The world is made up of 195 countries, 7.6 billion people, and an endless number of problems. How does the United Nations address them in one agenda? Which problems deserve inclusion?

Youth, agriculture, and climate change might not seem like a logical pairing, but they fit better than you might expect.

If you read Somayya Ali Ibrahim’s (C+S ‘09) resume alone before applying to C+S, you’d be hard-pressed to imagine her working at NASA. After all, she wasn’t exactly your traditional C+S student with degrees in pre-med and business administration.

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.

Krista Jankowski faced a choice. Discover the wonders of deep history or help preserve and heal the planet for this and future generations. She chose the latter, forsaking dinosaurs to join the C+S program. Since then, she’s gone on to pursue a PhD focusing on sea level rise in Louisiana. Her work has the power… read more