Featured series 
Tag: Environments & Sustainability
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Campus & Community
Energy Secretary and Nobelist Steven Chu to speak at Commencement
U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu, Nobel laureate in physics and a leader in the pursuit of alternative and renewable sources of energy, will be Harvard’s principal speaker at the Afternoon Exercises of Harvard’s 358th Commencement on June 4.
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Science & Tech
HMS presents award to Queen Noor, actor Edward Norton
The Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School (HMS) will present Queen Noor of Jordan and actor Edward Norton with the 2009 Global Environmental Citizen Award. The award, given annually, was developed to recognize those individuals who have been world leaders in protecting the global environment. The award will be presented…
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Science & Tech
Harvard turns wind into power
Watch your footing on those slippery winter sidewalks in Cambridge. But if you’re at the corner of Dunster and Mt. Auburn streets, take a minute to look up.
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Science & Tech
Mining exec: Coal vital to energy mix
The leader of one of the nation’s largest coal mining companies said Tuesday (Feb. 3) that coal is a vital part of the nation’s energy mix and that clean coal technology must be developed if the atmosphere is to stop warming.
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Health
Wilson receives NCSE’s Lifetime Achievement Award
Harvard professor Edward O. Wilson is the recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Council for Science and the Environment (NCSE).
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Science & Tech
‘Bicycle Environments’ takes HSPH and GSD students for a ride
At a time when the United States scrambles to resolve the country’s obesity epidemic, reduce greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution, and lessen dependency on foreign fossil fuels, this semester the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) and the Graduate School of Design (GSD) have launched an interdisciplinary course that tackles all three problems (and…
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Campus & Community
Q&A with Heather Henriksen
Gazette reporter Corydon Ireland recently had a conversation with Heather A. Henriksen, the director of Harvard’s new Office for Sustainability. Some highlights:
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Science & Tech
Idle computing power may ID candidate molecules for efficient solar panels
The world today uses enough power to illuminate 150 billion light bulbs for a year. According to some estimates, by 2050, demand will double, creating irreversible climate change without reductions in humanity’s carbon output.
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Science & Tech
Modeling the forest … and the trees
When building computer models of the ecosystems that cover the earth’s surface, it is tempting to incorporate sweeping generalizations in your calculations.
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Science & Tech
Climate options must include ‘all of the above’
Climate change has so much momentum behind it that “either/or” discussions about options are meaningless because it’ll take all we can do just to arrest carbon dioxide at levels double those in preindustrial times, a top climate scientist said Dec. 11.
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Science & Tech
Lovins: Protecting the environment is ‘a highly profitable enterprise’
As U.S. automakers plead for a government bailout, the next great automotive revolution is already under way, as Japanese automakers plan for a generation of lightweight cars that vastly increase mileage and whose advanced materials pay for themselves through dramatically streamlined assembly and smaller engines, an energy expert said Wednesday (Dec. 3).
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Nation & World
HLS students effect real change in law, policy clinic
In October 2007, the Kansas Department of Health and Environment made the unprecedented decision to deny a permit application for three new coal-fired generating units that together would emit 11 million tons of carbon dioxide into the air each year, citing greenhouse gas emissions and climate change as the reason for the denial.
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Campus & Community
FAS plan will slash greenhouse gas emissions
Without action to slow the release of greenhouse gases, Harvard biologist and oceanographer James McCarthy said last week, current projections indicate that Massachusetts in 2080 could resemble South Carolina in 2008: The Bay State would experience an average of 24 days over 100 degrees each summer and two solid months of temperatures above 90.
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Science & Tech
Woolsey: New technologies will make need for oil obsolete
Salt was once highly valued as a preservative for meat, but eventually a new technology — refrigeration — greatly reduced its value. Today, rather than a contentious commodity, salt is a humdrum condiment.
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Campus & Community
Harvard College Library is going green
The changes may not be immediately evident, but little by little, Harvard College Library (HCL) has been “going green” for years, even before the University’s newest commitment to sustainable practices.
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Science & Tech
Humanity may hold key for next Earth evolution
Human degradation of the environment has the potential to stall an ongoing process of planetary evolution, and even rewind the evolutionary clock to leave the planet habitable only by the bacteria that dominated billions of years of Earth’s history, Harvard geochemist Charles Langmuir said Thursday (Nov. 13).
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Campus & Community
Living in the green zone at ‘Rock Hall’
“Rock Hall” — the nickname for John D. Rockefeller Jr. Hall at Harvard Divinity School (HDS) — looks just like what it is: a spare, elegant building in the Modernist tradition.
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Science & Tech
Global warming predicted to hasten carbon release from peat bogs
Billions of tons of carbon sequestered in the world’s peat bogs could be released into the atmosphere in the coming decades as a result of global warming, according to a new analysis of the interplay between peat bogs, water tables, and climate change.
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Science & Tech
Wildlife Conservation Society chief outlines scenarios
From the complex social structure of elephant herds to the understanding that gorillas are susceptible to deadly “human” diseases to the impacts of climate change, conservationists are struggling to balance a suite of challenges unknown in past generations.
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Campus & Community
Effects of climate change vary greatly across plant families
Drawing on records dating back to the journals of Henry David Thoreau, scientists at Harvard University have found that different plant families near Walden Pond in Concord, Mass., have borne the effects of climate change in strikingly different ways. Some of the plant families hit hardest by global warming have included beloved species like lilies,…
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Health
New Guinea forest expands ‘observatory’
Just getting there takes hours of hot, sweaty hiking through lowland Papua New Guinea forests: three hours from the road to the base camp, then another seven to the site. That’s when the real work begins: tagging, measuring, and identifying 250,000 trees scattered over 50 hectares.
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Health
Global ‘chump change’ could provide biodiversity protection
Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson said the Earth’s major biological hot spots could be conserved for roughly $50 billion— an amount he termed “chump change” in a world of trillion-dollar financial bailouts.
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Science & Tech
GSD lecture and panel address ‘Designing for Sustainability’
Interest in green building is high at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), judging by the attendance at a lecture Tuesday (Oct. 21) in the Stubbins Room at Gund Hall. “Designing for Sustainability” was part of the popular and event-packed sustainability celebration instituted this year by Harvard President Drew Faust.
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Campus & Community
Students watch ‘An Inconvenient Truth’
It’s “an inconvenient truth,” but only about 25 people showed up for a Harvard screening Sunday (Oct. 19) of a film by the same name, which earned former Vice President Al Gore ’69 both an Oscar and a Nobel Peace Prize.
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Science & Tech
Controlling greenhouse gases, universities, individuals matter
From 1850 to 2000, the use of fossil fuels worldwide grew 140-fold, a practice that has gradually filled the Earth’s atmosphere with warming gases.
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Campus & Community
Alice Waters special guest at ‘smart food’ panel
In anticipation of Harvard’s upcoming sustainability celebration, a panel discussion on sustainable food took place Tuesday (Oct. 14) in the Faculty Room at University Hall. It began with a reception at which chefs doled out demitasse cups filled with a chowder of Cape Cod Bay scallops and Berkshires bacon, and wait-staff circulated trays of heavenly…
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Campus & Community
‘Green’ University celebration commences
If you flew over Harvard University in a small plane, you would see only a few outward and obvious signs of sustainability. You would see a glittering solar array on Shad Hall at Harvard Business School, a landscaped green roof on Gund Hall, home of Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, and you would see a…
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Campus & Community
Kuwait Program accepting grant proposals
The Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) has announced the 15th funding cycle for the Kuwait Program Research Fund, which is supported by the Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement of Sciences (KFAS). An HKS faculty committee will consider applications for one-year grants (up to $30,000) and larger grants for more extensive proposals to support advanced research by…
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Nation & World
HBS summit addresses future
The timing couldn’t have been worse, or perhaps better, for Harvard Business School’s (HBS) “Centennial Global Business Summit,” a three-day conference Oct. 12-14.
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Campus & Community
Smoking, burning solid fuels in homes in China projected to cause millions of deaths
If current levels of smoking and of burning biomass and coal fuel in homes continues in China, researchers estimate that between 2003 and 2033, 65 million deaths will be attributed to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and 18 million deaths to lung cancer, accounting for 19 percent and 5 percent of all deaths in that…