School Notes: School of the Environment
May/June 2015

F&ES offers online courses to alumni

This semester the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies for the first time made online courses available to alumni of the school. F&ES alums from five continents enrolled in two six-week courses: Tropical Forest Restoration in Human-Dominated Landscapes or Himalayan Diversities: Environment, Livelihoods, and Culture. In addition to weekly lectures featuring F&ES faculty and guest experts, participants were able to communicate directly with instructors during regular online meetings. “Like many others at Yale, we are very interested in exploring the opportunities brought by the world of online education,” said F&ES dean Peter Crane. “We already offer several courses with integrated technology to students. Offering these online courses to our own alumni is the next logical step in making these valuable opportunities available to a wider audience.”

Some metals face future supply risks

In a new paper, a team of F&ES researchers assessed the “criticality” of all 62 metals on the Periodic Table of Elements, providing key insights into which materials might become more difficult to find in the coming decades, which ones will exact the highest environmental costs, and which ones simply cannot be replaced as components of vital technologies. During the past decade, sporadic shortages of metals needed to create a wide range of high-tech products have inspired attempts to quantify the criticality of these materials, defined by the relative importance of the elements’ uses and their global availability. Their findings, accumulated over five years, suggest that many of the metals traditionally used in manufacturing, such as zinc, copper, and aluminum, show no signs of vulnerability. But other metals critical in the production of newer technologies—like smartphones, infrared optics, and medical imaging—may be harder to obtain in coming decades, said F&ES professor Thomas Graedel, lead author of the paper. The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, represents the first peer-reviewed assessment of the criticality of all of the planet’s metals and metalloids.