• Managed Retreat Conference

    The Columbia Climate School and its Earth Institute, will hold a virtual conference 22-25 June 20201 on the subject of managed retreat. conference will address a range of scientific, social, policy, and governance issues around managed retreat (also known as strategic realignment and planned relocation).

  • Drought and Record Heat in the West: The Climate Change Connection

    As intense drought and record heat make their way across the Western U.S., the deep and devastating impacts of this extreme weather are clear — electric utilities are asking consumers to ration power and water, farmers are scrambling to sell or save their produce, and officials are making plans to keep their communities safe and cool. All before true summer weather arrives. Research shows that these extreme events are expected to continue as our climate changes.

  • Exploring the Possible Risks, Benefits of Geoengineering

    Climate change is creating impacts that are widespread and severe — and in many cases irreversible — for individuals, communities, economies, and ecosystems around the world. 2020 was one of the three warmest years on record, bringing with it a number of costly climate disasters, including the worst wildfire season ever recorded in the Western U.S., historic flooding in China and other parts of Asia, and severe droughts in South America. One of the approaches to avoid the most serious, possibly catastrophic impacts, of climate change is solar geoengineering.

  • Early Wildfires Detection Systems Successfully Tested

    The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) successfully tested four prototype technologies for early detection of wildfires in California this week. The test was the second phase of S&T’s Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) wildfire sensor technology program.

  • World's Largest Outdoor Earthquake Simulator Undergoes Major Upgrade

    A major upgrade to the world’s largest outdoor earthquake simulator reached a milestone mid-April when the facility’s floor—all 300,000 lbs of it—was put back into place. When completed this fall, the simulator will have the ability to reproduce multi-dimensional earthquake motions with unprecedented accuracy to make structures and their residents safer during strong shakes.

  • Teaching Drones to Hear Screams from Catastrophe Victims

    In a disaster, time is of the essence when searching for potential victims who may be difficult to find. Unmanned aerial vehicles make the perfect platform for state-of-the-art technology allowing emergency crews to find those in need and provide situational awareness over a large area.

  • Analysis: The Texas Electric Grid and the Improvements that Didn’t Come

    After the deadly and expensive electrical outages during a winter freeze in February, Texas lawmakers passed major bills aiming to make such disasters less likely in the future. But there’s still a lot to do.

  • Increasing Pace, Intensity of Climate Hazards to Compound Security Threats: Report

    The other day the Expert Group of the International Military Council on Climate and Security (IMCCS) released its second annual World Climate and Security Report, which warns of the compound security threats posed by the convergence of climate change with other global risks, such as COVID-19.

  • Climate Change Increases Extreme Rainfall and the Chance of Floods

    Climate experts warn that, without urgent action, climate change will continue to cause an increase in the intensity of extreme rainfall that can lead to severe flooding.

  • A 20-Foot Sea Wall? Miami Faces the Hard Choices of Climate Change.

    In Miami, the U.S. metropolitan area that is perhaps most exposed to sea-level rise, the problem is not climate change denialism. Patricia Mazzei writes that “the trouble is that the magnitude of the interconnected obstacles the region faces can feel overwhelming, and none of the possible solutions are cheap, easy or pretty.”

  • Retreat from Rising Seas

    As climate change causes seas to rise, coastal communities around the world face a difficult dilemma: Should they fight to keep their homes and communities above water, or accept that moving inland may be the best option?

  • Increasing Flood Risks in the U.K.

    As climate change continues to cause unpredictable and extreme weather events around the world, researchers are calling for engineers to rethink how they design for flood prevention. Flood frequency analysis has been the cornerstone of flood risk control, hydraulic structure design, and water resource management, but the researchers say that flood series in most areas do not follow historical patterns.

  • Tipping Elements Can Destabilize Each Other, Leading to Climate Domino Effects

    Under global warming, tipping elements in the Earth system can destabilize each other and eventually lead to climate domino effects. The ice sheets on Greenland and West Antarctica are potential starting points for tipping cascades, a novel network analysis reveals.

  • How Coastal Towns Can Meet the Challenge of Sea Level Rise

    A group of Florida students was invited to participate in the community presentation of the “Envision Resilience Nantucket Challenge,” a competition that tasked participating teams with reimaging how Nantucket, a small island off Cape Cod, could meet the challenges of climate change and sea level rise.

  • Why Hurricanes Devastate Some Places over and over Again – a Meteorologist Explains

    Every coastline in the North Atlantic is vulnerable to tropical storms, but some areas are more susceptible to hurricane destruction than others. To understand why as the region heads into what’s forecast to be another busy hurricane season, let’s look more closely at how tropical storms form and what turns them into destructive monsters.