Sustainability

Supporting agriculture and a safe food supply

Essential workers in the School of Veterinary Medicine are caring for livestock, keeping track of disease, ensuring product consistency, and communicating with farmers to ensure that farms can continue providing a reliable food supply for the community.

Katherine Unger Baillie

Nature as a refuge in unsettling times

Even before the pandemic, campus initiatives like NatureRx@Penn and the 30x30 Challenge encouraged time outside. These efforts are continuing, now that restorative outlets are more important than ever.

Katherine Unger Baillie

Urban planning for biodiversity after bushfires

The Weitzman School’s Richard Weller visited Sydney for a two-week intensive on critical urban challenges and converting a parkland into an incubator for wildlife.

Penn Today Staff

‘An Atlas for the Green New Deal’

The McHarg Center releases a new collection of maps and datascapes capturing the spatial consequences of climate change in support of a coordinated national response.

Erica K. Brockmeier

Side Gigs for Good, part two

In a second installment of Side Gigs for Good stories, meet four more Penn employees whose after-work endeavors go above and beyond.

Katherine Unger Baillie, Michele W. Berger

As good as new at Penn Closet

The student-run thrift shop on the ground floor of Williams Hall gives clothes and other items a second life, plus offers donators and shoppers a simple way to practice sustainability.

Michele W. Berger

Immersive stories to spur action on climate

Organized by the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities (PPEH), a two-day festival, “Environmental Storytelling and Virtual Reality” begins Friday, and will explore how virtual reality and other immersive storytelling might inspire action on climate change.

Katherine Unger Baillie



In the News


Inside Climate News

As California pushes increased ethanol use, experts sound the alarm on environmental impacts

Danny Cullenward of the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy at the Weitzman School of Design says that the negative impacts of biofuels on land are difficult to overstate.

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Philadelphia Citizen

Penn bets big on green

Penn’s Climate and Sustainability Action Plan outlines the University’s efforts to combat climate change during the next five years.

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WHYY (Philadelphia)

Climate policy under a second Trump presidency

Michael Mann of the School of Arts & Sciences discusses how much a president can do or undo when it comes to environmental policy.

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Salon.com

Exxon CEO wants Trump to stay in Paris climate accord

Michael Mann of the School of Arts & Sciences voices his concern about the possibility that the U.S. could become a petrostate.

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Associated Press

Amid Earth’s heat records, scientists report another bump upward in annual carbon emissions

Michael Mann of the School of Arts & Sciences says that total carbon emissions including fossil fuel pollution and land use changes such as deforestation are basically flat because land emissions are declining.

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The Wall Street Journal

How can we remove carbon from the air? Here are a few ideas

Jennifer Wilcox of the School of Engineering and Applied Science and Kleinman Center for Energy Policy at the Weitzman School of Design says that the carbon-removal potential of forestation can’t always be reliably measured in terms of how much removal and for how long.

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