School of forestry and environmental studies

School Notes: School of the Environment
March/April 2022

Ingrid C. “Indy” Burke | http://environment.yale.edu

‘Climate Lab’ will study climate impacts in urban parks

Yale School of the Environment is partnering with the Central Park Conservancy and the New York City–based Natural Areas Conservancy in a new initiative to study the on-the-ground impacts of climate change on urban parks. The goal of the Central Park Climate Lab is to work with cities across the United States to advance and implement urban park strategies to mitigate and adapt to climate change and understand how these essential greenspaces could be used to create more resilient futures. “With about 55 percent of the world’s population now living in urban areas, urbanization plays an increasingly important role in how we manage and mitigate the impact of global climate change,” said Professor Karen Seto, Frederick C. Hixon Professor of Geography and Urbanization Science at YSE. “This collaboration aims to use mapping and other tools to develop urban interventions to protect their urban parkland and use them to mitigate and adapt to climate change.”

YSE-led team wins Geneva Challenge with crop byproduct app

Yale students Veenu King ’22MEM, Elaine Lac ’22MEM, Maximilian Schubert ’22MEM, and Yiwei Li ’22MBA have developed a centralized marketplace app to connect farmers with buyers who can use crop byproducts for resources. The digital marketplace platform, called BuyBy, earned the Yale team first place in the Geneva Institute’s 2021 Geneva Challenge, which provides $10,000 in seed money. The burning of residual agricultural crop stubbles to clear debris for a new harvest is a significant driver of air pollution, soil degradation, and climate change; the practice constitutes more than one-third of the global emission from biomass incinerations. The app is based on the concept of the circular economy and industrial symbiosis, where waste products are reused and become valuable commodities in the marketplace—in this case, sustainable textiles, pulp and paper, dyes, and biofuel.

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