Energy & Environment
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Predicting Natural Resource Violence
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Between 1949 and 2009, at least 40 percent of intrastate conflicts were linked to natural resources, according to estimates in a UN report. A growing body of research explores these links to try to explain variation across factors like time, geography, and resource type. One puzzle involves the question of…
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How Women’s Empowerment Reduces Child Hunger
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Burkina Faso, a small West African country, is experiencing a child public health crisis. 88 percent of children under five years old are anemic, 16 percent are wasted — meaning they weigh too little for their height (a good predictor of mortality), and 35 percent are stunted. Past studies have…
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Green Spaces, Gray Cities: Confronting Institutional Barriers to Urban Reform
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In many of the world’s largest urban areas, the basic standards of living set out in the Sustainable Development Goals are woefully out of reach. In the developing world, cities won’t achieve those goals without providing adequate green space. Conceived broadly, green space is anything ranging from parks or clean…
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Permafrost Thaw and Backwards Arctic Incentives Could Add Trillions to Climate Costs
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Surrounding the Arctic Ocean, lying along a nearly continuous 10,000 mile (16,000 km) ring of inhospitable tundra, one of Earth’s most important environmental assets is beginning to collapse. Permafrost — perennially frozen soil and rock — may not look like much, but estimates suggest that vast tracts of icy ground…
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Can a Small Nudge Make a Big Impact on Household Energy Efficiency?
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As America’s policymakers grapple with ways to reduce the nation’s carbon footprint, one often-overlooked area is ripe for improvement: household energy consumption. According to the Department of Energy, about 22 percent of energy consumed in the United States in 2016 was used by residential households. Yet, while residential energy consumption…
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The Geopolitics of Renewables: The World in 2050
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Renewable energy is increasingly popular as the urgency for climate action intensifies around the globe. Meanwhile, ongoing technological and economic challenges dominate the debate over the deployment of renewables, marginalizing the discussion of the geopolitical consequences of a renewables-heavy future. However, a research group sponsored by the International Renewable Energy…
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How to Battle Misinformation in the Fight Against Climate Change
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Climate change poses a vast set of public policy challenges ranging from energy generation and resource extraction to food production and transportation. However, in the United States today, some policymakers and legislators regularly propagate misinformation around climate change. For climate activists, this has proven to be one of the biggest…
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The Amazon in peril: The life and death of the world’s most diverse biome
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Brazil’s Amazon rainforest is one of the world’s most extensively researched ecological zones. In addition to its rich biodiversity and economic importance to Brazil, the Amazon is also one of the largest land-based sinks of atmospheric carbon in the world. A significant body of ecological research regarding the Amazon focuses…
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How electrification will replace fossil fuels and change the future
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Electrification, defined as replacing carbon-emitting fuels with electricity as a primary energy source to provide a similar service, is often considered a critical tactic in the fight against climate change. The process of electrification may be the globe’s best option in satisfying increasing energy demand while simultaneously decreasing humanity’s carbon…
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With the Right Government Incentives, Electric Vehicle Adoption Could Rise
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Over the past decade, the trend of switching to electricity as a power source for everything from cars to space heaters has garnered much attention. With electricity now increasingly being generated from renewable energy sources, the electrification of transportation offers an attractive approach to reducing greenhouse gas emissions and potentially…
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Indigenous Knowledge Can Help Address Climate Change
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As climate change increasingly threatens populations across the globe, indigenous communities relying on rain-fed agriculture are especially vulnerable. Yet governments and policymakers have developed and implemented climate change adaptation plans rooted almost exclusively in Western scientific knowledge. These plans have consistently ignored or omitted the knowledge and expertise developed by…