After Frances Seymour’s keynote talk yesterday afternoon, Friday started with an introductory address by Dr. Anna Herforth on nutrition and joining forces with conservation through forestry.
In her talk, Dr. Herforth raised the question of what food security is. According the FAO (World Food Summit 1996) “Food security exists when all people, at all time, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for a healthy and active life.” While being pretty comprehensive, this definition leaves out the physical access to food. Convenient access to food is often a concern in remote areas. Furthermore, food needs to be nutritious besides providing calories. Dr. Herforth used the example that many of us take power bars and extra vitamins with us when…
By Angel Hsu and Grant Tolley
Negotiators from 194 countries and observers from nearly 1, 400 organizations are trickling into the bustling halls of the International Convention Centre (ICC) Durban today for the global climate talks. Among them are 26 graduate students from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies (F&ES), who are participating in the negotiations as a capstone to a semester of learning about global climate change governance in theory and by working directly with a stakeholder in practice. Historically, F&ES has a long tradition of participating in international environmental conferences as a way of bringing to life the challenge of developing institutions and treaties to deal with pressing environmental issues. In the age of “conference diplomacy” that has emerged since the momentous Rio Earth…
Climate Change is again attracting public attention as the Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Convention on Climate Change is getting closer. F&ES students from the International Conferences and Organizations, Environmental Diplomacy Practicum, and Environmental Protection Clinic classes will participate in the COP16 from November 27th to December 11th, 2010 to be held in Cancun, Mexico, with the objective of acquiring experience in the international climate change negotiation process.
During the semester the classes hosted guest speakers to share the last updates in climate science and in the international climate negotiations, such as Gary Yohe, IPCC leading author, Lumumba Di-Aping, former spoke person for the G-77 plus China the last year, and Crispine Gregoire, permanent representative from Dominica to the UN. There was also a mock negotiation to resemble…
I took a great courses at FES last spring which has been pivotal in shaping my summer internship experience with Axio Power: Dan Esty's Environmental Law and Policy course.
For those of you unfamiliar with Dan, I encourage you to check out how much comes up from a simple GOOGLE SEARCH. Dan has his own page on Wikipedia, so he is definitely a big deal. Dan's course focuses primarily on US environmental laws and regulations, including the political, regulatory and legal aspects of how we attempt to address environmental problems. We were challenged in the class to approach each regulation critically, and identify ways that we would choose to improve it. Perhaps someone in the Massachusetts legislature took one of Dan's courses, as they seem to have improved on…
