A Message From Dean Indy Burke
An update for the Yale School of the Environment's 2024-2025 academic year.
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July 1, 2024
Since its founding in 1900, the Yale School of the Environment (YSE) has been at the forefront of environmental science and scholarship, training generations of leaders who have tackled some of the most pressing challenges of their time. Today, we continue to build on this solid foundation by providing research, teaching, and public engagement aimed at creating a healthier, more equitable and sustainable world.
Our faculty, students, and alumni are bringing a science-to-solutions focus to tackling the climate crisis and a wide scope of critical environmental issues. They are engaging in novel cross-disciplinary scholarship and practice in energy policy, ecosystem science and biogeochemistry, hydrology, urban science, green chemistry, and environmental justice, among many other areas. The teaching and study of forestry has been, and remains, a core strength of our school since its founding. The Forest School at YSE is a hub for practitioners and land stewards in forest-related fields worldwide, bringing together innovative, multidisciplinary research and practice to find solutions to the challenges that face the world’s forests.
Our alumni — who today number more than 5,800 — are tackling complex, high-stakes environmental, social, and economic challenges in every corner of the world. They work in NGOs, government, industry, academia, law, public health, and communications, among other sectors. Our highly engaged alumni network is an invaluable resource for students, providing mentorship and support as they prepare to make their own impact in the environmental sphere.
In the past several years, we have made great progress in expanding our capacity to address global environmental challenges in many areas. In 2023–2024, the school welcomed its first cohort of Three Cairns Scholars and second cohort of Three Cairns Fellows through the Three Cairns Climate Program for the Global South. The Three Cairns Scholars program allows YSE to meet 100 percent of the demonstrated tuition need for qualified master’s students from the Global South who are committed to combatting climate change in their home countries and regions. The Three Cairns Fellows program supports mid-career environmental professionals from the Global South who are seeking to enroll in two of YSE’s highly rated online certificate programs, Financing and Deploying Clean Energy, Tropical Forest Landscapes: Conservation, Restoration, and Sustainable Use, and Urban Climate Leadership.
In the fall of 2023, we were thrilled to be able to launch the Bekenstein Climate Leaders Program, which, through a combination of scholarships, internship stipends, and postgraduate incentives, will help make it more affordable for emerging climate leaders across YSE and Yale to pursue high-impact careers in areas of high need, such as government and the nonprofit sector. With the window of time to reduce emissions rapidly closing, the initial primary focus of the Bekenstein Climate Leaders Program will be on climate change mitigation.
To help prepare urban policymakers and practitioners to implement innovative climate solutions, YSE and the Hixon Center for Urban Sustainability launched a new certificate program in Urban Climate Leadership in 2024. Karen Seto, Frederick C. Hixon Professor of Geography and Urbanization Science, and Mark Ashton, senior associate dean of The Forest School and Morris K. Jesup Professor of Silviculture and Forest Ecology, are co-leading the nine-month program that kicks off its inaugural semester in August 2024. The Clean and Equitable Energy Development (CEED) Certificate Program, which was co-developed by The Yale Center for Business and the Environment and the Yale Center for Environmental Justice, also welcomed its inaugural cohort in the fall of 2024. The twelve-week program, designed for long-time and burgeoning energy professionals, covers foundational energy concepts, environmental and climate justice topics and issues, approaches to energy justice, and the practical aspects of energy project development.
YSE also welcomed Arianna Salazar-Miranda to the faculty as assistant professor of urban planning and data science in July. Salazar-Miranda, who earned her doctorate in computational urban science and planning from MIT, uses machine learning, sensing, spatial analysis, mapping, and related historical work to examine the impact of development paradigms on social and environmental dimensions of urban life, including patterns of sedentarism, social mixing, greenhouse gas emissions (GHG), and exposure to environmental risks. She joins an unparalleled group of environmental scholars and practitioners who are committed to advancing the knowledge and leadership we need to achieve a sustainable future. Her esteemed colleagues include Eli Fenichel, Knobloch Family Professor of Natural Resource Economics, who returned to YSE in 2023 after serving as the assistant director for natural resource economics and accounting in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, where he led a historic effort to expand the U.S. economic accounting system to better capture the links between nature and the economy; Sara Kuebbing, director of the Yale Applied Science Synthesis Program, who co-authored the Department of Energy's groundbreaking “Roads to Removal” report that lays out a pathway to remove at least one billion metric tons of carbon dioxide annually from the atmosphere by 2050 and store it on a gigaton scale through careful management of forests; and Daniel Esty, Hillhouse Professor of Environmental Law and Policy, who took leave from Yale to work with World Trade Organization Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala on developing a sustainability agenda for a trading system that better aligns the WTO with the world community’s commitment to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
Since its founding, the School of the Environment has demonstrated the willingness and strength to adapt to the evolving challenges facing our world. I have never felt more confident about how well poised we are to fulfill our mission of providing knowledge and leadership for a sustainable future!
Indy C. Burke
Carl W. Knobloch, Jr. Dean
School of the Environment