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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

It has been a long time since humans thought of themselves as the prey of other species. But when Joel Cohen summarizes his research, it makes a person think twice about his or her comfortable perch ...

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 ...

Shahid Naeem and his team are unwavering when it comes to the need for preserving biodiversity; their motto is “Ecology with no apology.” The planet is facing its sixth mass extinction, which means ...

As a young undergraduate, Peter deMenocal once wandered the halls of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, where he met Charlie Hollister, a well-known and charismatic marine geologist. Charlie ...

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 ...

Vijay Modi is a professor of mechanical engineering at Columbia University and an Earth Institute faculty member. He also lead the UN Millennium Project effort on the role of energy and energy ...

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 ...

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 ...

Under the stewardship of the Earth Institute faculty, the Earth Institute moves beyond the usual academic boundaries to create a multidisciplinary approach to questions of Earth's sustainability.