School Notes: School of the Environment
March/April 2011

Addressing the impact of climate change

NBC News, in partnership with the National Science Foundation, Discover magazine, and Yale, held a town hall event on “The Changing Planet: The Impact on Lives and Values” at Kroon Hall in January. Former NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw moderated a panel discussion on climate change’s impact on economic opportunity and competitiveness, human health, youth, and moral and religious values. The panelists were Rajendra Pachauri, director of the Yale Climate and Energy Institute; Katharine Hayhoe, research associate professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas Tech University; Billy Parish, cofounder and president of Solar Mosaic; and Linda Fisher, vice president of safety, health, and environment and chief sustainability officer at DuPont. The audience was surveyed on their attitudes toward climate change by a team led by Tony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication.

Singaporean, Yale scholars discuss urban development

For the first time in history, more people are living in urban areas than anywhere else. By 2050, the world’s urban population is expected to nearly double to 6.3 billion. This epochal shift in where people live presents significant challenges to the way urban societies are designed and for how natural resources are managed. Dense cities are plagued by air and water pollution, traffic congestion, heat islands, social problems related to overcrowding, inadequate open spaces, and a concentration of public health problems.

Scholars from Yale University and the National University of Singapore (NUS) recently discussed the implications of high-density urban development on environmental sustainability in panel discussions on “Challenges and Opportunities for Sustainability Through High-Density Urban Development” that took place simultaneously at NUS and Yale’s Kroon Hall. NUS School of Design and Environment professors presented new research on high-density development and its effects on a host of issues related to transportation, public spaces, and pollution. Marian Chertow ’81MPPM, ’00PhD, associate professor of industrial environmental management at the environment school, moderated the Yale panel, which included university planner Laura Cruickshank, who is responsible for directing campus planning and the architectural design of capital projects on the central campus; Alan Plattus ’76, professor of architecture and urbanism at the Yale University School of Architecture who also directs the school’s China Studio; and Colleen Murphy-Dunning, director of both the Hixon Center for Urban Ecology and the Urban Resources Initiative at F&ES. At NUS, Karen Seto, associate professor in the urban environment at F&ES, moderated a simultaneous discussion that included distinguished faculty from that university.

College hoops results mirror nature

A college basketball team’s wins and losses bear a remarkable similarity to life and death in the wild, according to environment school researchers in the journal PloS ONE.The researchers treated teams as species and analyzed the win-loss records of the 327 NCAA Division I men’s basketball teams from 2004 to 2008 (approximately 20,000 games). They concluded that few teams win a lot of games and most win a few; and similarly, from tropical forests to river floodplains, few species dominate and most species are scarce. The researchers hope that their analysis will deepen understanding of what is happening in natural communities and what society needs to know for managing biodiversity. The paper, “Universal ecological patterns in college basketball communities,” was submitted by F&ES professors Mark Bradford, Oswald Schmitz, and David Skelly and postdoctoral associate Robert Warren.