SUSTAINABLE ENVIRONMENT
​INSTITUTE
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Introducing the Sustainable Environment Institute

West LA College Offers Nation's First AA Degree in Climate and Environmental Studies

​Valley EcoAdvocates Working through the Summer

​The Revitalization of the LA River 

​LA Harbor Opportunity for LACCD Students

News Briefs

News Briefs   

• On Sept. 20th youth strikers around the world  will walk out of school and work to join marches and rallies on behalf of climate action. Activities will continue through Sept. 27, coinciding with the UN Climate Summit on Sept. 23 in New York. Organizers, including the Sunrise Movement and Friday’s For Future USA, say the week will mark the largest-ever global mobilization for climate action, with over 6,000 events in 150 countries planned. Large numbers of adults are expected to participate, which will be a first since the strikes began last November.
• The campaign for the University of California to divest from fossil fuels received a big boost in July when 77% of the faculty statewide voted to ask the Board of Regents to end all investments in “the 200 publicly traded companies with the largest fossil fuel reserves.” Students have been petitioning the regents for such a divestment since 2013. Bill McKibben, the co-founder of 350.org, which started the international campaign, said such a step would be “one of the biggest moments in the seven-year history of the fossil fuel divestment movement."  ​
•  A group of STEM researchers based at Carleton College and Illinois State University, et al, have created a collection of environmental education projects using “large, publicly available datasets to engage students in STEM and improve their quantitative reasoning." The suite is called Project EDDIE (for Environmental Data-Driven Inquiry and Exploration), and the teaching modules cover such topics as ecology, limnology, geology, and hydrology. The researchers also provide guidance on the best utilization of the modules. Project EDDIE is a branch of SERC, the Science Education Research Center at Carleton.​​
• Two new climate change studies released this summer have debunked the history argument of climate deniers. Even though 97% of scientists believe that human agency is causing the planet to warm, skeptics have continued to argue that the temperature change of recent decades is a naturally occurring phenomenon, similar to the warming that took place in the North Atlantic region during the Middle Ages. The studies show that there is no evidence, going all the way back to the Roman Empire, for any event that compares in degree and extent to the warming that is now occurring.