I have a new paper, led by Jess Raff, that analyzes sediment transport and sediment budgets in the Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna delta, and assesses the implications of sediment flow for sustainability in the face of sea-level rise and the diversion and damming of major rivers.
I am very excited to announce that I have been selected for a Fulbright Scholar Award, which will allow me to spend a large part of the next academic year at the University of Calgary’s Werklund School of Education as the Fulbright Canada Research Chair in Digital Technologies and Sustainability.
In June, I gave the keynote talk for a webinar and panel discussion at the National Socioenvironmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC) about incorporating behavior change into socio-environmental systems models. The video of the event has now been posted to SESYNC’s YouTube channel
I have a new paper in the journal Energy Efficiency, co-authored with Alex Maki, Emmett McKinney, Mike Vandenbergh, and Mark Cohen, about employers who offer employee benefits to promote energy efficiency.
Cities face challenges on many fronts as they work to assure their residents of safe and reliable access to water. Changes in both supply and demand are driven by complex interactions among many human and natural factors, such as drought, infrastructure, population growth, and land-use. Climate change adds new complexities and uncertainties as cities plan for the future. In the past, challenges to water security were addressed by Promethean energy- and technology-intensive infrastructure projects, such as long-distance transfers, desalination, and artificial aquifer recharge; but in recent years, attention to soft approaches has grown. Soft approaches to water security focus on improving efficiency in obtaining and consuming water, and as John Fleck documented in his book, Water Is for Fighting Over, a number of cities have made impressive progress toward resilience and sustaniability.
Comparisons of observed trends of energy and carbon intensity in the global economy to trends implied by emissions scenarios used in policy analysis suggested that those scenarios were severely over-optimistic about the rate at which the world would spontaneously decarbonize its economy.
I update these analysis, using global emissions since 2005, and find that observed rates of decarbonization are not far behind those implied by the RCP 4.5 policy scenario. This suggests that the policy challenge may not be as difficult as previous work has reported.
With President Trump’s announcement to pull the United States out of the Paris Agreement, many other countries around the world—and cities and states within the U.S.—are stepping up their commitments to address climate change.
But one thing is clear: Even if all the remaining participating nations do their part, governments alone can’t substantially reduce the risk of catastrophic climate change.