School Notes: School of the Environment
March/April 2008

Science of sustainability focus of Hawaii gathering

Marian Chertow, associate professor of industrial environmental management at the environment school, discussed her research in industrial ecology at a gathering of Hawaiian business leaders and 40 Yale alumni at the Pacific Club in Honolulu. Chertow studies how businesses cluster in places as varied as Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and mainland China. She has recently proposed a new approach to encouraging corporate greening: map the symbioses -- the waste, water and power exchanges, and other beneficial relationships -- that exist among businesses; show companies that they have already begun to build industrial ecosystems; then help them to do more of the same. "Business people just want to know the rules of the game so that they can go out and play hard," said Chertow. "If we have green rules, then they can go play the green game hard."

While researching the Campbell Industrial Park near Honolulu, Chertow's team found that eight companies were trading seven different kinds of materials among themselves. Yet companies weren't aware of what their neighbors were doing or how they might benefit from sharing resources. Chertow, who has found similar exchanges taking place in a large industrial complex in China, now leads Yale's new Program on Industrial Ecology in Developing Countries.

Agriculture changing chemistry of Mississippi River

Midwestern farming has injected the equivalent of five Connecticut River's worth of irrigation water annually into the Mississippi River during the past 50 years, as well as large amounts of carbon dioxide, according to a study published in January in Nature by researchers at Yale and Louisiana State universities.

"It's like the discovery of a new, large river being piped out of the corn belt," said Pete Raymond, lead author of the study and associate professor of ecosystem ecology at the environment school. "Agricultural practices have significantly changed the hydrology and chemistry of the Mississippi River." The researchers concluded that liming and farming practices, such as changes in tile drainage and crop type and rotation, are most likely responsible for the majority of the increase in water and carbon in the Mississippi River, which is North America's largest river. 

Raymond said that the research team analyzed 100-year-old data on the Mississippi River that had been warehoused at two New Orleans water treatment plants, and combined it with data on precipitation and water export. "A notable part of this finding is that changes in farming practices are more important than changes in precipitation to the increase in water being discharged into the river," he said.

The researchers used their data to demonstrate the effects of this excess water on the carbon content of the river, and argue that nutrients and pollution in the water are altering the chemistry of the Gulf of Mexico.

United States ranks 39th in 2008 environmental index

The United States placed 39th in a global list of countries ranked by environmental performance, according to the 2008 Environmental Performance Index (EPI), which was produced by F&ES professor Daniel C. Esty ’86JD and a team of environmental experts at Yale and Columbia universities.

The United States came in significantly behind other industrialized nations like the United Kingdom (14th) and Japan (21st), and ranked 11th in the Americas and behind 22 members of the European Union. The U.S. score reflects top-tier performance in several indicators, including provision of safe drinking water, sanitation, and forest management. But poor scores on greenhouse gas emissions and the impacts of air pollution on ecosystems dragged down the overall U.S. rank.

"The United States' performance indicates that the next administration must not ignore the ecosystem impacts of environmental, agricultural, energy, and water-management policies," said F&ES dean Gus Speth, who called the ranking "a national disgrace." The 2008 EPI ranks Switzerland at the top, followed by Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Costa Rica.

The index, released at the World Economic Forum in Davos on January 23, ranks 149 countries on 25 indicators tracked across six established policy categories: environmental health; air pollution; water resources; biodiversity and habitat; productive natural resources; and climate change. The EPI identifies broadly accepted targets for environmental performance and measures how close each country comes to these goals. As a quantitative gauge of pollution control and natural resource management results, the index provides a powerful tool for improving policymaking and shifting environmental decision-making onto firmer analytic foundations.