One of those students, D’Alessandro de Afvdial, is a sixth-grader at Augusta Lewis Troup School. He told the News he had never been to a museum before stepping into the Peabody with his classmates.

Discussing the visit, de Afvdial said that he loved “discovering new things” and was especially excited to explore the Peabody’s exhibits on electricity and other technological inventions. 

“Come this summer, I would love to come here with my family,” he said.

Mayor Justin Elicker, Rep. Rosa DeLauro, NHPS Superintendent Madeline Negrón and New Haven Arts, Culture and Tourism Director Adriane Jefferson welcomed first graders from the Family Academy of Multilingual Exploration and sixth graders from the Augusta Lewis Troup School as the first visitors on Tuesday. 

Accompanied by their teachers, students gawked at the Burke Hall of Dinosaurs and exhibits on the evolution of the human species and the history of science and technology. 

“It sends a real statement that the first kids into this building are New Haven Public School kids from the community,” Elicker told the News. “On top of that, the fact that you now no longer have to pay to get into the Peabody just opens up this world to so many kids that previously wouldn’t have been able to explore this space.”

Following a $160-million donation from Edward P. Bass ’68, the Peabody underwent a four-year renovation, and is now free for all visitors in perpetuity, joining the Yale University Art Gallery and the Yale Center for British Art. 

Elicker said that while New Haveners missed being able to visit the Peabody’s collections during the renovation period — especially during the COVID-19 pandemic — the reopening has reminded people of its value to the community. 

“Of course, we missed coming in here,” Elicker said. “On the other hand, having been closed for so long, it made a lot of people realize just how special this space is, building up anticipation for today.” 

Beyond expanding and reorganizing its exhibition spaces, the Peabody is also set to increase educational programming for K-12 students and develop a partnership with NHPS. 

In an interview with the News, Superintendent Negrón said that the specifics of this partnership are still unclear. Initial discussions between NHPS and the Peabody began three weeks ago, though both parties demonstrated interest in forging a stronger relationship, she said.  

Nevertheless, she expressed optimism about how the Peabody’s new K-12 education center could offer opportunities to local students and enrich their educational experience. 

“I think [the Peabody] is an opportunity just to continue to expand on learning,” Negrón said. “For example, many of our kids are interested in having leadership roles and having an opportunity to go into all kinds of different fields. This could be a way that kids could come in and learn from the people who work here, what it means to hold one of these professions and explore academically.”

The Peabody will also enhance the exhibits’ educational experience through a new app called “Amuse.” 

According to Dakota Stipp, the company’s CEO and co-founder, Amuse was founded in 2019 in collaboration with Yale’s Center for Engineering and Innovative Design. Once visitors download the app, depending on where they are standing in the Peabody, they will receive videos, tidbits of information and other types of short-form content related to different exhibits. While the Peabody is the first museum to use the app, Stipp said he hopes to expand its use to other public spaces, including museums, parks and historic landmarks. 

Stipp said that Amuse accrues data on how visitors interact with the app, informing what types of future content the Peabody will develop. The app also allows users to learn more about the city, he said. 

“When you’re looking at the map of the museum, you can actually zoom out, and then you’ll find historic information about New Haven,” Stipp said.

For the next 29 days, the Peabody will be using a ticketed reservation system. 

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Organized by its Committee on Canadian Studies, the MacMillan Center’s “Smoke from Canada” conference explored the aftermath of the fires earlier this month. The hybrid event included presentations from School of the Environment researchers and a keynote presentation delivered by guest speaker Pierre Minn, an anthropology professor at the University of Montreal.

“We conceived of our symposium in the aftermath of last summer’s wildfires in Canada and the ensuing smoke that blanketed much of the eastern United States,” Brendan Shanahan, MacMillan Center postdoctoral associate and panel moderator, wrote in an email to the News. “But as we saw with the wildfire smoke last summer, the effects of climate change in Canada are not confined within the country’s geographical boundaries.”

The interdisciplinary event invited School of the Environment researchers to speak about the relations between climate change, wildfire and public health.

Jennifer Marlon, a lecturer at the School of the Environment, addressed the ongoing gaps between wildfire impact and their perception. Even though the Canadian wildfires contributed to roughly 25 percent of global carbon emissions last year, she explained that recent work by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication suggests growing but still largely inadequate responses from the public. Per Marlon, only 47 percent of Canadians and Americans believe that climate change would harm them personally.

Sebastian Block-Munguia, a research affiliate at the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy, discussed how wildfires can also initiate deadly ripples throughout the ecosystem, as their pollutant can be toxic to vegetation by inhibiting plant photosynthesis.

Beginning as early as March 2023, Canadian wildfires picked up during the summer months. Wildfire smoke drifted across America and brought days of hazy smoke throughout stretches of the Northeast and the Midwest. Farms across states hard-hit by the wildfire smoke reported slower-than-usual corn growth last year.

Researchers added that prolonged exposure to smoke comes with a steep toll on human health as well.

“The wildfire smoke is really a public health problem,” Kai Chen, a professor at the School of Public Health, said at the event. “We need government policies to help regulate and help reduce the air pollution.” 

Chen, who studies the impacts of climate change on human health, explained that wildfire smoke is rich in fine particulate matter, or PM 2.5. These 2.5 micrometer-sized particles — ranging between 1/20 and 1/30 the diameter of a human hair — can have deadly effects on the nervous system and lungs, he said. Chen added that previous studies have linked PM 2.5 exposure to diseases such as asthma, lung cancer, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

While long-term health assessments have to follow subjects for years and decades after the wildfires, Chen said that preliminary work is already revealing high costs to public health. Research Chen conducted in collaboration with Columbia University — which has access to records of New York City’s near real-time emergency system asthma visits — detected a 44-percent increase in asthma syndrome visits across all age groups during the days when smoke blanketed the city.

“Climate change is making forest fires worse by extending the length of the fire season, making the weather warmer and drier,” Block-Munguia said. “But also, fires contribute to climate change.” 

Per Block-Munguia, fires kickstart a vicious cycle: they release significant amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, which compounds global warming effects and contributes to drier, less predictable weather conditions. Plants — which rely on CO2 for photosynthesis — could also grow in excesses due to this increase in CO2 release, making them more vulnerable to catching fire.

Even so, he added that fossil fuels remain the overwhelming contributor to PM 2.5 exposure, and enable some of the climate change-related effects responsible for last year’s wildfires. In 2019, PM 2.5 was responsible for 4.1 million global deaths — roughly 1 million of which were caused by fossil fuel combustion, according to Block-Munguia. By comparison, that smoke was responsible for 0.2 million deaths, Block-Munguia said.

Despite its forest growth and natural resources, Canada has been lagging behind peer nations in climate mitigation efforts, Block-Munguia added. He cited recent reports that revealed chronically underreported CO2 emissions from the nation’s oil centers.

According to the panelists, last year’s El Niño cycle likely compounded the scale of the Canadian wildfires. El Niño, during which a warm Pacific Ocean shifts the flow of jet streams, often leads to drier, hotter weather across the Pacific Northwest — perfect conditions for a wildfire, Marlon said. Marlon added that Canada might not expect fires of last year’s size for at least another five to seven years.
Roughly 7,300 forest fires burn through Canada each year.

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Led by Sarah Lowe, a professor of public health in social behavioral and sciences at the School of Public Health, in collaboration with researchers from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, the University of Chicago and Oxford University, the researchers reviewed the scientific literature on the connection between chronic climate change and mental health issues. The study reported that the existing research is sparse — and scientists ought to do much more to help inform specific public health interventions. 

“Climate change is already harming human health, including growing mental health impacts,” Anthony Leiserowitz, the director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, who was not involved in the study, wrote in an email to the News. “This paper underscores the critical need for more research on these impacts and investments in providing mental health support for individuals and communities struggling with the issue of climate change and the aftermath of climate change disasters.”

There is substantial evidence that natural disasters caused by climate change, such as hurricanes — which many scientists consider to be acute climate change — can directly impact mental health.

During a recent Climate Change and Trauma Webinar with the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies, Betty Lai, a professor in counseling psychology at Boston College who was not involved in the study, highlighted this connection. 

“Disasters are directly linked to potential mental health distress symptoms,” Lai said.

Lai said that climate disasters especially affect children, recalling one study that demonstrated that one in four children who witnessed Hurricane Ike in 2008 were still reporting anxiety and PTSD symptoms 15 months later. 

In the webinar, Lowe noted that much of her research typically centers on the long-term mental health consequences of traumatic events. Her doctorate began with a study on how Hurricane Katrina exacerbated socioeconomic and racial disparities. 

However, after joining the School of Public Health in 2019, Lowe said, she realized that the bulk of research on climate change and mental health focuses only on acute climate change and not on the effects of long-term climate change. 

“[I]t seemed obvious that climate change could influence mental health in other ways, and I was hearing a lot from young people and in the media about how the threat of climate change escalation was leading to significant anxiety,” Lowe wrote in an email to the News. “We decided to embark on this systematic review to see what work had been done on the topic, knowing that there was likely to be research outside of our specialties.”

In the study, the researchers analyzed qualitative, quantitative and mixed-methods studies that examined the effects of slow-onset climate change on mental health indicators, which, according to Lowe, ended up being a “huge undertaking.” After screening over 10,000 abstracts, they included only 57 in the final review. 

They found that there is a lack of research on the specific link between chronic climate change and PTSD and post-traumatic stress symptoms. Most studies, they claimed, tended to focus on how the climate affects anxiety and depression symptoms and negative emotions, such as sadness, fear and anger. In addition, they noted that low and middle-income countries, the places most likely to feel the effects of chronic climate change, have less research output.

Lowe said she was especially surprised by how small the body of literature is on chronic climate change and mental health.

“As a point of comparison, I conducted a review of studies published in 2018 on PTSD and depression symptoms after disasters; in that single year, without using gold-standard systematic review methodologies, and focusing on only two outcomes, my colleagues and I identified 100 peer-reviewed articles on the topic,” Lowe wrote. 

For Lowe, because this body of research is so small, it is too early to determine the main differences between chronic climate change and acute climate change. Still, the preliminary evidence suggests that acute natural disasters may have more consistent negative impacts and are more likely to cause PTSD-related symptoms. 

Lowe emphasized the importance of conducting more qualitative and quantitative research across different disciplines to clarify the effects of chronic climate change. She also noted that longitudinal cohort studies, combined with interviews and focus groups, could help researchers learn more clearly how climate change affects overall well-being. 

Joan Monin, a professor of public health at the School of Public Health, who was not involved with the study, praised the call for more climate change research, noting how it could impact future policy. 

“This work is so important because it suggests that policymakers can implement changes to mitigate the effects of climate change,” Monin wrote in an email to the News. “This can have far-reaching effects on the mental health of large communities.”

According to the National Institute of Mental Health, it is estimated that one in five adults in the United States live with a mental illness. 

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The event, which brought together over 2,500 people from various sectors interested in sustainability, served as a platform for exploring emerging trends and sharing insights on environmental challenges. 

“Attending GreenBiz was an enriching experience that provided insights into the emerging trends in corporate sustainability and facilitated valuable connections with fellow professionals in the field,” Lucia Castellares Tello ENV ’25 said.

The conference boasted an impressive lineup of attendees, with nearly 50 percent representing companies with annual revenues exceeding $1 billion, according to their website.  

Throughout the event, students had the opportunity to participate in panels, workshops and networking sessions. Lauren Phipps ENV ’24 worked for the GreenBiz Group for over six years, and this year marked her ninth time attending the conference. Phipps moderated a panel discussion titled “Making Progress on Critical Minerals and Materials.” The session provided insights into the intersection of sustainability and resource management, emphasizing the importance of responsible mining practices in achieving clean energy goals and sharing expertise across organizations.

 “If you want to think strategically about making business sustainable, you need to think beyond the walls of your own organization,” Phipps said when discussing the panel.

Speaking with the News about their motivations for attending, several students highlighted the importance of staying connected with their professional community and gaining real-world perspectives beyond academia. They emphasized the need to bridge the gap between theoretical knowledge and practical applications, underscoring the value of experiential learning in shaping their career paths. 

“I loved how applied everything was,” Emily Lin ENV ’25 said. “What I learn at Yale can be different from what is currently happening in space, and to understand and engage with the implementation and barriers beyond academia is so informative. This makes me excited to go into the real world after equipping myself with knowledge and tools I get from YSE.” 

Throughout the conference, students engaged in discussions on a wide range of topics, including the role of agriculture in reducing emissions, the challenges of implementing circular economy solutions and the influence of Gen Z on corporate sustainability initiatives. They also had the opportunity to hear from industry leaders, such as Zoe Chance, senior lecturer in management at the Yale School of Management, who shared stories and insights on driving positive change within organizations. 

Daniel González Pena ENV ’24 expressed appreciation for the willingness of conference participants to share their struggles and challenges, highlighting the collaborative spirit that permeated the event – an energy that González said reflects the collective, interdisciplinary action needed to address the climate crisis.

 “As we are dealing with the climate crisis, there is not one solution. The conference highlighted that we are going to need inputs from people in various industries and from all walks of life,” said González. 

The GreenBiz24 Conference took place in JW Marriott Phoenix Desert Ridge Resort & Spa, Phoenix, Arizona.

Correction, Feb. 22: A previous version of this article did not mention Yale School of Management students’ participation in the conference. The article has been updated to reflect the correct information.

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The Yale chapter of the International Society of Tropical Foresters hosted its 30th annual conference at the School of the Environment on Feb. 2 and 3. Starting Friday morning and ending on Saturday, the hybrid, two-day event invited attendees to reflect on the challenges tropical forests face while turning an eye to their restoration and preservation. 

Nonprofit directors, economists, policymakers and researchers delivered talks on the current state of forest health and offered potential solutions from their work. The presentations were followed by networking opportunities, a poster presentation session and the conferral of their Innovation Prize Award.

“When you’re thinking about ecosystem restoration and conservation, it’s really so much of a holistic approach that we need to be taking,” event organizer Sophia Roberts ENV ’25 said. “It’s about everything that’s connected and being able to disseminate those co-benefits to the local community.”

Speakers at the event sounded the alarm on current rates of tropical forest loss.

Keynote speaker and Wildlife Conservation Society Executive Director Daniel Zarin explained that the majority of tropical forests could currently be compromised or lost. According to the Forest Landscape Integrity Index — a measure of a forest’s overall well-being produced by data aggregation and algorithms — almost 60 percent of all the world’s forests are in either medium or low integrity, meaning that they are partially or completely destroyed. Zarin added that these losses would come with steep costs to ecosystem resilience and biodiversity.

Recent destruction of the Amazon — the world’s largest tropical forest — has accounted for some of these declines, speakers said.

Ane Alencar, panelist and director of the Amazon Environmental Research Institute, noted that Brazil is among the top ten countries that have reported the greatest tropical forest loss.

Alencar added that almost half of the nation’s domestic emissions have been related to deforestation, primarily related to illegal logging, land use, agriculture and mining.

She said that her research suggested that rural areas contributed to roughly 68 percent of all emissions.

Other presentations directed attention to the scope of agriculture-driven tropical deforestation. According to Peter Umunay, senior environmental specialist at the Global Environmental Facility, commodity and resource-driven cultivation has cost 6.4 to 8.8 million hectares of tropical forest cover each year — an area that falls roughly between the size of West Virginia and Indiana, and accounts for up to 83 percent of all annual tropical forest loss.

Though forest declines continue, speakers also said that the past year has experienced some noteworthy slowing in deforestation rates — many of which were enabled by stronger government intervention. Alencar praised the “strategic enforcement” of conservation laws under Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s presidency, which she said has seen a 50 percent reduction in deforestation over this past year.

“We need one thing, that is political will, to [stop deforestation], and we need engagement of society and also [the] private sector to support that,” Alencar said.

Speaker Kimberly Carlson noted that the same trend had happened in Indonesia, though recent decreases in deforestation rates might be attributed to a wider range of factors. Carlson traced the nation’s regulation efforts to a 2011 moratorium on new permits for palm oil, mining and other agricultural activities across one-third of the tropical forest.

However, these measures also coincided with new land-tenure security programs and a reduction in palm oil prices — all of which could have “cumulatively” resulted in a more significant drop-off, Carlson explained.

In their solutions to current conservation efforts, speakers presented visions of public policy coupled with financial incentives.

In the absence of a “silver [bullet]” for supporting forests, Zarin added that preserving healthy tropical forests will require as much financing as the carbon offsets market. Per Zarin, high-integrity forests still remain at risk of destruction and often lack the necessary resources to protect them.

Unlike carbon offsets, which must definitively yield results, financing forests could operate like healthcare, where money is spent not just for prevention but also proactive support, Zarin said. In this model, money would go towards restoration but also into interventions that could slow the degradation. Zarin noted that 750 million hectares of high-integrity forest are still unprotected by the market, with no finances dedicated towards their preservation, leaving them at risk of disappearing.

“Today, there is no clear-cut blueprint for tackling social issues about the environment,” Frederick Addai ENV ’23 said. “We just need to keep on learning and engaging with people to collaborate on how best to go about with the world.”The International Society of Tropical Foresters was founded in 1950.

Correction, Feb. 12: This article has been corrected to fix several misspellings of Kimberly Carlson’s last name.

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Conducted by scientists from the School of Public Health, the Climate, Health and Environment Nexus, or CHEN, Lab and other international institutions, the research spans 406 cities across 20 countries from 1985 to 2015. Using data from the Multi-Country Multi-City Collaborative Research Network, a global collaboration of environmental and health scientists, the researchers analyzed the acute impacts of short-term, daily exposure to ground-level ozone. 

After establishing this baseline, the researchers modeled future ground-level ozone mortality. They found that deaths will increase from 2010 to 2050 except in the climate scenario consistent with the Paris Agreement, which calls for the global temperature to rise no more than two degrees Celsius by the end of the century. 

“If we are taking actions to address climate change, we are saving lives,” said Kai Chen, an assistant professor of epidemiology at the School of Public Health.

Ground-level, or tropospheric ozone, forms when nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds react in sunlight and high temperatures. As global warming increases the number of hot days per year, the production of this hazardous ozone is projected to rise.

The model explored various emissions scenarios outlined in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Sixth Assessment Report (IPCC AR6). The ozone-related mortality fraction — the excess number of ozone-related deaths divided by the number of total deaths — only decreased in the low-emissions scenario aligned with the Paris Agreement target. Still, the fraction only minimally decreased from 0.17 percent to 0.15 percent.

According to Chen, the researchers used the best available global climate models and accessed daily projections downscaled to the city level to obtain more granular results. For Alexandra Schneider, the deputy director of the Institute of Epidemiology at Helmholtz Zentrum München, it is important to also consider the “heat island” effect in urban areas, where cities generally have higher average temperatures, meaning more tropospheric ozone is produced and there are higher ground-level ozone-related mortality rates. She plans to continue researching the impact of city size on increased temperatures and ozone-related mortality rates in the future. 

The researchers also found that the ozone-related mortality rates continued to rise in big cities in Mexico, China and the United States — even in the climate scenario that meets the Paris Agreement goals.

In future studies, Chen hopes to consider other pollutants and incorporate long-term exposure data. He also seeks to get data from additional locations — including many areas across the developing world that do not have extensive ground air quality monitoring stations networks — by using satellite monitoring models. 

Both Schneider and Chen also plan to assess in more detail how mortality changes over time, accounting for factors like population growth, emissions increase or reduction, life expectancy changes and shifts in medical treatment and food intake. 

“This model is just using mortality, [but] this is just the tip of the iceberg,” Schneider said.

Schneider emphasized the need to understand better the underlying mechanisms behind the interaction between rising temperatures, increasing emissions, changing baseline mortality rates and population size shifts on growing mortality. 

“Now you only see that mortality increases but don’t know how you can treat it except making the environment better,” Schneider said. 

Cate York ENV ’24 is a second-year master’s student at the School of the Environment. From Los Angeles, a metropolis with pollution and poor air quality, York emphasized the importance of spreading awareness about ozone and mortality.

“As an individual, I don’t know what to make of it or what to do about it. I don’t even know what levels I was exposed to in the area where I lived,” York said. “When you are in it, I don’t know if people even realize the extent of the problem. That’s just their baseline.” 

According to the State of Global Air, ground-level ozone contributed to 365,000 deaths worldwide in 2019. 

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As carbon offsets grow in popularity, the University has also made an entrance into the market over recent years. Starting in 2020, the University retired 47,604 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent to reach its emissions target that was set for the University to meet in 2005. Yale has continued acquiring credits — tradable carbon-eliminating permits — for every year it fails to meet that standard. Last year, it retired 47,282 metric tons of CO2 equivalent. While its 2025 Sustainability Plan acknowledges that such offsets are stopgap measures, it anticipates that these measures will continue helping the University reach its emissions goals.

According to Amber Garrard, director of the Office of Sustainability, the University started exploring the use of offsets after setting its emissions reduction goals in 2005. Under the plan, the University aimed for a 43 percent reduction in 2005 emissions levels by 2020.

“Each year, if our annual reductions are not below our 2020 target, we retire additional offsets from our existing portfolio to maintain that commitment,” Garrard wrote in an email to the News.

Carbon offsets are purchasable certificates that allow industries to compensate for their emissions by investing in removal efforts elsewhere. Once registered and verified by third-party programs, they can be purchased as credits that are withdrawn from the market — or “retired” — following acquisition.

Kenneth Gillingham, a professor of environmental and energy economics at the School of the Environment, explained that carbon credits promise to “[reduce] emissions at a lower cost” compared to pursuing more expensive reductions initiatives. By purchasing carbon credits, industries temporarily reduce emissions as they transition toward longer-term capital investments.

Critics of carbon offsets have objected to what they say are misleading accounting practices in certain unregulated markets where carbon credits are claimed to be generated even in the absence of any real change. A study published in March by researchers from Yale and the University of California, Berkeley, found that 11 percent of all carbon offsets ever issued had overstated their climate-saving benefits.

The University’s current carbon offset portfolio has focused on projects that capture or reduce methane emissions.

As the second-most abundant greenhouse gas, methane is over 28 times more potent than CO2, though it also degrades significantly faster. Agriculture, fossil fuels and landfill waste are the largest contributors to human-caused methane emissions.

One of Yale’s six methane projects is the Laurelbrook Farm in East Canaan, which composts its manure by adding wood chips and frequently aerating it. Doing so reduces the methane emissions that would have been otherwise produced by regular anaerobic breakdown.

The University’s five other carbon offset sites are landfills.

At both the Greater Lebanon Refuse Authority Landfill and Greenville County Landfill — another two of the University’s project sites — methane reduction has involved setting the gas on fire. Per James Zendek, Lebanon Landfill’s senior staff engineer, the largest source of landfill methane comes from leachate — the wet liquid, or runoff, that flows through solid waste.

By collecting that methane, the landfill can convert the greenhouse gas into a potential energy source. Steve Pineiro, Greenville County Landfill regional operations supervisor, explained that pipes drilled throughout the landfill pile help funnel the gas to an engine for burning.

Pineiro added that the quantity of collected methane gas diminishes as the landfill ages. At its peak, methane from the Greenville County Landfill had produced enough electricity to power 2,500 homes. The site has collected 2,000 to 3,000 tons of methane annually since 2013.

According to Zendek, methane conversion to electricity produces significantly less CO2 but is not entirely emissions-free.

“[The gas] still has emissions, but they’re much, much cleaner than if you just let the gas go to the environment without running it through that layer first,” Zendek told the News.

Garrard wrote that current offset projects underwent a research and vetting process that involved faculty, staff, students and administrators across the University. The University’s five-person Carbon Offsets Program Oversight Committee worked alongside an eleven-member Carbon Offsets Working Group to evaluate project proposals, visit sites and make recommendations. Per Garrard, the process accounted for factors such as costs, permanence, campus proximity and environmental justice.

As outlined in the University’s Climate Action Strategy, carbon offsets are intended to “supplement, not replace” on-campus emissions reductions.

Gillingham said that one “downside” of offsets is “additionality” or the idea that purchasing carbon credits is not enough to prove that emissions reductions “would not have happened otherwise.” Even if investment in reforestation does lead to reduced emissions, he explained, it is impossible to ensure that the offsets were solely responsible for them.

However, Gillingham added that the offsets market is expected to continue growing. Though global demand for carbon offsets dipped in 2022, supply will likely increase through 2050. The offsets market is poised to grow from $2 billion to roughly $250 billion over the coming decades as industries seek to decarbonize.

Under the University’s current target for net-zero emissions by 2035, it will likely have to increase its reliance on offsets. Turning the campus completely carbon-free is expected to cost $1.5 billion across the next three decades.

“Based on current projections, we will need to retire significantly more offsets at that point in time to reach that target,” Garrard wrote. “As part of our larger decarbonization strategy, we will be working to reassess our approach to offsets.”

The first attempt at carbon offsetting started in 1997 after the release of the United Nations’ Kyoto Protocol.

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With the cacophonous chatter of climate crises, energy disparities and ecological challenges, the study of environmental humanities aims to bring a humanistic touch to science. 

Hosted in the Humanities Quadrangle on Wednesday, the Yale Environmental Humanities program’s “Welcome Back Panel” featured presentations by Maria Trumpler GRD ’92, professor of women, gender and sexuality studies, and graduate students Kevin Yang ARC ’24 and Charlotte Hecht GRD ’24. This panel focused on three microhistories unfolding in the midst of humanity’s consideration of the environmental sciences. 

Paul Sabin, professor of history and American studies and director of the Yale Environmental Humanities program, expressed his gratitude for those who came to support the event before turning over to the first presenter. 

“We live in a social world and sometimes there is an impulse to reduce it to technology and economics and law, but then we have to remember that we’re human actors making choices and making these choices because of ideas and beliefs and relationships,” Sabin said. “In order to understand those things, we need the humanities, and that includes various aspects of culture that help us think about what we imagined to be the right ways to live and what the proper relationship is to the environments around us.” 

Trumpler, who received a doctorate in history of medicine and life science from Yale, has been a member of the University community since 1983. 

Now a senior lecturer in the department of women, gender and sexuality studies, many of Trumpler’s academic interests concern the historical imprint of women in science and technology. 

In Trumpler’s presentation “Handweaving, Fibersheds, and Environmental Education,” she discussed that understanding “how women engaged with things in the past” can help inform our conception of women’s lives today. 

“So for example, some people think the life of a 19th century farm woman in New England must have been constant drudgery,” Trumpler explained in her presentation. “But if you actually go back and start engaging with the tools, engaging with the irons, engaging with the fabrics, engaging with the life as much as you can, you actually see that they handled objects that are very beautiful and very sensual.”

Taking time off from the academic setting of Yale, Trumpler explored a hands-on approach to better comprehend the daily activities of 17th-century New England women in her research. Aided by grants through the Environmental Humanities program and Whitney Humanities Center, she journeyed to Vermont to make cheese, bread and clothing as early American women once did. 

Explaining that history helps people in the present to make sense of progress and current values, she chronicled some of her daily activities, including the process of spinning her own wool and making a blanket, tasks she undertook for eight hours a day. 

With this newfound insight, Trumpler said she has turned her attention to fibersheds, traditional areas in New England that were once responsible for clothing all the members of a particular community with wool and linen. 

She now dedicates her extra time to trying to convince people, and in particular, women, to be more conscious with their clothing decisions, whether that includes mending or even creating new pieces to wear from the offerings of fibersheds. In spite of her efforts, Trumpler said she has found the task to be more difficult than expected, as she noted that modern women “love the number of clothes they have in their closet.”

Regardless, Trumpler remains optimistic in her findings. 

“There’s a sense of empowerment of sensual pleasure accomplishment,” Trumpler said. “I made a blanket entirely myself from this fleece, And so I think it illuminates aspects of daily life in the past that we tend to brush over.”

Kevin Yang next discussed the details of his project, titled “New Haven, Revisited,” which he conducted with fellow architecture student Fany Kuzmova ARC ’24, with funding from the Environmental Humanities program. Inspired by the School of Architecture’s Jim Vlock First-Year Building Project, an assignment that, according to the project website, “allows professional degree students the unique chance to design and build a structure as part of their graduate education,” Yang and Kuzmova joined forces to address community development issues in New Haven.

Interested in urban renewal from the experiences of residents, the project partnered with a local high school to develop a three-part workshop on development issues, oral histories and a photo exposition, forming a “combined anthology” to represent New Haven, particularly in relation to Yale initiatives. 

The two hope to provide two deliverables with the culmination of the project, the first being a “guidebook,” or more of an architectural publication, as Yang explained, where they introduce the history of community spaces and the factors that helped support their successes. Yang and Kuzmova said they also intend to bring about an exhibition of the work they collected throughout the workshops.

Finally, Hecht presented the enlightenment she gained through reading the memoirs passed on by her great-grandfather, U.S. Navy Captain Bert F. Brown. A graduate student in American studies, Hecht is completing her dissertation, which sprung from the implications of the United States’ history of nuclear testing in different locations, including Nevada and the Marshall Islands, throughout the Cold War, and focuses more broadly on the U.S. nuclear industry. Little did she know that her own family tree also contained a surprising connection to nuclear testing.

Paging through her great-grandfather’s memoirs, she learned he was involved in nuclear tests. 

“This felt like a really crazy coincidence to me,” Hecht said. “It wasn’t something I knew about, I had no idea, and it really stuck with me as something I wanted to think about and explore, because here I was writing this dissertation about the environmental destruction, the social impacts of nuclear testing.”

As she detailed in her presentation “Unhomelike,” Hecht said she aimed to reconcile with her revelation through the humanities and a fund from the Environmental Humanities program and investigate “long legacies of brief action.” Mediating history through a personal lens, Hecht displayed images she felt were relevant to her grandfather’s story, including one of him alongside other officers and an image she took when in Utah, visiting the locations he once experienced. 

Both photographs had a distinctive blue tint, the product of cyanotype printing that she taught herself to conduct within her own home. Hecht informed the News that the pigment in the printing, Prussian Blue, when presented in the form of pills, serves as a treatment for radiation poisoning. She added that the medium she used was a gesture to the “violent history” her great-grandfather was involved in.

After the presenters concluded, the crowd adjourned for refreshments and chatter, launching into a discussion of broader issues. 

Lav Kanoi GRD ’24, the program’s graduate coordinator, told the News that there are numerous questions with strong social value, with underlying “philosophical impulses”. 

“How does one bring equity issues to alternative energy? In a sense, does the burden of environmental pollution again fall on poorer people, or poorer countries and so on and so forth? Questions like that are not really addressed from a technological perspective,” Kanoi said.  “Even in technological circles, what does one do with the new kinds of wastes that are produced as we shift to alternative energy forms and such?”

In addition to his role as graduate coordinator, Kanoi has been a graduate student at Yale since fall of 2018, studying anthropology in a joint program through the anthropology department and the School of Environment. 

Citing the creation of the Environmental Humanities program in 2017 as a contributing factor in his choice to join the Yale community, he noted the importance of adding humanistic perspectives to the environmental sciences. 

“What is my relationship to another human being to another animal to another life form? That relationship predicates so much about what I do in that interaction,” Kanoi said. “Do I cut down a tree? To do something that was planned in its place to use a part of it in so many different ways? Simplistically speaking, the Environmental Humanities allows us without a market compulsion to investigate these questions, to think freely.”

Kanoi said he hopes to see more students revel in the many coming events to be offered by the program, as detailed on their active calendar. 

Sabin later reiterated that the program, which serves as an umbrella for a number of other associated endeavors such as the Environmental Film Festival and the Franke Program in Science and the Humanities, welcomes all interested students.

“Environmental Humanities is broadly open to anyone who’s interested in thinking about the intersection between humanities and the environment,” Sabin said “Think about questions of culture, social, social questions, ethics, ethical questions. Those can enrich any other fields of study that people might have. So you don’t have to be in the humanities, but rather think about the relationship of the work that you do to these broader humanistic contexts.”

The Environmental Humanities program is open to all members of the Yale community and now offers a graduate certificate in Environmental Humanities.

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Originally founded in 2017 by multiple seniors at the Sound School, a vocational aquaculture high school, as part of their capstone, the reef currently consists of thirteen “reef balls,” each of which is two feet in diameter and made of a combination of cement, sand, gravel and oyster shell. Beyond its environmental advantages, which includes improving the local water quality by filtering it through oysters, the reef serves as a living laboratory for both the Sound School and Yale students, who can conduct scientific research and gain technical skills. 

“The mission of the school is to help students become stewards of the environment and aquaculture,” said Peter Solomon, the aquaculture coordinator at the Sound School, referring to the reef’s practical and learning value. 

The reef grew in size and scope after James Nikkel, a research scientist in the Yale Physics Department and the director of the Advanced Prototyping Center, located in the Wright Lab, helped the school in 2022 secure a seed grant from Yale Planetary Solutions, a program that aims to raise awareness about climate change and biodiversity.

After receiving initial funding, the reef project sought to secure an environmental permit from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection and the state Department of Agriculture. 

“You need to go through a bunch of hoops to get permitting to put something into the water,” Nikkel said. 

In collaboration with John Buell, the chair of the New Haven Harbor Foundation, Nikkel worked with an independent engineering firm to develop project-design drawings for the expanded reef. Ultimately, the team hopes for the project to become a self-sustaining reef. While recruitment of species from the wild stocks is high, the current die-off levels exceed the natural birth rates.

According to Nicole Bouve, the environmental and underwater science teacher at the Sound School and the project lead for the reef, they hope to build and install 100 new balls by 2027, when the permit ultimately expires. Importantly, Sound School students are the ones building the new reef balls. 

“The students are really bought into the program because they are the ones doing all of the work,” Bouve said. 

Still, the project faces some time and weather constraints. Due to low water temperatures in the winter, the balls can only be installed in late spring and summer and students have to organize their data collection around the oyster growth cycle, from May through October. Further, given that the seed grant funding was completed in October 2023, the project leaders need to pursue more grants.  

According to Arina Telles, a graduate student who works in the Advanced Prototyping Center and is involved in the project, the reef grows little during the winter, so students don’t dive during that time. Nevertheless, she said she is looking forward to conducting more dives in the spring to study the reef more systematically.

Solomon noted that the team installed a data logger prototype on a reef ball to ensure continuous remote collection of data, such as water pH levels, temperatures and oxygen concentrations. The logger is connected through cables to a battery charged from a buoy-based solar panel. 

The team expressed optimism about the reef’s future. Though he acknowledged that this will take several years, Buell hopes for the development of  “a very extensive oyster reef that will build on itself.”

The reef aims to connect the broader New Haven and other state communities with their history, traditions and the environment. Solomon hopes that the reef will join one of the many service-based aquaculture projects being developed across Connecticut with different educational institutions. According to Buell, there is a growing national interest in similar reefs, such as the Billion Oyster Project in the New York Harbor. 

“It’s a really exciting time, I think we’re headed in a very positive direction as a state,” Solomon said.

The Sound School is located at 60 South Water St. 

Correction, Feb. 5: This article was corrected to reflect that the reef doesn’t grow in the winter and therefore students don’t need to monitor it closely. It has also been corrected to note that the researchers work at the Advanced Prototyping Center, not the Advanced Photocopying Center, within the Wright Lab.

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The Conference of the Parties — the supreme climate governing body formed by the United Nations’ Framework Convention on Climate Change treaty, or COP — is holding its 28th annual summit. The conference, which began Nov. 30 and will run until Dec. 12, brings UN member states from almost 200 countries together to refine climate action plans.

“If you take a look at the universities who will be present at COP, I think Yale really punches above its weight,” Paul Simons, a senior fellow at the Jackson School of Global Affairs who teaches courses on energy and climate change policy, told the News.

According to Simons, many of Yale’s “top-level experts” and policy researchers are attending this year’s conference, including Dan Esty LAW ’86, a professor of environmental law and trade policy at the Law School, and Anthony Leiserowitz, the director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and a professor at the School of the Environment. Julie Zimmerman, the vice provost for Planetary Solutions and a professor at the School of Environment, is also at COP28. Representatives from the Yale Emerging Climate Leaders, a group of young climate professionals from the Global South, are also attending. 

Additionally, many students are participating in the conference. These include 11 undergraduate representatives who are part of the Yale Student Environmental Coalition. These undergraduate representatives have joined other stakeholders to help address climate issues. 

Peter Boyd, a resident fellow at the Center for Business and the Environment, said that many graduate students are also at the conference. Boyd told the News he is even having roughly 10 students enrolled in his “International Organizations and Conferences” class at the School of the Environment visit the conference as part of the course.

Yale students at COP28

Peyton Meyer ’24 is one of the 11 undergraduates representing the Yale Student Environment Coalition. For Meyer, COP28 gives students the opportunity to engage with climate policymakers, world leaders, NGO staff and other students from around the globe at one of the most important international climate conferences. 

Meyer also said that students who receive official “observer” status can attend most of the events at COP28.

“These include side events at pavilions run by various organizations and countries throughout the venue on a ton of different climate-related topics, COP presidency events on the daily themes like health or finance, and multilateral negotiation sessions with country delegates,” Meyer told the News. 

Meyer gave a presentation at the Higher Education Pavilion on the intersection of climate change and mental health as a part of the Yale Planetary Solutions Series, a Yale project that seeks to raise awareness about climate issues and spark innovative solutions.

Nevertheless, students cannot contribute to any negotiations between parties. 

“I’ve dreamed of attending a Conference of the Parties for a long time. I keep describing it as like Disneyland for climate activists,” Rose Hansen ’25, an environmental studies major and co-president of the Yale Student Environmental Coalition, told the News. “They are just thousands and thousands of really brilliant, really hard-working people all in the same place.”

Hansen, who works with World Bank Director of Global Resources Valerie Hickey and Coral Vita, a coral regeneration start-up, said that Yalies at the event had formed a “really active and enriched network” to support each other.

For Marco Marsans ’24, getting to participate in COP28 has confirmed his plans to dedicate his life to climate change. He said he believes the knowledge he has gained from the conference will help him pinpoint how and where he can do the most good.

Marsans also mentioned how “exhilarating” it is to attend the conference as an undergraduate.

“You keep bumping into your idols,” he said. “I really wanted to meet Bill Gates — reading his book is what started me on this whole climate journey — and I’ve met him twice now, which has been deeply moving.”

Gates, former CEO of Microsoft and author of “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need,” is just one of many philanthropists attending and contributing to COP this year. 

A one-of-a-kind conference

According to Boyd, this year’s climate conference may have many firsts. The UN expects over 70,000 attendees, an increase of over 20,000 from last year. Boyd also noted that more private corporations, indigenous people and youth groups are participating in the talks.

Hansen said that this is the first conference to have a Global Stocktake — a comprehensive, collective inventory of all carbon emissions. Mandated by the 2015 Paris Agreement, this assessment was established to help countries set future carbon budgets and inform their future climate goals.

Both Boyd and Simons voiced concerns over the current pace of climate action and expressed doubt on the feasibility of reaching the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement’s goals. 

“We have to realize that we’re not as far ahead on progress as we should be,” Boyd told the News.

Under the 2015 Paris Agreement, 194 states pledged to limit average global temperatures to two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and ideally to no more than 1.5 degrees. However, a recent UN emissions gap report, which was issued weeks in advance of COP28, suggested that, at the current rate, temperatures could increase to roughly three degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. According to the report, greenhouse gas emissions reached a record high in 2022, and states would have to cut their carbon emission by 28 to 42 percent by 2030 in order to meet the Paris Agreement’s goals.

Simons said that many of the member nations’ “high levels of ambition” have not translated to significant execution. Even though nearly 90 percent of global emissions were accounted for by net-zero targets from last year’s conference, he said that the world’s total emissions have yet to peak.

The report also found that per capita emissions in the U.S. and Russia have risen since 2020. As of 2018, all the existing mines and fields were projected to produce enough coal, oil and natural gas over their lifetimes to emit 3.5 times the world’s total allotted carbon budget under the 1.5-degree Celsius increase temperature scenario.

Debate over the future of fossil fuels

Several Yale faculty members attending COP28 told the News that they expected the debate over fossil fuel phaseout to take center stage in the discussions. 

The COP28 host nation, United Arab Emirates, is among the world’s top ten oil producers and generates an average 3.2 million barrels of petroleum a day. 

“The greatest challenge is finding a middle ground between two powerful groups: those who consider fossil fuels as an inevitable part of the medium-term energy mix and those who are pushing for an extremely rapid phase-down of all oil and gas consumption,” Kenneth Gillingham, a professor of energy economics at the School of the Environment, wrote in an email to the News.

Still, Boyd also said that it might be a “tall ask” to make states end fossil fuel extraction given the “interests in the room.”

“It’s sad but not surprising that there are people that could be using the gathering to sustain the old way,” Boyd said. “But I’m hoping now that it’s out in the open, there are enough loud voices to talk about what needs to be done.”

COP28 Chair Sultan al-Jaber has drawn criticism from environmental groups. As head of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, he has claimed that fossil fuel companies must have a part in the sustainable transition. During the first days of the conference, Jaber opened with calls to phase down fossil fuel production, rather than advocating to eliminate fossil fuel use.

Jaber’s efforts to fold the oil industry into climate talks “has not really been attempted before,” said Simons. Despite the presence of gas and oil executives at this year’s conference, Simons added that the UAE has also boasted a “strong track record” of investments in renewables around the world. 

Simons and Boyd both emphasized that fossil fuel phaseout targets are inseparable from efforts to accelerate the rollout of sustainable technologies. 

Though many news outlets cover its international dealmaking, COP28 offers an equally important opportunity for private industries in the corporate, philanthropic and civil society sectors to showcase their work, said Simons.

“I feel like this COP has really taught me a lot about how to work with […] people who might not immediately line your interests,” Hansen said. “In this transition, we have to build bridges […] and this transition is going to take all of us.”

Berlin hosted the first Conference of the Parties in 1995.

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