Environment

Presented at the Forum of Center for Globalization Studies in an Urban World

Introducing The Power of Cities, a TED Theme

TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) is an annual conference-holding entity, holding conferences on themes related to three areas of technology, entertainment, and design. It is owned by The Sapling Foundation, which aims to disseminate ideas and expert knowledge.

The Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment (SAGE) which is at the University of Wisconsin-Madison provides a wide range of data on natural resources, human impact, and climate change. Their site includes a number of downloadable maps and datasets on topics such as land use, river discharge, and soil quality.

New research examines the environmental impact of wealthy nations on middle and poor income nations as well as the reverse. Thara Srinivasan of the Pacific Ecoinformatics and Computational Ecology Lab (PEaCE) finds that the cost of the damage done by wealthy nations to poor nations exceeds the amount of their debts. Environmental impact was measured by looking at a number of factors including climate change, ozone depletion, and deforestation.

The Global Seed Vault located in the Arctic at Svalbard, Norway is a project of the Global Crop Diversity Trust. The high-security seed vault houses in cold storage crop seeds from all over the world as a means of protecting biodiversity through conservation. The seeds stored at the vault included crop species which are threatened as well as more common varieties. Protection of biodiversity of crop species may prove critical in the face of global climate change.