The Earth Institute uses a multi-disciplinary approach to address the world’s most pressing challenges. We bring together:

• Earth and environmental sciences, ecology, engineering and architecture, law, medicine and public health, economics, political science, public policy, ethics and management, and moreto help address problems of:• climate change, renewable energy, ecosystem maintenance, water quality, food production, air quality, urban development, waste management, and the manufacture of goods and services with the least possible environ-mental impact.

By a combination of population growth, economic growth, material consumption and ignorance, human impact on environmental systems threatens to damage those systems and their ability to sustain human life. The solu-tion is something we have come to term sustainability.

Complex global problems cannot be solved by any single discipline, academic department, school or research center. What makes the Earth Institute unique is that it is designed to institutionalize interaction among many academic and professional fields. The institute has built an interdisciplinary community of hundreds of scien-tists, faculty and scholars to understand and solve these issues.

Science for

SustainabilityThe Earth Institute uses a multi-disciplinary approach to address the world’s most pressing challenges.

By a combination of population growth, economic growth, material consumption and ignorance, human impact on environmental systems threatens to damage those systems and their ability to support human life. But complex global problems cannot be solved by any single discipline. What makes the Earth Institute unique is that it institu-tionalizes interaction across many academic and professional fields.

We bring together: Earth and environmental sciences, ecology, engineering and architecture, law, medicine and public health, economics, political science, public policy, ethics and management, and more

to help address problems of:climate change, renewable energy, ecosystem maintenance, water quality, food production, air quality, urban development, waste management, and the manufacture of goods and services with the least possible environmental impact.

ResearchThe Earth Institute is the largest research institute at Columbia University. The institute includes over two dozen research centers and programs examining every aspect of sustainability.

Much of our work is to support the university-wide community of senior and junior researchers working on this new interdisci-plinary field of sustainable development.

Our Cross-Cutting Initiative seeds new cross-disciplinary research that joins researchers from our different centers and across the university. We established the Earth Institute Postdoctoral Scholars program to encourage new scholars to engage in multidisciplinary work. We created the PhD in Sustainable Development (the first of its kind) to establish a new generation of research scholars trained in multiple disciplines.

EducationThe Earth Institute is dedicated to training a new generation of sustainability professionals equipped with the interdisciplin-ary problem-solving tools to address critical environmental problems.

We have established a compre-hensive set of educational programs at the undergraduate, masters and doctoral levels. Eleven programs are managed or co-sponsored by the Earth Institute in partnership with seven schools.

We provide opportunities and support for student research assistantships within our centers, internships, travel and field work, and co-curricular programming including speaker series and other practical skill-building activities.

OutreachThrough events, our website and blog, and media appearances by our faculty and researchers, we deliver information to public audiences interested in sustainability.

We convene hundreds of public lectures, seminars, conferences and events each year.

The Earth Institute’s State of the Planet blog gets roughly 40,000-50,000 visits a month.

We aim to bring sustainability education to a global audience. We developed a Massive Open Online Course and an in-per-son, noncredit training for anyone interested in the basic concepts of sustainability.

PracticeApplying research knowledge to help communities achieve sustainable development is a significant part of the Earth Institute’s work.

Our main practice instrument, the Earth Clinic, serves immedi-ate needs in developing countries by creatively respond-ing to pressing economic and environmental problems.

What distinguishes the Earth Institute from many other university-based organizations is our willingness to engage directly with stakeholders in long-term efforts to improve sustainable development; help introduce new technologies, policies, and institutional approaches to solve real-world problems; and evaluate what does or does not work.

earth.columbia.edu

Our mission is to develop programs of research, education, outreach and practical application of knowledge to address global sustainability.