When most people think of a weather forecast, they usually think of a forecast 1-10 days in advance. While these forecasts are the most familiar, they are only one end of a spectrum. On the other end are forecasts that range up to months in advance. Farmers in the developing world are increasingly using these types of forecasts to make decisions that directly impact their livelihoods.

We are surrounded by numbers throughout our daily lives. Some, you’ll recognize easily. 24: the number of hours in one day. 365: the number of days in one year (except for leap years). $100: roughly the amount of money in my bank account at the moment. But what about 406.95 parts per million (ppm)? If you’re not a climate geek, you’re probably not familiar with it, but you really should be since it’s an incredibly important number for our planet.

Only a six-hour drive across New York state, Buffalo and New York City have completely different priorities when it comes to sustainability. When it came time to find an internship, I knew I wanted to return home to Buffalo to use my newfound knowledge gleaned from the Climate and Society program to benefit my hometown.

Water is one of the most precious resources we have, yet we all can remember a time when we left the faucet running (perhaps this morning even). In the developing world, increasing demands to develop, growing populations and the threat of climate change could make water less freely available.

What is the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the word “solar?” Sunshine, bright, warm? What places then typically come to mind to fit this description? Florida, Los Angeles, Arizona. But how about New York City?

I live in a city. In a typical day, I wake up in the morning and I take a shower, I eat some toast, I drink some coffee, I grab my phone and head out. A normal city life, I guess. What could possibly be uncommon about it?

I was sitting across from various diplomats of the United Nations (UN) member states in conference room 4 at the UN Headquarters in New York. With interpreters speaking rapidly in the background and everyone scanning through the volumes of notes sitting in front of them, the atmosphere was electric with buzz of policy ideas and back and forth discussions about the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and targets.

In some ways, the world is getting better. It’s something that I tend to forget sometimes. Amid all the doom-ridden headlines and the pictures of polar bears treading water, literacy rates are improving, people are escaping extreme poverty and our path as a society has continually become more equal and less violent with an improved quality of life.

Even those who are not interested in climate change and in the well-being of the environment usually know that using inefficient light bulbs rather than efficient ones, eating meat rather than vegetables and traveling by car rather than by public transportation result in higher greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. What they probably do not know is that if you live in a Western country, many of the simple daily actions you do are a major source of emissions. What if I told you that the Western lifestyle is highly unsustainable?

A recent piece of biomedical research has drawn extensively from an unexpected source: glacial moraines.