This year, we are celebrating our 125th anniversary with the theme of “Leadership, Innovation, and Impact.” Recognizing the far-reaching impact our alumni, faculty, staff, and students have had, and continue to have, on every dimension of environmental science at this milestone in our school’s history is important, but it also comes at a very challenging time for our environment and for many environmental professionals, our friends and colleagues, who are committed to protecting and preserving our natural resources and addressing the climate crisis. Despite (or maybe due to) the enormity of the challenges we’re facing, I believe the hallmark strengths of our YSE community — of our approach to research and learning — will enable us to continue to make significant progress in advancing solutions that can be put into practice at the local, national, and global levels. The cover story “Creating Climate-Smart Cities,” which describes the work YSE faculty are doing to lay the groundwork for cities to become more sustainable, is a wonderful example of how we are bringing our interdisciplinary approach and systems thinking to local-to-global challenges — integrating work in energy systems, environmental economics, urbanization and data science, environmental justice, sustainable and green design, and urban forestry.

Our innovative, collaborative community and lifelong networks are also among our core strengths. When the Class of 2025 graduated in May, they joined a global network of more than 5,800 YSE alumni who are making an outsized impact in every sector of environmental science and practice in every area of the world. Among the graduates were our first cohort of Three Cairns Scholars, emerging climate leaders from across the Global South, who are joining an alumni network that includes environmental leaders and groundbreakers such as 2024 Distinguished Alumni Award winners Mirei Endara de Heras ’94 MESc, Panama’s first minister of the environment, who helped establish a nonprofit that uses artificial intelligence to rid the country’s waterways of plastics pollution, and Claudia Martínez Zuleta ’89 MES, who served as Colombia’s deputy minister of environment and who works to advance regenerative food systems and reduce inequality between urban and rural areas in Colombia. It also includes Luke Swampdog Tyree ’14 MESc, who was honored as a 2024 Distinguished Alumni Award winner for his work reclaiming and protecting the natural habitat of the Indigenous people of the hills in Virginia. Our YSE community — here in New Haven and around the world — is a vital source of support and inspiration to me as we continue to work toward a more sustainable future.

We are tremendously proud of our past 125 years of impact, bringing innovation and leadership to environmental challenges, as well as all of the advances we are making at the present time, whether it is addressing the challenges of global urbanization, helping to ensure our drinking water is safe  or leading an international effort to map and track methane fluxes from water sources. I have no doubt that we can and will continue this great work long into the future, propelling us toward another 125 years of “Leadership, Innovation, and Impact”!

INDY BURKE 
Carl W. Knobloch, Jr. Dean