People, Equity, and the Environment

A research team led by F&ES Professor Michelle Bell has received a $4 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to examine environmental health disparities within the U.S. senior population.

In testimony before the U.S. Senate Special Committee on the Climate Crisis, F&ES Prof. Justin Farrell described a decades-old “well-coordinated and well-funded” movement intended to deceive the American people about the reality of climate change.

In an interview, F&ES Prof. James Saiers describes the health concerns historically associated with fracking and how a new Yale research project could provide important insights into whether there is a link between unconventional drilling and adverse birth outcomes.

A new partnership between the Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology and the UNEP’s “Faith for Earth” initiative will highlight the moral and practical contributions of the world’s religions to addressing the planet’s mounting environmental challenges.

Effective strategies to confront the vast environmental threats facing the planet require a new way of talking about these challenges — and who is invited to the conversation — panelists said last week during an event in Washington, D.C. hosted by the Yale Environmental Dialogue.

What does a plant sound like? And what does a plant hear? An interdisciplinary project at Yale, highlighted during a recent installation at the F&ES Forest Garden, is applying new technologies that help people listen to plants — and even speak their language.

A new Yale-led study found that the Covid-19 pandemic may have at least temporarily altered some historical anti-government attitudes that tend to be stronger in rural communities, particularly in the West. 

In the last decade the Chinese government has realized the need to create not just a prosperous and technologically sophisticated society but an “ecological civilization” based on its cultural and religious traditions. In the sacred mountains of Henan, Yale Professor Mary Evelyn Tucker recently participated in the Songshan Forum, an annual meeting that has become part of this effort.

A national study co-led by Stephen Kellert prior to his death in 2016 has reported a troubling disconnect between people and nature in the United States. But it also found reasons for hope.

Poorer households in India are bearing a disproportional impact from pollution caused by others, a new study by Yale School of the Environment Associate Professor of Energy Systems Narasimha Rao has found.

Efforts to help direct institutional food purchasing toward more equitable and sustainable food suppliers can be stymied by a lack of transparency and by discriminatory practices that keep minority-owned farms, small-scale producers and frontline workers at a disadvantage.

In an interview Gao Yufang ’14 M.E.Sc., who is now a doctoral student at F&ES, discusses a new paper he co-authored in Science that calls for a more iterative process that recognizes different value systems in order to save the world's disappearing elephants.

Nowhere has the impact of scientific misinformation been more profound than on the issue of climate change, where a well-funded network has coalesced around the goal of undercutting the legitimacy of climate science. But as a new paper illustrates, an emerging field of research is providing new insights into this critical dynamic.

In a Special Feature of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, edited by Yale Professor Karen C. Seto, some of the field’s leading thinkers examine the growing implications of global urbanization trends, including their impacts on resource use, potential environmental tradeoffs, and human wellbeing.

More than 880 people attended the conference, which celebrated the work of people of color across the fields of environmentalism and conservation, while also exploring how justice, inequality and environment are connected.