Ruth DeFries examines human transformation of the landscape and its consequences for climate, biogeochemical cycling, biodiversity, and other ecosystem services that make our planet habitable. The ...

Mark Cane has never been one to follow the status quo. After studying pure mathematics and what is now known as computer science at Harvard in the 60s, he took a hiatus from academia to work in New ...

The Earth Institute was established in 1995 to advance our understanding of Earth science and apply that knowledge to decisions made by governments and businesses around the world. A world leader in ...

The Millennium Villages project offers a bold, innovative model for helping rural African communities lift themselves out of extreme poverty. The Millennium Villages themselves are proving that by ...

The faculty of Columbia University ’s Master of Public Administration in Environmental Science and Policy (MPA ESP) reflect the program’s desire to balance the practical skills necessary to understand ...

Pedro Sanchez attributes the roots of his life’s work in soil sciences to the fact that he always liked to “play with dirt.” That boyhood pastime was nurtured by the fact that his family owned a ...

The Earth Institute at Columbia University aims to create a rich educational environment for study in the earth and environmental sciences. One way that it accomplishes this objective is by providing ...

More than one billion people--one-sixth of the world's population--live in extreme poverty on less than $1 a day. At the Earth Institute, researchers take a “human needs" approach to developing ...

Elke Weber has made it her life’s work to understand why and how people make the decisions they make. Not a simple task. Take, for example, smoking cigarettes. Doctors’ warnings of the deadly ...

These are busy and exciting times for the Bamboo Bike Project (BBP). Established in 2007 with seed funding from the Earth Institute, the BBP has been working alongside the Earth Institute’s Millennium ...

For twenty years, Robin Elizabeth Bell has worked alongside a team of Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory geophysics senior scientists and engineers to coordinate nine major aero-geophysical expeditions ...

The Education section of this web site provides information on academic programs at all levels of study that are associated with the Earth Institute. Further information can also be obtained by ...