here.”

With 44 raised garden beds, the farm offers a small plot for any hobbyist gardener willing to take care of it. Williams said that the farm follows a community-supported agriculture model, where members invest their time in helping with the space’s upkeep in exchange for shared harvests.

Since joining the farm, Williams has grounded his gardening practices in an ethos of permaculture. He said that permaculture, which prioritizes responsible stewardship of the land and resource use, has helped establish the farm as an example of sustainable practices. Crops are grown pesticide-free and fertilized by compost, fish emulsions or mycorrhizae. 

Williams added that the farm’s focus on crop rotation and organic gardening has helped remind community members about the relationship between food sovereignty and health in an age of increasingly destructive agricultural practices.

“Having a relationship with the ingredients that you’re using and growing your own food, is really essential to people’s health,” Williams told the News. “It’s empowering to grow your own food.”

According to Williams, the lot has existed for almost a decade. Christelle Ramos, assistant director of communications for Yale Hospitality, wrote that prior to 2021, the lot — formerly known as the Yale Landscape Lab — was loosely managed by a small group of West Campus students and staff volunteers. Yale Hospitality brought Williams into the position last year to help coordinate community events and oversee maintenance, per Ramos.

Williams said that he has sought to increase the farm’s presence on the 136-acre campus. Over his first year as farm manager, he has created a GroupMe, email lists and weekly volunteer sessions for anyone interested in helping. Volunteers with garden beds can enter the space to work at any time of the day.

“The vision for the farm is centered on fostering community engagement and supporting various educational initiatives,” Ramos wrote an email to the News. “We aim to create a space to uplift and support the community—where nursing students and faculty members can take breaks to recharge, spend quality time, and even put their knowledge into practice.”

Williams said his emphasis on community-building and diversity has extended to the farm’s gardening philosophy. During a tour of the lot, he pointed to the heirloom tomatoes growing alongside black-eyed peas and mini cucumbers. Sorghum stalk brushed against corn husks in the greenhouse.

The space is also home to a handful of more lesser-known species, such as ground cherries, horsetail and burdock. A sixth-generation farmer, Williams has also introduced okra and Gungo peas that pay homage to his roots in Jamaica, Georgia and Alabama.

“A weed is just a plant that we don’t know what to do with,” Williams said. “But to me there’s no such thing as a weed. Every plant has a use.”

The harvest is not large enough to regularly supply the menus of the West Campus cafe, which serves roughly two hundred diners each day. However, Williams noted that some of the crops occasionally are featured in the cafe’s specialty farm-to-table dishes. The cafe has even used the farm’s purple sweet potatoes in fudge brownies and used a couple pounds of harvested blueberries to make jam. Williams explained that he often leaves the harvest for community members to take.

Nursing students, researchers and staff members are also invited to engage in a different kind of experimentation at the farm which is across the parking lot from the nursing school and science labs.

Molly Skinner-Day NUR ’25, a School of Nursing student, joined the farm during her first year and said that she rekindled her passion for gardening in the process. This year, she cared for a garden bed by planting butterfly seed mix, escarole, lettuce, parsley and kale. She added that the reward of spending time in nature and with others has led her to consistently return to the farm.

“For our schedules, [visiting the farm is] really tough,” Skinner-Day said. “But sometimes just being able to be out for an hour or even less is really helpful.”

Despite the successes of this year, Williams spoke about the challenges of transforming the space. Given West Campus’ seven-mile distance from New Haven, he said there has been difficulty in “building a community from scratch.” He has continued recruiting new volunteers to ensure the farm can “accommodate all the different needs from different people.”

The farm has also contended with unwanted visitors — voles and rabbits — and grappled with the effects of climate change. According to Williams, gardeners this year had to “adapt” to a dry spring and abnormally rainy summer. He explained that even small shifts in seasonal patterns can often compromise plant immune systems, making them more vulnerable to white flies or diseases like powdery mildew.

Members of the farm have since cleared their garden beds for the season, but the work does not stop. Williams said he has started preparing the seed ordering list and planning for next spring. Skinner-Day said she is looking forward to trying out new vegetables and growing garlic in the interim.

“Being a farmer is also being a scientist,” Williams said.

Yale purchased West Campus from Bayer Pharmaceuticals in 2007.

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In a report released on Oct. 12, a team of former School of the Environment students shared research reimagining the future of disaster recovery through clean energy. The study, conducted in partnership with the Connecticut Green Bank — an organization that helps finance green energy projects — assessed the financial feasibility of integrating sustainable technology into environmental emergency relief centers. Though developing clean energy infrastructure remains expensive, the report concluded that federal funding and local incentives can make the renewable energy transition less daunting than expected.

“This research has helped jumpstart a discussion — not only of how to customize these technologies to fit a local resilience need but also some of the creative financing tools we may seek to deploy across the state,” Sara Harari, Connecticut Green Bank’s director of innovation, wrote in an email to the News.

The project focused on “green resilience hubs” — public facilities that provide immediate relief to local communities during natural disasters — and the ways in which current policy might make them more financially viable. By drawing on data from buildings on the Connecticut Green Bank’s campus, researchers developed a model that showed the potential for outfitting these facilities with renewable energy sources.

The report concluded that the current clean energy financing offers “enormous economic opportunity for both communities and developers.” It argued that green resilience hubs are not just fiscally feasible to develop, but can generate year-round revenue during normal operations through energy bill savings and excess energy sales.

In an email to the News, Sarah Gledhill ENV ’23 explained that the bonus incentives under 2022’s federal Inflation Reduction Act “unlock capital that can be invested in resiliency.” The report found that government policies or utility agreements — many of which provide tax credits and compensation for extra generated energy — can make clean energy investment significantly more affordable. Gledhill added that these benefits could allow investors to do more than otherwise possible, such as adding a battery system to a planned solar project.

Under the Inflation Reduction Act, certain renewable energy facilities in low-income communities can qualify for a 10-20 percentage-point increase in investment tax credits. The law also provides up to a 30 percent tax credit for certain renewable energy projects and promises to create enough renewable infrastructure to generate up to 1.8 gigawatts of electricity for various underserved communities.

However, the report found that battery technology remains a “major hurdle for achieving enhanced resilience.” Simulated pairings of solar panel and battery configurations showed that the economic returns progressively fell with increasing battery size. Solar panels are currently “subsidizing” the costs of battery storage, per the report.

Since solar panels only capture sunlight at certain times of the day, lithium batteries help store electrical energy and release it when a building’s energy demand increases. Though lithium prices have significantly fallen from their record highs over the past year, the market remains volatile due to the difficulty of its extraction and rising demands.

The report also identified areas for policy improvement as severe weather becomes more common. For the researchers, the work was a reminder of shortcomings in current disaster response legislation and the difficulty of assigning a price to climate resiliency.

“Our policy around natural disaster response is fundamentally flawed,” coauthor Maggie Thompson ENV ’23 told the News. “The value of resilience needs to be incorporated into our policy frameworks in a more proactive way.”

Thompson added that increasingly frequent extreme weather events have shifted pressure to developing more preventive measures. Current markets and policies should better account for the value of resilience and social costs of carbon emissions in their pricing, she explained. According to Thompson, relief funds from the Federal Emergency Management Agency primarily support communities after disasters.

In the 2022 fiscal year, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, spent nearly $3 billion on climate resilience projects through its Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities and Flood Mitigation Assistance programs.

Both Thompson and Gledhill explained that the report was inspired as part of their graduate capstone project. They reached out to the Connecticut Green Bank and worked afterward with faculty, bank experts and the Yale Center for Business and the Environment to refine their models.

“The process was both incredibly challenging and rewarding,” Gledhill wrote.

The researchers hope their findings might provide a blueprint for any community hoping to develop their own green resilience hubs. The authors hosted a webinar on Nov. 3 sharing their findings and answering questions. They also created a video that walked viewers through their financial model.

Harari added that the Connecticut Green Bank’s individual case study will likely inspire other projects in the future. 

“[The students] developed a framework and methodology that not only advances the discussion of resiliency hubs in Connecticut, but also can be used as a template across the country,” Harari wrote.

Thompson said that the team’s model is just the starting point. The study did not incorporate the social impacts of burning fossil fuels, or envision how financing might look if more preventative funding were available under FEMA. Thompson also hopes that future researchers might develop a tool to make the study’s findings more accessible to policymakers.

The Connecticut Green Bank expressed optimism for continued collaboration with the University.

“As we expand our mission to encompass other forms of environmental infrastructure, such as water, agricultural lands, and waste, we look to the deep expertise on these topics from the Yale School of the Environment faculty and students,” Harari wrote.

The Connecticut Green Bank is the nation’s first green bank.

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The Yale Environment 360 Magazine — E360, for short — is an independent, online publication dedicated to environmental journalism. Drawing on work from journalists and climate experts, the magazine features pieces that explore a range of environmental issues and draws roughly five million visitors each year.

“I think e360 is wonderful because it reports not just about [climate change] but about the entire range of environmental conditions around the world,” Timothy Gregoire, a Yale School of the Environment professor, wrote in an email to the News.

According to Roger Cohn, executive editor of E360, the magazine’s emphasis on the “big discussions” of global environmental issues has helped it strike a balance between in-depth exploration and breadth of content. He noted that E360 articles have previously been featured on Apple and YahooNews, but also have an “influential” readership, many of whom are “decision makers” and policy experts on the environmental issues themselves.

Oswald Schmitz, a Yale School of the Environment professor, added that E360’s style of long-form journalism and analysis also encourages its authors to provide extra context alongside the environmental topics covered by popular media. The pieces, Schmitz said, give the broader public a “firsthand understanding” of the important environmental issues.

“We make sure that [the pieces are] written and edited in a way that the articles are accessible to a general audience,” Cohn told the News. “You don’t need to be an academic […] to follow our articles.” 

Regular contributors to the magazine include reporters Bill McKibben, Elizabeth Kolbert and Jim Robbins.

Cohn emphasized the importance of “good, science-based reporting” in E360’s environmental coverage, especially in the face of climate change and the rise of misinformation. He said that articles undergo a rigorous fact-checking procedure prior to publication, in which student researchers and interns inspect the accuracy of every sentence before pieces get posted to the site.

Rose Nagele, a graduate student at the School of the Environment and fact-checker, added that the proofreading process involves verifying any information within the piece but also confirming the representation accuracy of the sources within the piece.

“I think we need to support [the magazine] in this day and age of alternative facts,” Schmitz said. “I think having an organization like Yale E360 is present and essential, especially in this day of misinformation.”

Though E360 still bears the University’s name, the magazine is editorially independent. Cohn said that the publication receives slight funding from the University, but largely sustains itself from independent donations.

The Ford Foundation, BAND Foundation, Heinz Endowments and Climate and Land Use Alliance are listed on the website as some of the magazine’s donors.

E360’s operations are currently housed in the School of Environment. The publication also retains a faculty advisory committee to maintain communication with the University. Schmitz, who is a committee member, said that the ongoing dialogue between the University and publication helps both sides exchange “opinion,” guidance and gain a deeper understanding of environmental journalism’s challenges in the process.

Cohn and Schmitz said that the proposal for an environment-focused magazine came from former School of Environment Dean Gus Speth, who sought to increase the University’s role in promoting environmental discussions. University funding from then-University President Rick Levin helped kickstart the magazine, which began publishing online in 2008.

Since then, E360 has provided insight into a cross-section of environmental issues. Cohn recalled that some of the magazine’s most significant journalistic coverage includes its careful investigative work into a slew of environmentalist murder cases across Honduras, Cambodia and South Africa. He also pointed to the impact of “Warriors of Qiugang,” a 2011 Oscar-nominated documentary that the magazine co-filmed to chronicle the Chinese village’s struggle against the polluting chemical factory.

For Nagele, one of E360’s most powerful stories includes an account of the chronic flooding faced by Eastwick, a neighborhood in her own home city of Philadelphia.

Some of the magazine’s previous work has garnered awards from the Online New Association in 2009, 2010,and 2011. “Levelling Appalachia,” a documentary about coal mining’s effects on the American Appalachia region, also won the National Magazine Award for Digital Media and the National Press Photographers Association’s “Best of Photojournalism” award in 2010.

“Stories are important for understanding the world around us,” Nagele said.The magazine saw roughly 1.137 million viewers over the past three months.

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Kicking off last Thursday, the two-day event offered a survey of the latest renewable energy developments and gave attendees a sampling of recent technology and economics behind them. The conference included keynote speeches, panels and networking opportunities for its participants.

“I think this has been a really great convening of different organizations from all different sectors that are excited about propelling this [clean energy] space,” Brennan Wong SOM ’25 told the News.

The event was part of the Yale New Haven Climate and Energy Summit, which also included the Yale Climate, Environment, and Economic Growth Conference and the launch of ClimateHaven, an innovation hub focused on helping green start-ups.

CBEY’s Executive Director, Stuart DeCew, told the News that the conference, organized by the Yale Clean Energy Collaborative which focuses on making sure that activities around clean energy on campus have resources and a platform to share opportunities, drew over 700 attendees. 

“There were 25 different organizations and companies that were attending and over a dozen early-stage ventures in the innovation showcase who were talking about their work,” DeCrew said “It just goes to show, the community is rallying in a direction that really gives us an opportunity to meet the goal [of reducing carbon emissions] that scientists, policymakers and advocates set.”

This year’s conference theme was “Aligning Innovation, Equity, and Investment for the Clean Energy Future.”

DeCew explained that the two past conferences were held in the spring and fall of 2022.

“We’re seeing four times the number of organizations [this year],” DeCew said. “We also didn’t have an innovation showcase last year.”

At the showcase, students had opportunities to connect with firms and climate start-ups, including  Deloitte, energy company EDF Energy and environmental consulting company WSP.

Julie Zimmerman, vice provost for planetary solutions, kicked off the event by affirming Yale’s commitment to helping with the energy transition. 

Zimmerman said that the event represented the collaboration between the University and community partners to “catalyze, design, implement and iterate solutions” to the current environmental challenges.

Yale currently has a pledge to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2035 and to achieve zero actual emissions in 2050. However, the University has faced criticism from students for continuing to invest in the fossil fuel industry. 

In 2022, the EJC submitted a complaint to Connecticut Attorney General William Tong claiming that Yale’s investments in fossil fuels violated state law. Hundreds of Yale and Harvard students and alumni stormed the field during the Yale-Harvard game in 2019 to protest the universities’ investments in fossil fuels. 

According to reporting by the News at the time, as of April 2021, the Yale Investments Office estimated that $800 million of the University’s endowment was invested in fossil fuels. 

Thursday’s slate of events included a discussion panel by renewable energy leaders and financiers. Avangrid CEO Jose Antonio Miranda, during the panel, weighed in on recent troubles facing offshore wind farm projects, citing supply chain disruptions for the difficulties of feasibly financing large-scale renewable energy infrastructure. Though Miranda said that Avangrid’s offshore project has been “insulated” from these forces, other renewable energy giants such as Orsted had to write off plans for key wind farms earlier this month.

Despite these setbacks, other presenters spoke about the new challenges and opportunities provided by the transition to renewable energy. 

According to Andy Bowman, CEO of energy storage start-up Jupiter Power, construction of wind and solar energy farms in distant rural areas has “inverted” the entire grid system. Where, traditionally, generated energy took place in power plants on the outskirts of urban areas, renewably captured electricity must travel further to reach city centers and can overwhelm transmission lines, Bowman said.

To solve this, Bowman said that Jupiter Power’s battery storage would ease the current strain by discharging electricity during moments of high grid stress. The company currently provides about 1,000 megawatts of electricity each day — roughly enough to power between 460,000 and 900,000 homes in a year.

In addition to its emphasis on making use of IRA funds, the conference also explored issues of equity. Speakers focused on financing strategies that would make renewables economically competitive with natural gas, while others shared ways in which underprivileged communities could earn financial support to secure green infrastructure.

During a “Tech Talks” presentation on Friday, Yan Zhao — principal engineer at GTI, a nonprofit research center — spoke about the organization’s efforts to test the effects of blended hydrogen on household appliances. Hydrogen blending, a process in which hydrogen gas reserves power homes through existing natural gas pipelines, Zhao said, would provide low-carbon energy alternatives without the need for new infrastructure. 

Under the Justice40 Initiative, the Department of Energy announced it is aiming to deliver at least 40 percent of the “overall benefits from certain federal investments” to disadvantaged communities. With this plan, Zhao said, GTI Energy’s hydrogen blending project would deliver energy to more disadvantaged neighborhoods.

“I just really appreciate that focus on the equity aspect of the energy transformation,” Jennifer Lovett, a conference attendee, told the News. “There’s a much larger portion of our community that is not able to take advantage of those same [clean energy] opportunities.”

Wong added that the recent transition toward more renewable energy offered a “new opportunity to think about inclusive growth more differently.” He said that the conference helped build on the interest in clean energy he had developed during his career in consulting.

Over the last year, the share of renewable technologies – geothermal, hydrogen and solar – in the world’s energy supply rose by 0.4 percent. Renewable energy is expected to account for 35 percent of global power by 2025, according to the International Energy Agency.

Saturday’s event also featured a reunion for members of the Financing and Deploying Clean Energy Certificate program, a 10-month online joint program between the School of Environment and School of Management, as members of the program were invited to campus for the conference.

“This is my first time to campus,” Lovett, a member of the FDCE program cohort from 2022, told the News. “It’s just amazing to see how many people are here, all focused on financing and deploying clean energy.”

DeCew told the News that the conference is especially important at this time because this year marks “a tremendous amount of investment” in renewable energy, especially since the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022.

He said that the industry is growing fast, partly because clean energy is becoming cheaper to deploy than fossil fuels. DeCrew said that the United States is at the beginning of the largest industrial transformation since the New Deal, providing an opportunity to benefit communities that have long been underinvested in and marginalized in past years. 

“I think that there is a unique period of time here,” he said. “There is a time to act. And this decade is absolutely critical.”

The Yale Center for Business and the Environment was founded in 2006.

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