Summer 2005

MA Focus: Climate and Society
By Emily Polk

This year has taught us some terrible lessons about the human cost of climate disasters.

There is growing awareness of the need for climate risk management, both in the U.S. and worldwide. Only one educational program brings together the expertise of cutting-edge scientific and policy researchers with an emphasis on the impacts of climate for human societies, economies, and sustainable development: the master's program in Climate and Society at Columbia University.

The M.A. program in Climate and Society is a 12-month interdisciplinary program that teaches professionals and academics how to approach real-world problems using climate data and research. By examining and analyzing the crucial impacts of climate variability and climate change on the developing world, students in the program develop the skills to respond to a variety of climate-related problems.

" By far the greatest cost in numbers of disasters is caused by droughts and floods," said Mark Cane, M.A. Program Director and G. Unger Vetlesen Professor of Earth and Climate Sciences at Columbia, who is one of the world's leading climatologists. "Then you have droughts leading to conflicts in places like Africa. Even in the United States, we just had five years of drought in the west, after 20 years with above-average rain."


Cane, who founded the M.A. Program with support from the Earth Institute, also had a hand in founding the International Research Institute for Climate Prediction at Columbia (IRI), a global leader in research on climate variability and its impacts.

Students in the M.A. Program study the effects of global warming, droughts and flooding, and the various impacts of El Niño, among other climate-related issues, says Cane. Together with Steve Zebiak, the current director of the IRI, Cane made the first scientific prediction of the El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenomenon in the 1980s.

In part, the program was created as an effort to reach out to professionals in developing countries who can take the skills they learn at Columbia back to their home countries.

In Academic Year 2004-05, eighteen students from the U.S. and abroad, including students from Ethiopia, Cameroon, Philippines, India, and the United States, completed the 12-month program. They came from a wide range of disciplines and backgrounds. "We have a logging professional from Maine, two secondary school teachers, a malaria specialist from Ethiopia, and other professionals with plenty of experience in the public sector," said Abigail Schade, Assistant Director of the M.A. Program. "It's been really neat to see students coming from natural science backgrounds getting involved in the impact side of things. They're looking at problems in an interdisciplinary way, studying how it affects society at large."

Diriba Korecha Dadi (Climate and Society '05) is team leader of the weather forecast and early warning unit at the National Meteorological Services Agency in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. He came to the program on a Joint Japan/World Bank Graduate Scholarship and returned to his country in August 2005 with plans to focus on improving the network of meteorological information in Ethiopia. Dadi researched his master's thesis on an improved model of rainfall prediction for Ethiopia's climate, in close collaboration with his research adviser at IRI, M.A. program faculty member Tony Barnston.

Lauren Faber (Climate and Society '05), one of two Columbia graduate students selected as a Student Energy Research Fellow at the Center for Energy, Marine Transportation and Public Policy at Columbia University (CEMTPP) during her year at Columbia, worked part-time during the Spring Semester with the New York City Department of Environmental Protection on water conservation methods for adapting to climate change. She came to the M.A. program straight from Stanford University, where she majored in Earth Systems. Faber finished the program in August 2005 and is currently employed by the British Embassy in Washington, D.C. as Climate Change and Energy Projects Coordinator.

" It was the sheer proclaiming that climate issues were a big enough problem in society, and wanting people to consider it on all levels, that drew me to the program," said Faber. "I knew this program had a large focus on climate and decision making in uncertainty." While she was a student, Faber said it was "exciting to be a part of [the program] because it's in its first iteration. There's lots of cutting-edge things that I'm able to be involved in."

The M.A. Program in Climate and Society, offered through the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, works closely with IRI and the Earth Institute. The program, which is housed in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, utilizes a broad range of experts, researchers and professors at Columbia in earth sciences, earth engineering, international relations, political science, sociology, and economics.

The M.A. Program curriculum "responds to the need for skilled professionals who can bring an understanding of climate science and forecasting techniques to policy implementation, especially in places where people are most vulnerable to a varying or changing climate," said Schade.

Researchers at IRI, scientists, and social scientists teach core courses designed especially for the program which include: Dynamics of Climate Variability and Change; Regional Climate and Climate Impacts; Quantitative Models of Climate-Sensitive Natural and Human Systems; and an Integrative Seminar on Policymaking under Uncertainty.

" The interdisciplinary nature of this program really reflects the priorities of the IRI, the Earth Institute and Columbia," said Schade, "And that's probably why we're the first to do this."

A wide range of electives, including anthropology, economics, philosophy, psychology and history allow students to focus on their own areas of interest or expertise. About one third of the students have a social science background, and just over a third have a biology and ecology background, with the remainder in physical science, according to Cane.

Missy Stults (Climate and Society '05) did an internship in the offices of the German Parliamentary leader of the Committe on Environment for academic credit during Summer 2005. Stults was selected for a position at Columbia's Global Roundtable on Climate Change (GROCC) immediately upon finishing the M.A. Program. Others, like Dadi, plan to return to their home countries to focus on improving climate information to aid in their country's self-sufficiency.

" I expect many will get jobs with NGOs, the UN, Congressional staff," said Cane. "I would hope that we'll place some people in business. I think that would be a good thing."

At the conclusion of the program, students are expected to be able to explain the workings of the climate system using a variety of climate-related research and analysis methods, as well as design appropriate methodologies for their own impact assessments. They will be able to apply climate-related knowledge to societal problem solving, and communicate effectively with scientists and policymakers, by making climate-information "usable" for climate-related decision making.

" The Climate and Society students are really lucky to be taught by all of the cutting-edge researchers," said Faber. "It's been quite an eye-opener to see the diverse interests that go into thinking about climate change. For all of us, whether we go into science, development, policy, we are all now very connected to and familiar with the science and research community, which is a huge benefit for any path that each of us will take."

For more information about Climate and Society see the program's webpage: http://www.columbia.edu/climatesociety