News & Events

February 3, 2012

The newly released report, Climate Change Impacts and Responses: Societal Indicators for the National Climate Assessment, presents the background materials and outcomes of a workshop held April 28-29, 2011 in Washington, D.C. Sponsored by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the workshop convened more than 50 experts from the social and natural sciences to consider the development of policy-relevant indicators of climate impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability. It was one of three workshops on indicator needs and approaches organized to provide inputs to the National Climate Assessment (NCA), which is preparing a report to be released in 2013. CIESIN director Robert Chen served as co-chair of the workshop steering committee and synthesis team and co-authored the workshop summary (Part 1) and a white paper on the development of societal indicators for the NCA (Part 2). CIESIN senior staff associate Sandra Baptista was also a member of the workshop steering committee and synthesis team and prepared a societal indicators bibliography, inventory summaries, and an inventory table (Parts 3, 4 and 5 of the report). Chen is now one of the co-chairs of the NCA Indicators Working Group together with Anthony Janetos of Battelle/University of Maryland and Deke Arndt of NOAA's National Climatic Data Center.

See: Report: Climate Change Impacts and Responses....
       National Climate Assessment Overview
       Global Change Research Program: Workshop and Meeting Reports

February 2, 2012

The Board on Research Data and Information (BRDI) of the U.S. National Research Council held its sixth meeting in Washington, D.C., January 31–February 1 under the leadership of two new co-chairs, Prof. Francine Berman of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Clifford Lynch of the Coalition for Networked Information. One major focus of the meeting was the role of BRDI in relationship to international scientific data efforts led by the International Council for Science (ICSU), and in particular the ICSU Committee on Data for Science and Technology (CODATA) and the ICSU World Data System (WDS). CIESIN director Robert Chen, in his capacity as CODATA secretary general and ex officio member of BRDI, reported on current CODATA activities and initiatives, including plans for the 23rd CODATA international conference in Taipei in October 2012. He also helped to lead a discussion on potential cooperation between CODATA and the WDS on topics such as data policy, stewardship, citation, and access. Former CIESIN director Roberta Balstad was one of the outgoing BRDI members, having served as BRDI's vice chair and as the former chair of the U.S. National Committee for CODATA.

See: New BRDI Chairs and Members
       Sixth BRDI Meeting Agenda

January 30, 2012

Two new staff appointments have been made recently in CIESIN's Science Applications Division. Sylwia Trzaska, a climate scientist specializing in climate variability and change in Africa and other developing regions, has joined CIESIN as an associate research scientist, effective January 16. She is helping to lead a project on African and Latin American resilience to climate change with support from the U.S. Agency for International Development. Since 2002, Trzaska has worked with the International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI) and the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory (LDEO). Her areas of research include sea surface variability in the Tropical Atlantic; interannual variability of climate and its sub-seasonal features and their predictability in West Africa; and variability of the dry season in West Africa and its relationship to meningococcal meningitis epidemics, with a special focus on the role of mineral dust. Trzaska holds a Ph.D in climatology from the University of Burgundy, Dijon, France.

Kimberly Peng, a former Earth Institute intern at CIESIN, has been appointed senior research staff assistant. Peng is working on the Haiti Regeneration Initiative (HRI), assisting with the data collection and analysis for the household surveys currently being conducted in the Côte Sud Initiative (CSI) region. In addition, she is supporting the Africa Soil Information Service (AfSIS) by maintaining content for the AfSIS Web site. Peng has a B.A. in economics from the University of Maryland and an M.A. from the Earth Institute’s Program in Climate and Society.

January 26, 2012

Announced at the World Economic Forum held January 25–29 in Davos, Switzerland, the 2012 Environmental Performance Index (EPI) produced by CIESIN and Yale University’s Center for Environmental Law and Policy (YCELP), in collaboration with the World Economic Forum and the Joint Research Center in Ispra, Italy, identifies Switzerland as first in addressing pollution control and natural resource management challenges. Iraq is ranked last. The EPI has been produced every two years since 2006. The 2012 EPI ranks 132 countries, using 22 indicators in ten major policy categories including air and water pollution, climate change, biodiversity, and forest management.

For the first time a complementary index showing country improvement from 2000 to 2010, the Pilot Trend Environmental Performance Index (Trend EPI), was released. Latvia was ranked number one in the Trend EPI, with Russia in last place. The U.S., which is 49^th in the EPI, was just 77^th in the Trend EPI, implying few recent gains in addressing environmental issues.

Data sets making up the EPI were contributed from the International Energy Agency, remote sensing research groups at Battelle and University of Maryland, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, and other entities. Lack of data in certain areas—in particular, waste management, toxic exposures, agricultural sustainability and water resources—continue to limit the ability of the EPI to contribute towards the understanding necessary to develop policies for safeguarding the environment.

See: 2012 Environmental Performance Index

January 20, 2012

Alex de Sherbinin, CIESIN senior research associate, participated in “Where the Rain Falls,” a project analysis workshop organized by CARE and the United Nations University January 17–19 in Bonn, Germany. The purpose of the workshop was to review field research results from seven countries on the relationship between rainfall variability, rural livelihoods, and migration. CIESIN’s role is to provide time series climatological data (focusing on rainfall variability over the past decade) for the research sites and to provide geospatial data and mapping to help put the research results in context.

See: Where the Rain Falls

January 19, 2012

An article in the anthology, Sensing Our Planet: NASA Earth Science Research Features 2011, highlights the research of Erle Ellis and Navin Ramankutty, who have focused on landscapes used by people in order to understand more about human impacts on ecology at the global and local scale. According to the article, “Repatterning the World,” two major insights resulted: that a surprisingly large amount of the world is actually taken up by human-inhabited areas (anthromes); and that human influence has grown so extensive that natural systems in large part now fit themselves within human systems. Rather than restricting biome definitions to various wild descriptors, as is traditional in ecology, Ellis and Ramankutty developed 21 classifications, of which only three are wild. Their results have been published as a data set, Anthropogenic Biomes, disseminated by the NASA Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC) operated by CIESIN. Sensing Our Planet is an annual publication that showcases multidisciplinary research using Earth-observing data from NASA Earth science data centers, including research on climate change, hazards, and more. Ellis, who is an associate professor of geography and environmental systems at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, is a member of the SEDAC User Working Group, which provides strategic guidance regarding the data and information needs of SEDAC users. Ramankutty is an assistant professor at McGill University in Montreal, Canada.

See: Sensing Our Planet: NASA Earth Science Research Features 2011

January 18, 2012

CIESIN deputy director Marc Levy joined a distinguished panel of speakers organized by the Environmental Change and Security Program of the Woodrow Wilson Center to discuss “New Research on Climate and Conflict Links.” Levy’s presentation raised a number of research challenges, including the contrast between climate data, which is structured around time scales of centuries, and the much shorter time frames of conflict data and concerns, typically six months to two years. In addition to Levy, the panel included Joseph Hewitt, technical team leader, Office of Conflict Management and Mitigation, U.S. Agency for International Development; Joshua Busby, assistant professor of Public Affairs, Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, University of Texas, Austin; and Solomon Hsiang, postdoctoral research associate, Science Technology & Environmental Policy, Woodrow Wilson School of Public & International Affairs, Princeton University. A video of the event, which was held at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C., December 19, 2011, is available at http://www.wilsoncenter.org/event/new-research-climate-and-conflict-links.

See: “New Research on Climate and Conflict Links”

January 13, 2012

A visiting scholar from the China Earthquake Administration, Long Wang, has been hosted by CIESIN for two weeks beginning January 4. Wang is currently an an assistant professor and a doctoral student in disaster prevention and reduction at the Earthquake Disaster Research Center (EDRC) of the Institute of Earthquake Science in the China Earthquake Administration, where he also received a masters degree in solid earth geophysics. He has a B.S. from Nanjing University in geographic information systems. While at the Lamont campus, Wang has investigated methods of assessing exposure to earthquake hazards using gridded population data and building inventories and has met with seismologists from the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

January 10, 2012

CIESIN senior digital archivist Robert Downs and Data Center Services manager John Scialdone attended the ESIP Federation Winter Meeting 2012, which was held in Washington, DC, January 4–6. Downs presented the paper, “Alternative Approaches to Collaborative Software Deployment Leveraging Open Source Software,” during the session, Realizing the Benefit of (Re-)using Open Source Software. He also presented a poster co-authored with CIESIN geographic information specialist Sneha Rao, “Learning About Climate Change and Human-Health Impacts with the CHANGE Viewer.” At the meeting, John Scialdone was elected chair of the ESIP Federation Partnership Committee, which oversees the Federation's membership selection process.

See: "Alternative Approaches to Collaborative Software Deployment..."
       "Learning about Climate Change and Human-Health Impacts..."

January 6, 2012

The first independent analysis of China environmental data at the sub-national level by an international team has been released by the Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN), part of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, and Yale University. The report, Towards a China Environmental Performance Index, presents a framework for assessing environmental performance by province as an aid to developing government environmental policies. China faces formidable environmental challenges owing to its large population, limited water resources, rapid economic growth, and fast-paced urbanization.

The research was carried out in collaboration with the Chinese Academy for Environmental Planning and the City University of Hong Kong. The framework that emerged, developed in consultation with many environmental experts in China and the U.S., provides a tailored set of issues and indicators that will be important to track for the foreseeable future. Core policy issues include air pollution, water quality, climate change, energy efficiency, and toxic metals, among others. According to the report, greater transparency and freer access to data, especially raw data from monitoring systems and spatial data on environmental conditions, are essential in the future development of environmental performance indicators for China.

The Yale Center for Environmental Law & Policy and CIESIN have been the world leaders in developing national-scale environmental indices since they launched the Environmental Sustainability Index in the year 2000. The motivation behind the subnational work in China was to better reflect the country's diverse geographical landscapes and differentiated environmental stresses, and to provide a more effective tool for policy making.

See: Report: Towards a China Environmental Performance Index
       Blog: China’s Long March Towards Better Environmental Conditions

January 5, 2012

CIESIN director Robert Chen has joined the Board on International Scientific Organizations (BISO) of the National Academies for a three-year term beginning January 1, 2012. BISO promotes international collaboration in scientific research and coordinates U.S. participation in international scientific, engineering, and medical organizations. Chaired by Tilahun Yilma of the University of California, Davis, BISO serves as the U.S. National Committee to the International Council for Science (ICSU) and oversees a network of more than 20 U.S. National Committees for various ICSU scientific bodies. BISO also coordinates U.S. involvement in other international organizations such as the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World (TWAS), the InterAcademy Panel for International Issues (IAP), the International Social Science Council (ISSC), and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA). Chen is currently Secretary General of the ICSU interdisciplinary committee CODATA, the Committee on Data for Science and Technology, through October 2012, and has extensive experience working with international scientific organizations and initiatives.