School Notes: School of the Environment
July/August 2016

UN official discusses next climate steps in Yale visit

Christiana Figueres, who played a central role in achieving the recent Paris climate agreement as executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), discussed critical next steps in the fight to curb global warming during a visit to F&ES in April. Speaking at Yale, Figueres said the Paris Agreement sets “an incontrovertible new direction” toward a cleaner energy future. But now, she added, everyone has to do the work to get there. “We have spent years creating a new vision and now, I argue, we have to work two or three times as hard to make the new reality as laudable as the vision we created. That is going to be much harder.” Dozens of members of the Yale community—including 60 students from F&ES and Yale College—filled a wide range of roles during the 2015 UN Climate Change Conference in Paris, known as COP21, which set an ambitious target to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

Alums help make Connecticut a model for innovative green policymaking

While political gridlock has frustrated many critical federal environmental policy initiatives in recent years, Connecticut leaders say a spirit of innovation and bipartisan cooperation has made the state a model for how to get things done on critical energy- and sustainability-related issues. Many of the recent achievements—from the creation of the acclaimed Connecticut Green Bank and a new institute for climate resilience to the merging of the state’s environmental and energy agencies—have been led by faculty, alumni, even students, from Yale F&ES. During a panel discussion at F&ES this spring, several of those leaders discussed the factors that have made Connecticut a successful “laboratory” for sustainable development and environmental policy—and outlined opportunities to make government work better for local communities and the environment. “A lot of the innovation, a lot of the thinking, is happening now at the state level,” said Connecticut state senator Ted Kennedy Jr. (D-Branford) ’91MESc. “And Connecticut can really lead the way in a lot of the innovation that we’re seeing.”