Forty master's and professional-degree students from eight schools and colleges at the University of Michigan, including 17 from the School of Natural Resources and Environment, are beginning the Dow Sustainability Fellows Program today, marking the first cohort of fellows in the $10 million program launched last spring.
1991-92: Talks begin between deans of the schools of Business and Natural Resources and Environment about the creation of a joint degree involving business and environmental studies
1994: The Corporate Environmental Management Program (CEMP) debuts; first class enters fall 1994. Advisory board formed to shape program’s direction
1993: Stu Hart hired as CEMP’s first director
Achim Steiner, the Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations and the Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme, will deliver the 12th Annual Peter M. Wege Lecture on Sustainability Monday, March 11.
The lecture begins at 5 p.m. in the Rackham Auditorium, and is followed by a public reception.
The title of his lecture is "The Imperative of Change: Environmentalism in the 21st Century
LECTURE ABSTRACT:
Energized by overwhelming scientific evidence and agreement that human activity is causing serious changes in the Earth’s climate, the Erb Institute has joined environmental, social, and economic leaders around the world in promoting climate-change research, action, and opportunity on a global scale.
Reaching across business sectors and national borders, the Institute has identified and disseminated strategies for advancing energy-efficient technologies, informing the climate policies of key decision-makers, and encouraging climate-wise behavior by corporations and consumers.
Greg Keoleian, a professor of Sustainable Systems at SNRE and director of its Center for Sustainable Systems, was interviewed by SmartPlanet’s Ian Mount regarding plans by Uruguay to become the world’s biggest producer of wind power and one of the planet’s greenest countries.
Attention SNREds!
It’s that time of the year; please join the greater SNRE community this Friday, December 7th as three Master’s Project teams present their final reports during the Master’s Project Symposium (1040 Dana). This is truly an exciting event. The students involved in these projects have spent countless hours on these intense, interdisciplinary projects, which are the cornerstone of the SNRE professional-school program. Brief descriptions of each of the three projects are below.
At the end of the winter semester last year, students in the Environmental Policy & Planning (EPP) Working Group held a visioning session to determine how to improve the EPP track in SNRE. The end product of the session was an action plan that outlines planned activities for the EPP Working Group for this academic year and goals for the longer term.
Jennifer Blesh is a post-doctoral researcher in agronomy at the Federal University of Mato Grosso in Cuiabá, Mato Grosso, Brazil. She earned her Ph.D. in soil and crop sciences and a master of science degree in soil science, both from Cornell University. She also has a bachelor of science degree in ecology from the University of Geogia.
When: Tuesday, Dec. 4; 4-5 p.m.
Where: Room 1040, Dana Building
We have arrived in Doha, Qatar—a city rising from the desert and, rather ironically, from oil revenue—for the 18th United Nations Conference of the Parties (COP18). While expectations for an international climate change agreement are tempered this COP, 2012 is significant in that two of the negotiating tracts—the Kyoto (KP) Track for signatories of that protocol and the Long-term Cooperative Action (LCA) Track for developed countries taking “mitigation actions” outside of Kyoto—are expected to close this year.
This past summer, a group of University of Michigan graduate students from the College of Engineering and the School of Natural Resources and Environment traveled to Liberia, West Africa as members of the student organization Sustainability Without Borders. Sustainability Without Borders (SWB) is an interdisciplinary organization whose objective is to create a network of sustainability practitioners who develop and implement sustainability projects in rural areas of developing countries.