Tom Springer has been named the new Managing Director of the University of Notre Dame’s Environmental Change Initiative (ECI), starting June 1, 2016. Springer brings significant management and communication expertise to Notre Dame, including strategic planning, grant development, program design and evaluation, group facilitation, and program promotion.

More than 50 percent of today’s population lives in cities. According to the United Nations Development Programme, that number is predicted to rise to 70 percent by 2050. Growing urbanization increases the overall temperature of a city as buildings, roads, parking lots and other infrastructure absorb heat, creating an urban...

Notre Dame Research will be participating in the Alumni Association’s Annual Reunion event on the first Friday of June on the third floor of the Main Building. From 9 a.m. to 12 p.m., the dome will be open to tours, where several offices will open their doors to alumni, faculty,...

Zebra mussels, a ship-borne invasive species, are such a problem in American waters that they cost the U.S. power industry alone $3.1 billion in economic losses in 1993-1999, mainly by blocking pipes that deliver water to cooling plants. Researchers looking for a way to predict where they might end up...

Congratulations to the ECI faculty members, who earned a promotion, tenure, or other recognition this May.

Harindra Joseph Fernando will receive an honorary doctorate from the University of Dundee in the United Kingdom.

New research from the University of Notre Dame will be used to generate maps that provide time-sensitive, mosquito-to-human ratios that determine patterns of mosquito population dynamics for the Zika virus. The model outputs will be available online to provide users with the ability to find reported cases and estimated incidences...

Alex Perkins, Ph.D., Eck Family Assistant Professor in the Departments of Biological Sciences and Applied and Computational Mathematics and Statistics, and a member of the Eck Institute for Global Health, has been recognized with the Oak Ridge Associated Universities (ORAU) Powe Award for Junior Faculty…

Today, April 25, is the annual World Malaria Day. This year’s theme – End Malaria for Good – seeks to build upon past successes in combatting this deadly disease, which killed over 435,000 people in 2015, and sustain this progress in order to truly  “end malaria for good.” At the University...

Nearly ten years ago, the largest recorded tundra fire in the Arctic, known as the Anaktuvuk River fire, was sparked by a lightning strike, burning its way across more than 400 square miles of the North Scope of Alaska. The fire released nearly as much carbon – a greenhouse gas...

McKibben’s lecture, “The Last Ditch Effort for a Working Climate: Report from the Front Lines,” will offer strategies and tactics for countering climate change in the context of the Paris climate accords, Pope Francis’ encyclical on the environment, and the hottest year ever measured on the planet, 2015. This lecture...

As the celebration of the sesquicentennial of science comes to a close and the one-year anniversary of Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh, C.S.C.’s passing approaches, the University of Notre Dame reflects on the life of Father Hesburgh and his impact on the growth and development of the sciences and scientific research...

Professor Patrick Regan has been appointed the Associate Director of the University of Notre Dame Environmental Change Initiative (ND-ECI) for ND-GAIN.   In this new role, Regan will lead academic scholarship around ND-GAIN by amplifying faculty engagement in climate adaptation, identifying funding opportunities to enhance the University’s climate research capacity, directing scholarly...

Make no mistake: climate change is the environmental problem of this century. Arctic sea ice is melting, along with land-based glaciers and ice sheets. Sea levels are rising, threatening the security of hundreds of millions of people living in coastal regions, and ocean acidification is disrupting important ecosystems and food...

Paris Agreement reflects University of Notre Dame's climate research assets.  Notre Dame Global Adaptation Index is key to the success of the Agreement, providing knowledge, products and services for all of the signatories and other private sector and development actors working to achieve adaptation and resilience goals.

Maggie Xenopoulos straps on a pair of hip-waders, grabs a 1-litre plastic bottle from her truck and wades into Ontario’s Nottawasaga river. “See this brown colour?” she says, scooping up water the colour of weak tea. “That’s dissolved organic carbon. It blocks UV rays. It’s a bit like SPF for aquatic life.”...

As the Paris climate negotiations closed last Saturday, you heard a great deal of hope and optimism as well as congratulations for vision and progress emanating from COP21. Indeed, important commitments have been made – but they’re pledges, not actions, and they don’t reverse the adverse climate change underway. Which is why...

Frank Incropera acknowledges that it’s somewhat unusual for an engineer to delve deeply into the topic of climate change. Scientists, not engineers, have played the most prominent roles in the climate change debate to date. However, Incropera believes solving the problem going forward will require a joint effort from the...

It is human to be hopeful. Yet, in 20 years of meetings to avert the consequences of global warming and climate change, the United Nation’s Conference of Parties (COP) has failed to meet the challenge. Greenhouse gas emissions and the Earth’s average surface temperature have continued to rise, while the...

Notre Dame Research has opened its annual competition for the Library Acquisitions and Equipment Restoration & Renewal Grants. University of Notre Dame teaching and research faculty, library faculty, research faculty, and special professional faculty from all Colleges and Schools are eligible…

World leaders took to the stage at the climate change conference in Paris this week and declared that the future of the planet was at stake. They delivered speeches warning about the dire consequences of inaction and called on the world to unite in tackling greenhouse gas emissions.

The more than 190 countries that have gathered in France for worldwide climate talks did much of their work in advance. Before the summit, at least 181 nations had already announced their plans to lower their carbon emissions in order to help slow the pace of global warming.

As the historic 21st Conference of Parties gets underway in Paris, members of the Notre Dame community are finding a variety of ways to stay informed and engage in the climate negotiations.

Warming-fueled droughts and storms imperil populations, industries and even the existence of some countries. Climate change may be the one thing that threatens everyone on Earth. But the peril is much more dire for people in some countries if negotiators fail to reach a climate deal in Paris in the...

The world has changed a lot in the past 12 months, with political conflict focusing the world on immediate crises, not the distant future. But a group of scientists are are showing how these conflicts will affect our ability to adapt to climate change down the road–and our ability to survive as...

BARCELONA, Nov 17 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Syria, Libya and Yemen are among the countries whose ability to withstand climate change shocks and stresses has deteriorated most in the past five years, suggesting conflict makes people more vulnerable to climate impacts, researchers said. The University of Notre Dame Global Adaptation...

In the lead-up to 21st meeting of the Conference of Parties (COP 21), 10 countries have come from behind to make marked progress in their ability to withstand the shocks and stresses of climate change, while five are distinctly less resilient, according to data released Tuesday (Nov. 17) by the...