Join the Center for Global Sustainability for a session of Master of Public Policy students’ presentations. On Thursday, May 16, Anand Patwardhan's section of Project Course (Environmental and Energy specializations) will be presenting their project results from a year of research with the Global Commission on Adaptation. This is taking place in a TED Talk format with the CGS Forum, so each student will take 5 minutes to discuss the highlights of their project. Below are the titles of their presentations:
Joseph Drake - "Food Security in Central America."
The Central American region known as "the Dry Corridor" stretches across the nations of Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, and Nicaragua. Climate concerns such as drought have had a heavy impact on these countries' rural populations and their agricultural production. My studies have consisted of a cross-national examination of risks and proposed solutions, including investigation of differences in said risks and solutions and the reasons for their existence.
Janna Fernandez - Climate Migration in the Pacific Islands
Janna Fernandez conducted research on the feasibility and viability of migration within the Pacific Island Nations. At the front lines of the climate change fight, yet small contributors to the problem, Pacific Islanders face economic and social challenges when considering migration to other countries or islands and prefer to stay put. I analyzed three countries climate change strategic plans - specifically on migration to understand what are some viable solutions, if migration is the last resort.
Jessica Frech - "Climate Resilient Supply Chains: The Case of Levi Strauss and BSR’s Private Sector Risk and Resilience Framework"
Jessica analyzed Levi Strauss' supply chain using BSR's Private Sector Risk and Resilience Framework. She used ArcGIS to map climate hazards against locations of Levi's supply chain assets to develop a three dimensional view of climate risk. These climate risks were then viewed through a business impact lens with the goal of laying out a path towards resilience by strengthening six capital assets.
Amberly Holcomb - “Wetland Restoration as a Nature-Based Solution to Climate Change”
In the face of climate change, the Mid-Atlantic region is highly susceptible to hydrological shifts that can alter healthy aquatic ecosystems. Wetland restoration is a nature-based solution that offers a wide range of benefits when compared to hard infrastructure solutions. This study begins to quantify the economic and ecological benefits of wetland restoration as a nature-based solution to climate change.
Florencia Sánchez Zunino - "Climate Finance for adaptation: Economic assessment of adaptation co-benefits in public and private sectors"
The study reviews the current state of knowledge and practice on resilience-related action where there have been both private and public costs and benefits, analyzing evidence from key sectors like for agriculture, the natural environment, cities, industry, supply chains and infrastructure.
Ted Wojciech Krawczyk - “Emissions shadow from existing coal plants under feasible retirement scenarios”
Ted analyzed the historical global emissions from existing coal power plants and quantified how much CO2e will these plants generate before retirement. He considered four alternative scenarios with different lifetime of plants and identified decisive factors affecting the retirement age. The final cumulative CO2e emissions were then compared to the budgets suggested by the IPCC (the well-below 2°C limit and 1.5°C limit scenario).
Angie Wong - "Mapping & Evidence in the availability of Climate stations from LDCs"
Climate information is essential in an array of climate research and applications, that include analysis of climate variability, estimation and modelling the impact of climate change on different socio-economic activities. Despite of the SDGs 17 effort, many reports and studies indicates that access, investment and infrastructure on weather monitoring observatories is still very limited for many least developed countries. This research works with NOAA 's Global Historical Climatology Network database in mapping the availability and identifying key factors of climate stations by combining satellite proxies, world bank data, political, development, governance indicators etc.
Yitong Zhang - "City Resilience: Practice of Assessment Frameworks"
This project aims at urban resilience, comparing three different frameworks and practicing one of them into chosen cities. Policy suggestions about both frameworks and cities are made.
Xinye Zheng - "Is the U.S. Electricity System resilient in the face of Climate Change?"
Climate change makes extreme climate events more frequent and intense in the years to come. Is the U.S. electricity system resilient enough to overcome the challenges of climate change? This talk shows how does the U.S. electricity system perform during extreme weathers, and how could policies improve the resilience of the electricity system.