As a Science Journal for Kids advisory board member, ERG professor John Harte recently oversaw UC Berkeley researchers and Science Journal for Kids adapting a paper that found associations between redlining and emergency department visits for asthma. The study was adjusted to be more kid-friendly, and was featured in relevance to today’s youth and the Black Lives Matter movement.

“The purpose of the organization is to bring easily readable and understandable articles to kids and to ‘improve the level of scientific understanding in society’,” Harte stated.

ERG professor Dan Kammen recently published an op-ed on the Daily Californian, discussing the powerful impact the Biden-Harris victory has on addressing the issues of COVID-19 and climate change. Kammen further states that the new leadership’s energy and climate platform can be a game-changer for achieving social and climate justice.

“Science, social justice and both domestic and global partnerships to address climate change are now back on the agenda in the United States,” Kammen writes. “More than any one specific action, the commitment Biden has already shown to a science-driven administration is critically important domestically and worldwide.”

In a recent MIT Technology Review article, alumna Barbara Haya raises concerns of Amazon’s carbon offset programs, providing research depicting that such programs can significantly overstate carbon reductions. She states that this could potentially result in Amazon exaggerating progress towards its goal of “net zero” emissions.

“Under the rules for the reduced harvesting practice, landowners would generally only need to account for a 10% leakage rate in their calculations. This suggests that even if the family forest projects do draw down significant additional carbon, much of the benefit could be wiped out by larger harvests elsewhere, limiting the real-world climate benefits,” Haya states.

In a recent San Francisco Chronicle article, ERG professor Dan Kammen was featured discussing how Biden’s goals of addressing climate change could potentially be achieved in the near future. While divisions in Congress are likely to slow progress, Kammen remains optimistic for the advancement of California’s climate agenda.

“It would be easier, of course, if Biden had the Senate. But the Senate does have a way of sensing the mood of the nation. There’s going to be some serious reckoning… There’s going to be increasing amounts of senators on the Republican side that ultimately switch over,” said Kammen.

In the recent Scientific American article “California’s Mega Fires Have Arrived 30 Years Early”, ERG adjunct professor Margaret Torn argued that as more people living in wildland-adjacent areas, the catastrophic impacts of wildfires only continues to grow.

“We’re changing how catastrophic a fire is because we have put more properties and lives at risk… because we’re building in fire zones,” Torn stated.

COVID Wastewater Epidemiology for the Bay Area Project (COVID-WEB) is a pop-up lab dedicated to monitoring Bay Area sewage for COVID-19, with ERG alumna Sasha Harris-Lovett as one of the several UC Berkeley scientists and researchers heavily involved with the project. The lab analyzes 30 samples each week, contributing valuable data to health officials keeping track of outbreaks in neighborhoods lacking in COVID tests and health care.

“Having a regional wastewater monitoring system is like having a fire lookout on a mountaintop,” says Harris-Lovett in the Berkeley News. “We want to be able to see smoke and marshall resources to put out the fire before it becomes an inferno.”

ERG professor Dan Kammen recently co-authored and published a research article, “Near-real-time monitoring of global CO2 emissions reveals the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic”, on Nature. The article was featured on various news sources, including AZO Cleantech, ScienceDaily, and StudyFinds.

“The greatest reduction of emissions was observed in the ground transportation sector. Largely because of working from home restrictions, transport CO2 emissions decreased by 40% worldwide. In contrast, the power and industry sectors contributed less to the decline, with −22% and −17%, respectively, as did the aviation and shipping sectors,” Kammen states in his research.

ERG PhD student Valeri Vasquez co-published “Protect the Antarctic Peninsula — before it’s too late” on Nature, focusing on how various issues like over-fishing have had devastating consequences on the icy regions. She depicts how banning fishing in such coastal waters, as well as limiting tourism and construction on land, can help protect the native marine mammals and seabirds.

“With human activity and construction also rising, the region’s precious biodiversity is at risk of being destroyed. Preventive measures must be taken immediately, on sea and on land,” Vasquez states.