When I tell friends, family, or strangers about the work I’ve been doing, the reactions all tend to be something along the lines of, “wow, GIS! Sounds interesting…what is it?” I always respond with a speech that, after having recited it dozens of times, is very well rehearsed.
How do you regulate workers’ rights in an illegal office? How do you enforce bodily autonomy, safety, and well-being when you’re not sure where a company operates or how many people they employ? How do you report crime in the workplace when there’s no HR department, and every police department within 100 miles is turning a blind eye?
Any New York City history buff can tell you how closely the city’s fortunes are intertwined with the rivers and estuaries that snake around the five boroughs. Manhattan alone has 32 miles of coastline, but public access to that waterfront has fallen under the shadow of expressways on both the east and west sides of the island.
In 2017, New York’s waterways are a shadow of what they once were, and that could spell disaster.
Machine learning and artificial intelligence are some of the hottest topics in the past few decades. They have caught wide attention because their applications as diverse as data mining, self-driving cars, fingerprint identification, financial services and other fields.
“SACRAMENTO – The Governor has left the state” – Governor’s Press Office.
That was the message in the inbox of all office staff one weekend in early June, to notify that Governor Jerry Brown was headed to Beijing to discuss climate change and diplomacy with Chinese officials. The event was rare. Governors rarely travel abroad for international diplomacy.
Transitioning from one career path to going back to graduate school and then trying to re-establish myself in another industry was terrifying. I felt enormous pressure to make the most of my internship.
Although the Atlantic Forest covers 463,000 square miles of Brazil’s eastern coast and supports around 60 percent of the country’s threatened animal species, it is not as celebrated as the Amazon Rainforest. Like the Amazon, it is one of the most biologically diverse and productive ecosystems in the world.
The best maps tell stories. They take us on journeys in places both familiar and strange, revealing information that might not have been evident before. They also tell these stories remarkably quickly, allowing us to gain a better understanding of situations or make decisions in short periods of time
Growing up, I never knew what mangroves were. In fact, whenever someone mentioned them, I thought they were talking about mangos. But of course they’re not tropical fruit. They’re coastal plants that live in the transition zone between the ocean and land and offer a wealth of services for both people and the environment. They are crucial in the fight against climate change.
From Hurricane Sandy to flooding in Miami, climate change already poses existential threats to our homes. It fuels the spread of mosquito-borne diseases and exacerbates violent conflicts, threatening our health and our lives. Climate change is a danger as personal as it is global, and it has hurt so many of us. I came to Climate and Society because by friends are beginning to lose hope, and I needed to find a way to keep that hope alive.