Students Present Their Final Workshop Briefings for Spring 2009 and the Academic Year

On Wednesday, April 29, students in the MPA program in Environmental Science and Policy (MPA ESP) marked the end of the spring semester with presentations of their final briefings for the Workshop in Applied Policy Analysis course.  In the spring workshops, MPA ESP students work with clients to address needs or challenges in various areas of environmental policy. 

The final workshop briefings provide students the opportunity to share with their cohort the details of their workshop projects, as well as some of the challenges they have faced and the solutions they found to manage them. Further, the briefings provide professional training by serving as simulations of presentations that students can expect to give during their careers in environmental policy. This semester's clients were the Wildlife Conversation Society, New York City Housing Authority, Gateway National Recreation Area of the National Park Service, National Audubon Society, Earth Action and Alliance for Renewable Energy.

"The purpose of the spring-semester workshop is threefold," said Steve Cohen, Director of the MPA-ESP program, in his opening remarks. "To share understanding of how each group is approaching their projects and the methodologies being used; to discuss the practical problems associated with conducting policy analysis in an action environment with a client; and to explain how they have framed the problems addressed and have learned to cut them down to a manageable size."

The workshop teams were advised by Professors Kathleen Callahan, Steve Cohen, Tanya Heikkila, Gail Suchman, and Sara Tjossem.

Assessing the Effectiveness of Payments for Environmental/Ecological Services
Professor Kathleen Callahan, the former EPA Deputy Regional Administrator of Region II, has been advising the group working on Payments for Environmental Services (PES).  PES aims to support the positive incorporation of environmental externalities through the transfer of funds from beneficiaries of those environmental services to the service provider.  The MPA ESP students evaluated PES efforts in areas that included carbon markets, water accessibility markets and biodiversity markets.  Using case studies of ten PES projects and five interviews of environmental experts, this group put together a cross project analysis paper which helped inform Translinks on topics such as carbon sequestration, watershed protection, and biodiversity preservation. 

Retrofitting Older Apartment Buildings for Energy Efficiency: Practical Proposals for Public Housing in New York City
Professor Steven Cohen, Director of the MPA-ESP program as well as Executive Director and Chief Operating Officer of the Earth Institute, has been advising the team that is working with the New York City Housing Authority to embark on an effort to scale up its energy-efficient building retrofit efforts to an "enterprise" level.  This workshop group was asked to describe and assess comparable efforts to enhance the energy efficiency of older multi-family residential buildings in order to provide a benchmark study of current potential technologies.

Gateway's Long-Term Ecosystem Management Options under Changing Climate Conditions
Professor Tanya Heikkila, Associate Director of The Earth Institute's Water Center and SIPA professor who was recently awarded a three-year grant by the National Science Foundation to study interstate river basin compacts in the Western United States, is working with her team to report environmental policy implications for Gateway National Recreation area using conceptual models.  The group split into the science team, which compiled existing information and developed an ecosystem catalog, and the policy team, which reported on existing legislation and global adaptation policy at Gateway.  Together, they have the research which is necessary to make policy recommendations and provide conceptual models.

Quantifying and Reducing a National Organization's Impact on Global Climate Change and Developing a Model to be Replicated
Professor Gail Suchman, lecturer at SIPA and Columbia Law School, and Senior Legal Advisor to the Urban Design Lab for Sustainable Development at Columbia's Earth Institute, has been advising the team working with the National Audubon Society.  National Audubon requested a comprehensive evaluation of its own carbon footprint and recommendations for how to reduce it by at least 10% in four years. Defining the possible scope to be electricity, heating, magazines, mailings, lands, employee commuting, and business travel, the team started in on defining the footprint of the whole operation.  After the analysis of over 90 facilities and 700 employees, the students found that the areas of energy, heating, and travel could all be made more efficient. 

Renewable Energy Payments (REPs) Policies for the United States
Professor Sara Tjossem, Lecturer and Associate Director of Curriculum for the MPA-ESP program, worked with the team to evaluate Renewable Energy Payment (REP) policies (aka Feed-in Tariffs) in over 40 countries and are being called 'The World's Most Effective Renewable Energy Policies'.  Research will strengthen the ability of the Alliance for Renewable Energy (ARE) to engage in a full scale, multi-track campaign to bring REPs to the USA.  The clients were ARE and EarthAction.  The group produced materials for their target audiences including fact sheets, memos, models for REP policy, and analyses of the current policy framework.  To synthesize the findings, the groups identified strategic opportunities for overlap between stakeholders' interests and policy recommendations in key states.