After murky water from the Mamaroneck River gutted the sanctuary, the rotting pews in First Baptist Church sat empty for months.
When the faithful returned, they wore whatever remained of their Sunday best. A blush pink blazer. A dress shirt buttoned tight around an Adam’s apple. Ladies white gloves.
Some parishioners were still displaced from their apartments and houses, lives scattered across hotel rooms, shelters, friends’ couches.
Dr. Max Homes, President and CEO of Woodwell Climate Research Center, highlights our work over the last year and gives you a sneak peek of what we have going on this fall. Thank you for being part of the Woodwell Climate team and supporting our work!
When company leaders are presented with predictive maps showing the increased prevalence of drought, wildfire or flooding in their area due to climate change, one of the most common reactions is “Where did you get this information from?” according to Chris Goolgasian, director, climate research and portfolio manager at Wellington Management which has about US$1.4 trillion in assets under management.
While efforts to mitigate global warming are increasingly widespread, Goolgasian said communities and businesses around the world are under-informed and largely unprepared to adapt given a 1.5 degree Celsius increase in average temperatures is almost certain.
In a panel discussion at Conexus Financial’s Sustainability in Practice Forum at Harvard University, Goolgasian spoke with Zach Zobel, a scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center, about the ongoing partnership between Woodwell and Wellington.
In summer 2019, the Cambridge physicist Gareth Rees flew into Yakutsk to meet a team of Russian scientists. The far eastern Siberian port is known as the coldest city on Earth, but that year it was simmering under a heatwave. Together the researchers drove deep into the region’s sprawling forests on a road paved by gulag prisoners.
The British and Russian scientists were on a mission to study how the boreal forests of the subarctic region are transforming with climate change. Together they measured 2,000 trees, sweating under the heavy clothes protecting them from crowds of insects.
Smoke from hundreds of wildfires darkened skies over the Alaskan Interior this summer, with the state experiencing its fastest start to the fire season on record amid hot and dry conditions.
Tens of thousands of lightning strikes ignited the majority of active fires, according to the Bureau of Land Management Alaska Fire Service. By late August, more than 3 million acres had burned across the state—roughly triple what’s seen in an average year, but no longer unusual in a warming world.
With climate change raising Arctic temperatures faster than the global average, wildfires are shifting poleward where the flames blaze through boreal forest and tundra and release vast amounts of greenhouse gases from the carbon-rich organic soil.
