Climate & Environment
- A paper recently submitted to Nature Scientific Reports explores a scenario in which a 100%-electrified fleet of vehicles must attend to both ride requests submitted by customers and charging requests sent by a utility company during a period of high renewable energy generation.
- For eight summers, Jody Jahn earned money for college working as a wildland firefighter on U.S. Forest Service crews. Now, instead of rappelling out of helicopters to fight fires, she's an associate professor of communication who studies the culture of wildland firefighting crews.
- More than half of the lakes around the world are losing water. The Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at CU Boulder reconstructed lake levels from the past 30 years, determining that climate change, human consumption and sedimentation are the reasons for the decline.
- Since the 1990s, Indigenous groups and other communities around the world have increasingly fought for, and secured, collective property rights to the land they live on. New research suggests that these arrangements can have impacts not just on ecosystems like forests but on the psychology of people.
- Snow is melting earlier, and more rain is falling instead of snow in the mountain ranges of the Western U.S. and Canada, leading to a leaner snowpack that could impact agriculture, wildfire risk and municipal water supplies come summer, according to a new CU Boulder analysis.
- Black Mirror meets Don’t Look Up in Apple TV’s dystopian drama about living through climate change impacts. Not for the faint of heart, Extrapolations depicts a future with rising temperatures, sea levels and global tensions—all mostly within the realm of possibility, according to CU experts.
- The TEAMUP consortium, which brings together researchers from academic, industrial and federal laboratories, seeks to identify and solve the factors that cause advanced perovskite materials to be unstable, paving the way for the integration into existing and future solar cells, boosting the efficiency of harvesting renewable solar energy.
- A student worker restored historic ice flow charts in the University Libraries collection, saving irreplaceable data that is part of the climate record while making progress toward her own goal of a career in art conservation and restoration.
- A Conference on World Affairs panel April 14 on a rights-based approach to addressing climate change vacillated between optimism at momentum around potential solutions and the grim truth that emissions keep rising and the Earth—and all of humanity—face dire consequences.
- Six decades of river data in Alaska highlight the cumulative and consequential impacts of climate change for local communities and ecosystems in the Arctic.