7.30
Amanda Mott
Associate Director for News
ammott@upenn.edu
Climate Change
‘Cities in water’
‘Cities in water’
Architect and landscape architect Anuradha Mathur and anthropologist Nikhil Anand are collaborating on questions of design and human practices to create new ways of thinking about low-lying coastal cities in India and around the world.
Climate change-resistant corals could provide lifeline to battered reefs
Climate change-resistant corals could provide lifeline to battered reefs
Corals that withstood a severe bleaching event and were transplanted to a different reef maintained their resilient qualities, according to a new study led by Katie Barott of the School of Arts & Sciences.
Reconsiderations of past, present, and future in a new environmental humanities book
Reconsiderations of past, present, and future in a new environmental humanities book
Featuring contributions from scholars representing a range of disciplines, ‘Timescales: Thinking Across Ecological Temporalities,’ is an outgrowth of the Penn Program for Environmental Humanities.
Studying plants from 400 miles up
Studying plants from 400 miles up
Using remote sensing data, senior Paul Lin looked for signals of climate change in the grasslands of the Great Plains.
To improve climate models, an international team turns to archaeological data
To improve climate models, an international team turns to archaeological data
The project, called LandCover6k, offers a new classification system that the researchers hope will improve predictions about the planet’s future and fill in gaps about its past.
Penn’s goal of achieving net-zero emissions within the endowment
Penn’s goal of achieving net-zero emissions within the endowment
Penn’s goal of achieving net-zero emissions within the endowment. The Office of Investments has established the goal of reducing the net greenhouse gas emissions from Penn’s endowment investments to zero by 2050.
Bringing the humanities into climate education
Bringing the humanities into climate education
Senior Tsemone Ogbemi is sharing the important role of the arts in comprehending climate through her work at the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities and in an environmental conference she is presenting at this week.
Report urges overall strategy for national security and climate crisis
Report urges overall strategy for national security and climate crisis
The Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law and Annenberg Public Policy Center have released Lessons from the Arctic: The Need for Intersectoral Climate Security Policy, a report on critical climate-change security issues.
The outlook for science under the Biden-Harris administration
The outlook for science under the Biden-Harris administration
Penn Today spoke with experts in various areas of science and environmental policy about what they anticipate will shift now that President Biden has assumed the nation’s leadership.
‘Crisis Upon Crisis’: The coronavirus is not the only emergency we are facing
‘Crisis Upon Crisis’: The coronavirus is not the only emergency we are facing
Episode three of the SAS podcast ‘In These Times’ looks at other urgent issues of our time, and examine how they affect and are affected by COVID-19.
Media Contact
In the News
The New York Times
Collapse raises new fears about Florida’s shaky insurance market
Carolyn Kousky of the Wharton School weighed in on Florida’s insurance market, where insurers are raising premiums and refusing new and renewed policies in the wake of the Surfside collapse. “Coastal areas all across the Gulf and up along the East Coast could start to see very similar dynamics,” she said.
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Marketplace (NPR)
What role does the Fed have in mitigating climate change?
Christina Skinner of the Wharton School spoke about how the U.S. Federal Reserve can address climate change. While the Fed can adjust monetary policy to mitigate loss, it can’t do things like “using its balance sheet to go out into the world and buy green bonds. To try and direct the flow of capital in that direction is not really on the table like it is for some other central banks,” she said.
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CNBC
Off-the-grid homes are coming to your neighborhood, as climate change creates suburban survivalists
Benjamin Keys of the Wharton School said off-the-grid features like solar panels are increasingly popular with homeowners. “It’s not just for extremists. I think you’re going to see more and more people looking for ways in which they can protect themselves as there are increased risk from storms, more utility disruptions, and more need for resiliency,” he said.
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The Hill
Stopping price reform won't eliminate flood risk
Carolyn Kousky of the Wharton School wrote an op-ed about helping at-risk households who can’t afford flood insurance by adopting a means-tested disaster insurance program for those in need. “Climate change is escalating flood risk around the country,” she wrote. “Failure to update pricing, though, effectively hides this risk from the market and limits financial incentives for risk reduction.”
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The Atlantic
Why celebrities are agog over this tiny climate think tank
Zane Cooper, a doctoral candidate in the Annenberg School for Communication, said all networked computation, including cryptocurrency, is powered by fossil fuels and harmful to the environment. “Bitcoin reveals a fundamental truth about the relationship between computing and energy,” he said.
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Huffington Post
Rep. Jamaal Bowman sees climate as the next big education push after COVID-19 reopening
Daniel Aldana Cohen of the School of Arts & Sciences and Akira Drake Rodriguez and Billy Fleming of the Stuart Weitzman School of Design spoke about the “climate + community project,” which calls for transformative investments in green infrastructure and public education. “There’s a ton of public money on the table this decade—we have to spend it right,” said Cohen.
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