The School of Natural Resources and Environment, through its Teaching and Inspring Environmental Stewardship program, is co-sponsoring the ENGAGE Program next week. ENGAGE is an exciting non-residential one-week program for 11th and 12th grade students considering careers in science and engineering.
Two members of the 2011 Green Brewery master's project team were interviewed on Candace Pinaud's show Local Lifestyles on Ann Arbor's business radio station WLBY. The Green Brewery team is working with Arbor Brewing Company on a sustainable business plan for the Corner Brewery and Beer Garden in Ypsilanti.
Joan Iverson Nassauer, a professor of Landscape Architecture in the School of Natural Resources and Environment, was named Distinguished Landscape Ecologist for her scientific contributions to the field by the U.S. Regional Association (national chapter) of the International Association for Landscape Ecology (US-IALE). Professor Nassauer is the first person to be named both Distinguished Landscape Ecologist (2010) and Distinguished Practitioner of Landscape Ecology (1998) by the organization.
March 23, 2011
By Kevin Brown
The passage of health care reform “should free up the capabilities to forge climate change legislation,” President Barack Obama’s assistant for science and technology told a U-M audience Monday.
Two School of Natural Resources and Environment professors were among 10 University of Michigan faculty elected as Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Dan Brown and Ivette Perfecto joined 530 scientists and researchers elected as part of an annual process conducted ty the AAAS. Professor Brown, who joined SNRE in 1999, was recognized for contributions to the understanding of the consequences of land-use change on ecosystems and human vulnerability via the innovative blending of social and ecological analysis. Professor Perfecto, who joined SNRE in 1989, was recognized for contributions to preserving biological diversity, particularly in demonstrating the importance of incorporating agricultural systems in models for conservation of biodiversity.
Today's enormous development challenges are complicated by the reality of climate change—the two are inextricably linked and together demand immediate attention. Climate change threatens all countries, but particularly developing ones. Understanding what climate change means for development policy is the central aim of the World Development Report 2010. It explores how public policy can change to better help people cope with new or worsened risks, how land and water management must adapt to better protect a threatened natural environment while feeding an expanding and more prosperous population, and how energy systems will need to be transformed.
Her theories on economic governance and common property earned Elinor Ostrom a share of this year's Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences. But since 2006, a major initiative she founded to grow and share applications of her research has been housed at the School of Natural Resources and Environment Professor Ostrom, who received an honorary degree from U-M in 2006, started the International Forestry Resources and Institutions (IFRI) research network in the early 1990s. Its focus then, as now, was on collecting and analyzing data at local levels related to forest governance.
Agrawal, colleague link land management, ownership and climate change in forests of developing world
Studying 80 forest "commons" in more than a dozen developing nations, a University of Michigan researcher and his University of Illinois colleague have found links between local ownership and control of those forests and the fight against climate change. They found that greater local ownership and input into forest management appear to keep these areas, also called forest commons, from being overharvested or otherwise misused, thereby increasing their ability to capture carbon and mitigate or slow the effects of climate change. Their findings, based on data collected on three continents, appear in a paper published online Oct. 5 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The authors are Arun Agrawal, a professor and associate dean of the U-M School of Natural Resources and Environment, and Ashwini Chhatre of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Joan Iverson Nassauer, a professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Michigan's School of Natural Resources and Environment, has been elected the first secretary of a new national organization of designers. The group, the National Academy of Environmental Design (NAED), is focused on reshaping national research priorities to more fully incorporate sustainable design as a means of responding to pressing global challenges including climate change, species extinction and a wide range of epidemics and toxins affecting human health.