The winners of the Windham-Campbell Prize, a prestigious award presented annually to writers of fiction, nonfiction, poetry and drama, were formally announced last Tuesday. The prize, which includes monetary compensation of $175,000, intends to support writers in their creative craft.

This year’s awards, led by director Michael Kelleher and administered by the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, recognized Christina Sharpe, Christopher Chen, Deirdre Madden, Hanif Abdurraqib, Jen Hadfield, Kathryn Scanlan, NourbeSe Philip and Sonya Kelly.

“I just think this […] is a really daring group of writers,” Kelleher said. “Some of them write about really difficult subjects. Some of them write in really inventive new forms, and they find new ways to use language to examine ideas and feelings and situations.”

According to Kelleher, the year-long prize selection process is fully anonymous and confidential. The Windham-Campbell prizes receive 30 nominations from Anglophone writers around the world. A panel of three judges per category read the writers’ works and narrow the field before submitting them to a final, nine-member selection committee.

Prize winners received the news with surprise.

“It’s really one of those very astonishing, delightful things,” NourbeSe Philip, one of the year’s two poetry winners, said.

Having been writing for over 40 years, the prize came from out of the blue, she told the News. She received an email from Michael Kelleher that requested she call him the following day. When she found out she was a recipient, she “just couldn’t believe it.”

She added that her anticipation of the prize money has reduced her anxiety in the face of a global, but especially Canadian, “affordability crisis” and granted her the freedom to turn down more projects.

Philip’s ideas, she said, come “in response to the external world.” She cited the pandemic, George Floyd and the ongoing war in Gaza as places where her poems may begin. 

“I was working with the idea of history, juxtaposing the large-scale canvas of what I call uppercase history with lowercase histories of family and origin and stories,” Philips said.

Currently, she is working on a collection of essays that she plans to finish this August. She also hopes to revisit and rework poems from decades past.

“I’m contending with language,” Philip said. “Using language almost like the way a painter uses paint.”

The award was first issued in 2013 following a gift from Donald Windham in memory of his partner, Sandy Campbell. As members of a rich American literary scene, Windham and Campbell boasted close ties to Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams. Campbell, who had sizable family stocks, left the family fortune to Windham when he died. Windham subsequently donated the funds to the Beinecke in 2011.

“The idea behind the prize was always to provide writers with time to write,” Kelleher said. “It’s given to them out of love, and it’s given to them out of a desire to see them fulfill their ambitions.”

In an email to the News, nonfiction winner Christina Sharpe expressed relief that the award would free her “from a great deal of worry.”

She said that her work focuses on the aftermath of slavery and added that the prize would allow her to continue producing work that continues experimenting with form and imagines “other, not brutal, ways of living into possibility.”

For fiction winner Deirdre Madden, the prize “was a wonderful surprise” — one that gives her the chance to “[balance] the writing with the other demands of life.” Her work, which deals with the subjects of memory and time, has explored themes of painting and artwork, families and the Northern Irish Troubles.

Kelleher also emphasized the importance of writing prizes in a world of diminishing literary profitability. He explained that, unlike other competitive writing awards, the Windham-Campbell prizes seek to foster a sense of community and collaboration.

Prize winners will visit the University come fall during the annual Windham-Campbell Festival for the ceremony and a keynote address delivered by a notable writer. During the weeklong event, they will deliver readings and participate in conversations throughout the New Haven community.

According to Kelleher, next year’s nominations have already started coming in.

Previous prize recipients include Ling Ma, Tsitsi Dangarembga and Yiyun Li.

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On its face, the whole premise may seem strange, and even a bit comically absurd: a 29.5-inch ball dragging some 28.3 million people down a month-long rollercoaster ride of euphoria and hysterics. What’s at stake is really only a wooden trophy, an impossible $1 million-per-year-for-life wager, and bragging rights that last for no more than a month. Few other tournaments can justify all the car burning, Charles Barkley ads or vasectomies.

Uncertainty is part of the appeal. We like David-Goliath dynamics that pit scrappy first-timers against blue-blood dynasties. Some things are mathematically inconceivable, such as a perfect bracket or a 14th-seed reaching the Final Four. But within these limits, the border that separates the possible from the probable is still fairly thin and porous: the laws of free-throw averages and three-point percentages momentarily cease to operate. Number-crunching helps but can only take you so far. Rules of thumb exist, but so do the exceptions. Forget the babbling sports heads or Vegas sportsbooks and FiveThirtyEight predictions. What matters here is right before you: the missed layups and scoring runs, wrong calls and botched free throws. There is drama. There are falls, redemptions. The 20 games before this make no promises about the 20 minutes to come.

Every game is an exercise in transience. There is before: the fanfare, introductions, dark stadiums stuffed 

20,000 strong, all shirtless, face-painted or sweaty. There is after: reels, headlines, broken brackets. Between the two is a rubbery space that alternately expands or contracts, an interval that lends itself to lessons about living in the moment or carpe diem.

In some contests, these key sequences are easier to spot than others. We might make out the knife’s edge of a game at a few points in a game, a back-and-forth possession in which the momentum visibly tips from one side of the fulcrum to the other. Certain putback dunks naturally steal all the oxygen in the air. Some back-to-back threes remind us, at some instinctive level, that the game has been sealed. The players on the bench who had been laughing one buzzer-beater ago now have their heads buried in Gatorade towels. We like imagining “One Shining Moment,” a single shot or the razor-thin margins of a second that make all the difference between victory and defeat.

But events don’t usually unfold in this way. Most games are more complex than that, culminations of possessions we might not fully understand or even register. We do not think about a team’s missed free throw three minutes into the game until the last 30 seconds of regulation, when the team is down by a point. That intercepted pass somewhere before the second TV timeout only comes to bite back when we watch condensed replays. Often there is no single moment, just tiny ones strung together — flicks of a wrist, marginally delayed lay-ups, pump fakes — that build up, one after the other. For all our emphasis on the present, we never really understand in it the way we should or can. Some moments ever come signposted; most just slip past. We always end up selecting what to remember, how to remember.

I’ve chosen my own touchstones of time. A few, though listed in no necessary order of importance: Kris Jenkins’ three, Aaron Harrison’s hot hand, the annual variations of Chris Paul’s State Farm ads. That was the year Zion Williamson played. That was the game Luke Mayes sent a dagger sailing through the net. That was the night Texas A&M staged a 12-point rally in just 31.1 seconds. That was the year a deer kicked down bowling balls in Chris Paul’s house.

For now, the replays will sit atop Twitter’s trending page. The confetti shower and hoisted trophy grace the cover of USA Today or ESPN primetime. For a few weeks longer the games might still remain talk for Stephen A. or fourth-graders heaving imaginary halfcourt buzzer beaters after basketball practice. Then, months from now, as with everything else, it will all hush to a faint rustling in the rafters. History.

We trudge into the desert of the offseason. The five-star recruitments come trickling in, along with press conferences and summer tours. We sketch out our career plans and internships and courses for next semester. But some things we will hold onto — that game, that play — remembering the event right down to where and when it happened.

We make our memories at a moment’s notice, in the fractions of a second or blinks of an eye. We spend the rest of our lives retracing them.

The post The Madness and Magic of March appeared first on Yale Daily News.

As part of a growing effort to support academic research in the Connecticut area, the locally-based climate start-up incubator helps its members connect to sources of venture capital, network with other companies, navigate regulations and find manufacturing suppliers. Its 22 start-ups take on challenges that range from electric battery recycling to bio-concrete and bio-synthesized industrial materials. Seeking to bring the city to the forefront of sustainability, the incubator has also benefited from a close relationship with the University. 

“Yale was our first university partner,” Kiko Wong ’22, ClimateHaven startup portfolio manager, said. “We’re hoping to build this pipeline of technologies and build this path with a number of other universities in the region as well.”

According to Josh Geballe ’97 MBA ’02, senior associate provost for entrepreneurship and innovation at Yale, the incubator was founded to address the growth of university lab research and fill some of the region’s gaps in climate start-up support.

Initial discussions for ClimateHaven started back in May 2022, along with visits to Massachusetts-based incubator Greentown Labs and local market demand assessments.

“We were seeing a significantly increasing number of climate tech startups coming out of Yale research and a significantly expanding number of students who are going into climate solutions, and decided that we wanted to create something similar in New Haven,” Geballe said.

While ClimateHaven is independent from the University, the two have worked in tandem since the organization’s inception

Geballe, who directs Yale Ventures, is also a member of the incubator’s board. Other Yale-affiliated board members include Yale Center for Business and the Environment director Stuart DeCew as well as Claudia Reuter, Yale Venture’s Robert Innovation Fund director. The incubator also received seed funding from the University in addition to other donors. 

In guiding start-ups to market, the incubator has direct interest in supporting spinouts from nearby research institutions such as the University, Wong explained.

According to a report by the National Academy of Inventors, the University ranked 53rd globally for patents granted last year, with 57 awarded.

“We want to be a part of that runway off of the University as researchers are ready to take the next step to really become a startup,” Wong said.

Geballe added that membership with ClimateHaven offers access to prototyping space, a mentorship program with guidance from experienced investors, connections to sources of equity investment and a sense of community.

“[ClimateHaven] provide[s] great support and great visibility,” Lonnie Garris, CEO of member start-up Cool Amps, said. “You’re getting more than just physical space — it’s networking opportunities with other companies, other organizations that they bring in to help founders.”

Inspired during his time at the School of Management’s Global Executive Leadership Program, Garris co-founded Cool Amps to specialize in smaller-scale battery recycling from end-of-life appliances and devices. According to Garris, the company’s patented electrochemical process resulted in metal extraction that was nearly 50 percent more energy-efficient than existing methods of hydrometallurgy and pyrometallurgy.

Though climate technology ventures raised $51 billion in venture capital last year, inflation has slightly hamstrung start-up efforts. 2023 saw an estimated 15- to 27-percent decrease in climate venture deal count and a 12-percent drop in total funding from the prior year.

However, the U.S. remains one of climate technology’s funding leaders — the Biden administration’s 2022 Inflation Reduction Act allocated $14.6 billion to climate startups, more than any other country. The U.S. also earned more than 40 percent of all global climate tech funding last year.

Wong and Geballe expressed hopes to continue expanding ClimateHaven in the months ahead. The incubator has been looking to provide more office and prototyping space for its members. Geballe explained that the incubator is undergoing an expansion of its existing 17,000-square-foot space on 770 Chapel St. while discussing other potential sites with the city.

“I think new innovations and new technologies is really one of the most important keys to addressing the climate crisis,” Geballe said. “We’re really excited that more of the startups that we’re spinning out will be able to stay here in New Haven.”

In its updated 2023 report, the International Energy Agency suggests that reaching net zero by 2050 will require technologies not yet available on the market to account for 35 percent of emissions reductions.

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Unveiled last month, YSE’s new “Urban Climate Leadership Certificate Program” started accepting applications for its first cohort on March 1. The nine-month virtual certificate program — focusing on the relationship between urban spaces and the climate crisis — joins two others aimed at supporting mid-career professionals in the Global South.

“We really hope that this is an opportunity to both learn about the myriad ways that cities contribute to climate change and are impacted by climate change,” said Cameron Kritikos DIV ’23 ENV ’23, Urban Climate Leadership program manager. “The speed and scale of urbanization, and the concurrent deterioration of our planetary system, demands swift and scalable solutions.”

Kritikos explained that the 36-week curriculum will encompass five themes: urbanization and climate change, adaptation solutions, carbon accounting, governance and implementation. The fully remote program will guide its 50-member cohort through a survey of current urban climate challenges, policy initiatives and new opportunities.

According to Colleen Murphy-Dunning, a School of the Environment lecturer and program staff member, the coursework will consist of 36 weekly modules, each of which involves faculty-led seminar discussions paired with an hour of asynchronous lecture by climate leaders from around the world. Intended to offer students a variety of perspectives, the program’s slate of lecturers ranges from IPCC authors to nonprofit leaders and Yale professors.

After nearly a year of development, the program looks to address a growing area of climate interest.

“Urbanization is one of the megatrends of the 21st century, and cities are at the front lines of climate change,” Karen Seto, School of the Environment professor and director of the Hixon Center for Urban Sustainability, wrote in an email to the News. “There is an urgent need to develop leaders who can help cities both mitigate and adapt to climate change.”

Asha Ghosh, Urban Program manager at the School of the Environment and a lecturer at the School of Management, said that the program’s emphasis on urban spaces navigates the complex dynamics between our urban centers and the warming climate. Urban spaces are the largest contributors to global carbon emissions, but they also present some of the foremost opportunities for new climate solutions, she added. 

“Cities hold the opportunity to make the biggest impact, in terms of addressing these climate challenges,” Ghosh said.

Equity — questions about how climate differentially impacts urban communities, for instance — will be a key “thread” throughout the program, Ghosh added.

Urban forestry — currently one of the most promising nature-based solutions to climate adaptation in cities — will also receive significant instructional attention, Murphy-Dunning added. Murphy-Dunning, who is leading one of the program’s urban forestry modules, explained that trees can mitigate heat island effects but must also be considered in the context of other urban infrastructure.

The Biden administration’s 2022 Inflation Reduction Act has bolstered city greening efforts, bankrolling urban forestry efforts across the country with its record $1-billion investment. Now, according to Murphy-Dunning, urban foresters must consider the challenges posed by uncertain precipitation, temperature changes and potential conflicts with housing.

“It’s not just using trees as a vehicle for mitigation, but it’s also recognizing that the urban forest itself has to adapt to climate change,” Murphy-Dunning said.

Sustainable development can be especially challenging in developing nations, Ghosh explained. Many cities in the Global South undergo a process of repeated upgrading from informal to formal settlements, rather than relying entirely on planned development. Buildings and large infrastructure projects are often developed without accounting for city-mandated plans or the environmental features of the land.

Kritikos emphasized the program’s relevance to any potential students working in governance, nonprofits or the private sector. Given the complexity of cities — spaces where infrastructure, nature and communities interact — advancing urban sustainability is a “messy process” that will need to engage all stakeholders involved, Kritikos said. The program expects to offer something for applicants from a diversity of professional specializations. 

The first of the School of Environment’s certificate programs was launched in 2022 following a donation from the Three Cairns Group, the largest-ever gift in support of the school. The slate of online courses are designed to support emerging, mid-career professionals throughout the Global South.

“[The program] is going to allow us to bring the latest science to practitioners, which I think is really important,” Murphy-Dunning told the News. “[It] allows for the possibility of more people to participate in learning through the university.”

The School of the Environment’s two other certificate programs, “Financing and Deploying Clean Energy” and “Tropical Forest Landscapes,” invite students to explore green technology policies and conservation initiatives, respectively. 

Applications for this program will close on April 30. Accepted applicants will matriculate later this August. Applications for the forest landscapes program will close on April 5 and for the clean energy program on March 10. 

Ghosh and Murphy-Dunning were both hopeful the program might provide students the opportunity to connect, share ideas and generate new solutions. 

“We need to very rapidly make change because of the pressure of climate change,” Murphy-Dunning said. “I think there’s a sense of urgency … that we can’t continue to build cities the way we have in the past.” 

According to UN estimates, urban centers currently account for 75 percent of global CO2 emissions.

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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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Founded in 2022 with grant funding from the Planetary Solutions Project, the Bird-Friendly Building Initiative has researched ways we might reimagine urban spaces to better accommodate birds. By assessing policy proposals for more bird-friendly cities and tracking bird deaths across the University, the project has started making an impact on campus building projects.

“[Bird collisions are a] bigger issue than people think often,” Viveca Morris ’15 ENV ’18 SOM ’19, executive director of the Yale Law, Ethics and Animals Program, said to the News. “With the initiative, we’ve tried to create a data-driven plan for what the university can do.”

According to Morris, urban spaces are significant — and often overlooked — contributors to wildlife deaths. Since birds struggle to perceive glass, building windows results in an estimated 365 million to one billion annual bird deaths nationwide — a figure that may only grow with the construction of large, reflective structures.

One of the initiative’s priorities has involved research on the effectiveness of local bird-friendly policy efforts.

Released last August, the initiative’s “Building Safer Cities for Birds” report compared the success of local bird-friendly policy across regions such as New York City and Arlington, Virginia. The report cited the need for state and national standards to complement local policy and concluded that bird-friendly window material was compatible with green design principles and cost-efficiency.

The initiative has also kept a close focus on home by treating Yale’s campus as a laboratory, Morris explained. By tracking bird-building collisions across Yale, the project seeks to spearhead building standards and demonstrate the effectiveness of retrofitting solutions that might offer a bird-friendly model for other campuses.

In partnership with the Peabody Museum, Morris added that the initiative has monitored collisions during peak bird migration in fall 2022, spring 2023, fall 2023 and soon in spring 2024. Every day over an eight-week period, student volunteers collect fallen birds along three routes across campus.

Peabody collections manager Kristof Zyskowski explained that the bird casualties are sent to the Peabody Museum, where they are photographed, sampled for muscle tissue, prepared and added to the ornithology collection. The frozen tissue samples provide researchers an opportunity to study genetic composition and climate-related geographical shifts of certain species over time. 

“These kinds of specimens document the occurrence of a particular species at a particular place and time and can serve for all sorts of projects — morphology, anatomy, pathogen emergence, pesticide presence,” Zyskowski told the News. “With the state-of-the-art archival conditions provided by the museum, these specimens are expected to last for centuries.”

 According to Zyskowski, the white-throated sparrow and dark-eyed Junco have been especially vulnerable to building collisions. Other common victims include the mourning dove, black-capped chickadee and ruby-throated hummingbirds.

Zyskowski, who has lived in the New Haven area for 22 years, acknowledged that the scale of bird collisions on campus has been “progressively increasing” over the decades since the construction of new glass-rich buildings. He estimated that Yale’s campus — along with some downtown New Haven buildings — has experienced over 700 bird casualties in 2023. Based on the data collected by the Yale Bird-Friendly Building Initiative, the School of Management’s Evans Hall and certain buildings on West Campus have been responsible for the greatest number of casualties on Yale’s campus.

However, Morris added that the initiative’s data collection has helped pave the way for more thoughtful building design on campus.

In 2019, the Yale Office of Facilities adopted a bird-collision mitigation design standard. In an email to the News, Cathy Jackson, director of planning administration for Yale’s Office of Facilities, said that the University has since been working to “[apply] bird safety measures to more of its existing buildings.”

Jackson added that a growing market for bird-friendly products has helped make more options available. Bird-friendly windows involve fritted, or patterned glass that increases their visibility to wildlife. Recently, safety film has also introduced designs that break up reflections.

The building standards have impacted a suite of buildings across campus. 87 Trumbull St. — the University’s latest home for its economics department — featured all bird-friendly windows in its design. The Peabody Museum — which opens later this spring — incorporated fritted windows into its renovation plans as well.

According to Jackson, the Office of Facilities has piloted the use of a patterned safety film at the School of Nursing and just wrapped up a mitigation project on the Collection Studies Center at West Campus, a building with “high collision levels.” She added that the Bird-Friendly Initiative helped track some of their initial mitigation projects to assess their success.

The initiative has also brought changes to the School of Management.

In an email to the News, School of Management media relations director Rosalind D’Eugenio explained that a 2022 pilot project successfully tested the effects of bird-friendly film on one side of the building. During a later eight-week monitoring period, the treated face reported no collisions.

Since then, the school has settled on a horizontal-striped pattern that “will maintain the aesthetic of the Evans Hall building design” and “reduce the heat load of the building.” The retrofitting project will begin once “the weather allows for another installation.”

Zyskowski said that the bird-friendly retrofitting projects at both Evans Hall and the West Campus buildings have already started paying dividends as these buildings have seen a significant collision reduction. Similarly, new university building projects that used bird-friendly glass, such as 87 Trumbull St., have reported “zero mortality” thus far, per Zyskowski.

“What’s really exciting is we’ve made a lot of progress in getting some of the worst buildings — in terms of bird kills — retrofitted, and that progress and work continues,” Morris said.

Morris added that the Bird-Friendly Building Initiative plans to release its data analysis in a publication later this summer.

Jackson said that inexperience was one of the construction industry’s initial challenges to addressing bird-building collisions. However, that changed after a “watershed moment” in 2019 when New York City adopted Local Law 15, requiring buildings to use bird-friendly materials on their exteriors.

Bird-building collisions have coincided with a decades-long decline in common bird species across North America. According to a study, the continent has seen the disappearance of roughly 3 billion birds — or 29 percent of the population — between 1970 and 2018; human development, pesticide use and deforestation could all be to blame.

The Yale Peabody Museum ornithology collection currently houses more than 152,000 bird specimens.

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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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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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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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With its second year in operation, the West Campus Farm — a community-managed space led by farm manager Jordan Williams — is connecting researchers and students through tending to the farm. Though still in its infancy, the growing pilot program has been teaching the community about farming, sustainable food systems and responsible land management.

“I’m just trying to make sure that this is more of a public space, more of a welcoming space,” Williams told the News. “Part of what I’m trying to do is make [the farm] more accessible and to make people aware that it’s here.”

With 44 raised garden beds, the farm offers a small plot for any hobbyist gardener willing to take care of it. Williams said that the farm follows a community-supported agriculture model, where members invest their time in helping with the space’s upkeep in exchange for shared harvests.

Since joining the farm, Williams has grounded his gardening practices in an ethos of permaculture. He said that permaculture, which prioritizes responsible stewardship of the land and resource use, has helped establish the farm as an example of sustainable practices. Crops are grown pesticide-free and fertilized by compost, fish emulsions or mycorrhizae. 

As interest in gardening continues to grow, especially in urban settings, finding reliable gardening tools in Hong Kong has never been easier. Numerous stores offer a wide selection of eco-friendly options tailored to suit different gardening styles and needs.

Williams believes that empowering hobbyist gardeners with quality tools is essential for fostering a deeper connection to the land and promoting sustainable practices. By equipping themselves with the right resources, gardeners can transform their small plots into thriving ecosystems that contribute to both personal well-being and environmental health.

Williams added that the farm’s focus on crop rotation and organic gardening has helped remind community members about the relationship between food sovereignty and health in an age of increasingly destructive agricultural practices.

“Having a relationship with the ingredients that you’re using and growing your own food, is really essential to people’s health,” Williams told the News. “It’s empowering to grow your own food.”

According to Williams, the lot has existed for almost a decade. Christelle Ramos, assistant director of communications for Yale Hospitality, wrote that prior to 2021, the lot — formerly known as the Yale Landscape Lab — was loosely managed by a small group of West Campus students and staff volunteers. Yale Hospitality brought Williams into the position last year to help coordinate community events and oversee maintenance, per Ramos.

Williams said that he has sought to increase the farm’s presence on the 136-acre campus. Over his first year as farm manager, he has created a GroupMe, email lists and weekly volunteer sessions for anyone interested in helping. Volunteers with garden beds can enter the space to work at any time of the day.

“The vision for the farm is centered on fostering community engagement and supporting various educational initiatives,” Ramos wrote an email to the News. “We aim to create a space to uplift and support the community—where nursing students and faculty members can take breaks to recharge, spend quality time, and even put their knowledge into practice.”

Williams said his emphasis on community-building and diversity has extended to the farm’s gardening philosophy. During a tour of the lot, he pointed to the heirloom tomatoes growing alongside black-eyed peas and mini cucumbers. Sorghum stalk brushed against corn husks in the greenhouse.

The space is also home to a handful of more lesser-known species, such as ground cherries, horsetail and burdock. A sixth-generation farmer, Williams has also introduced okra and Gungo peas that pay homage to his roots in Jamaica, Georgia and Alabama.

“A weed is just a plant that we don’t know what to do with,” Williams said. “But to me there’s no such thing as a weed. Every plant has a use.”

The harvest is not large enough to regularly supply the menus of the West Campus cafe, which serves roughly two hundred diners each day. However, Williams noted that some of the crops occasionally are featured in the cafe’s specialty farm-to-table dishes. The cafe has even used the farm’s purple sweet potatoes in fudge brownies and used a couple pounds of harvested blueberries to make jam. Williams explained that he often leaves the harvest for community members to take.

Nursing students, researchers and staff members are also invited to engage in a different kind of experimentation at the farm which is across the parking lot from the nursing school and science labs.

Molly Skinner-Day NUR ’25, a School of Nursing student, joined the farm during her first year and said that she rekindled her passion for gardening in the process. This year, she cared for a garden bed by planting butterfly seed mix, escarole, lettuce, parsley and kale. She added that the reward of spending time in nature and with others has led her to consistently return to the farm.

The integration of landscape design into gardening projects can significantly enhance the overall experience and outcome of such initiatives. By applying principles of thoughtful design, garden spaces can be transformed into beautiful, functional areas that offer both aesthetic pleasure and practical benefits. This approach involves selecting appropriate plant species, arranging them to create visual harmony, and incorporating elements that support the health and growth of the plants.

“For our schedules, [visiting the farm is] really tough,” Skinner-Day said. “But sometimes just being able to be out for an hour or even less is really helpful.”

Despite the successes of this year, Williams spoke about the challenges of transforming the space. Given West Campus’ seven-mile distance from New Haven, he said there has been difficulty in “building a community from scratch.” He has continued recruiting new volunteers to ensure the farm can “accommodate all the different needs from different people.”

The farm has also contended with unwanted visitors — voles and rabbits — and grappled with the effects of climate change. According to Williams, gardeners this year had to “adapt” to a dry spring and abnormally rainy summer. He explained that even small shifts in seasonal patterns can often compromise plant immune systems, making them more vulnerable to white flies or diseases like powdery mildew.

Members of the farm have since cleared their garden beds for the season, but the work does not stop. Williams said he has started preparing the seed ordering list and planning for next spring. Skinner-Day said she is looking forward to trying out new vegetables and growing garlic in the interim.

“Being a farmer is also being a scientist,” Williams said.

Yale purchased West Campus from Bayer Pharmaceuticals in 2007.

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