Energy, Environment & Sustainability

Cornell is a global leader in sustainability and climate change research, teaching and engagement. Our campuses are living laboratories for developing, testing and implementing solutions that address these most challenging issues.


Warming Atlantic forces whales into new habitats, danger

Critically endangered North Atlantic right whales – forced from its habitat, facing ship strikes and fishing peril – now confront extinction.

Bacteria may hold key for energy storage, biofuels

A new study identifies bacterial genes that may make it easier for scientists to engineer a bacteria that takes in renewable electricity and uses the energy to make biofuels.

Undergrad’s blogs, tweets stay ahead of storms

For Cornellians who watch storms, or use Twitter and read blogs, follow Jacob Feuerstein ’23. He can talk tempests before they exist.

To sustainably harness cow manure’s usefulness, fire it up

Cow manure – a longtime agricultural waste headache for dairy farmers – soon may ignite a new sustainable fertilizing trend.

Geophysicist sprints to monitor quake aftershocks in Alaska

When an 8.2-magnitude earthquake struck off the coast of Chignik, Alaska, on July 29, geophysicist Geoffrey Abers raced north with a group of collaborators to record its aftershocks.

Complex dynamics turn lake water green and brown

Scientists have mostly assumed that ecosystem relationships leading to these shifts are linear, but new research suggests something more complicated.

Gretchen Goldman '06 named to White House environmental policy office

Goldman began the job in July and will serve a one-year term while on sabbatical from the Union of Concerned Scientists, where she is the research director for the Center for Science and Democracy.

Around Cornell

Touted as clean, ‘blue’ hydrogen may be worse than gas or coal

‘Blue hydrogen – made by using methane in natural gas – is lauded a clean, Cornell and Stanford researchers believe it may harm the climate more than burning fossil fuel.

Metamaterials research challenges fundamental limits in photonics

Cornell researchers are proposing a new way to modulate both the absorptive and the refractive qualities of metamaterials in real time, and their findings open intriguing new opportunities.