Category: About One Health + Planetary Health

Sustainability efforts take root at Human Ecology

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Sustainability efforts take root at Human Ecology

Every weekday, James Jones-Rounds loads his bike onto the front of a TCAT bus in downtown Ithaca and heads to the College of Human Ecology, where he manages a neuroscience lab. In his spare time, he volunteers as a master composter and is a member of a housing cooperative in a Fall Creek pocket neighborhood.

When he began supervising a lab five years ago, Jones-Rounds felt his commitment to the environment did not always align with the practices in his workplace. That changed in 2014, when the college launched a program to conserve energy and promote a culture of sustainability in its offices, labs and classrooms. Jones-Rounds became a “green ambassador,” a team leader who helps organize the grassroots campaign to make the college an environmentally friendly place.

Because of the efforts of Jones-Rounds and 47 other green ambassadors, the college’s program has become the most successful sustainability effort at Cornell, based on the amount of electricity it has helped conserve and the number of activities it has sponsored. The College of Engineering and the College of Veterinary Medicine have also launched comprehensive sustainability programs.

One of the key outcomes in the university’s sustainability program is reducing electricity usage in the annual Energy Smackdown competition. CHE green ambassador and competition promoter Trudy Radcliff said the contest has “led to a greater awareness around the college of how to do more with less,” resulting in an overall reduction in electrical use of almost 14 percent since 2014. Those savings allowed the college to lower its electricity budget by 32 percent, or $158,000, said Kristine Mahoney, the college’s director of facilities and operations.

Provided Suyash Bhogawar, neuroinformatics programmer with the Cornell MRI Facility, prepares a dish for the College of Human Ecology Food Sustainers Cookoff.

As LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Platinum and Gold structures, Human Ecology’s two main academic structures already maximize energy conservation. The college’s sustainability program is part of Cornell’s Think Big, Live Green initiative, created in 2013 to enlist support for the university’s pledge to achieve carbon neutrality by 2035. To date, Cornell has achieved a 30 percent reduction in carbon emissions from its baseline level in 2008.

To help the college shrink its carbon footprint, green ambassadors have encouraged faculty and staff to make their offices and labs more sustainable by following a checklist of changes. Even the smallest gesture, such as bringing a plant to work to filter and refresh the air, is rewarded with points toward green certification.

Over the past two years, green ambassadors have certified 21 green offices and five green labs, Mahoney said. Faculty and staff have been evaluated on their offices and labs, and students will be assessed through a smartphone app, Humble Bee, developed by CHE graduate students and designed to engage and motivate students to change their behavior.

“The problem hasn’t been engaging staff – it’s been engaging students,” said Casey Franklin, a doctoral student in human behavior and design. “How do we reach a new generation that would rather play Pokémon Go than look at our sustainability website?”

Using Humble Bee, students will be able to record their actions, whether it’s taking the stairs instead of the elevator, eating vegan food at Martha’s Café or composting their leftovers after lunch. Upon reaching a set number of points, they level up and earn a reward, such as a free lunch or coffee. This spring, Franklin will test the prototype and conduct research on user behavior. By fall 2017, she hopes to introduce it to all Human Ecology students.

Denise Green and Kimberly Phoenix

Provided Denise Green ’07, assistant professor of fiber science and apparel design, right, and Kimberly Phoenix, teaching support specialist in fashion design, work in the natural dye garden planted in the courtyard behind the Human Ecology Building.

For faculty, a key focus is incorporating research that promotes environmental conservation. Denise Green ’07, assistant professor of fiber science and apparel design, for example, planted a natural dye garden in the courtyard behind the Human Ecology Building, which at the height of summer featured 13-foot-high Hopi dye sunflowers, Japanese indigo, purple basil and marigolds. To raise money for the garden, Green launched a crowdfunding campaign that generated more than $10,000, primarily from alumni.

While only a fraction of commercially produced textiles use natural dyes, Green says she wants to teach her students that there are alternatives to synthetics. “We’ve been destroying the environment pretty successfully for a long time, at least since the industrial revolution,” she said. “I hope to give our students the opportunity to think differently about the future of the apparel supply chain.”

Tasha Lewis, Ph.D. ’09, assistant professor of fiber science and apparel design, and collaborator Anil Netravali, the Jean and Douglas McLean Professor of Fiber Science and Apparel Design, have been developing a “fiberizer” to convert discarded fabrics into other products, including pillow stuffing, wall panels or placemats.

Funded by a $150,000 innovation grant from The Walmart Foundation, Lewis and Netravali are now creating an improved fiberizer, which could be used by small manufacturers to convert excess fabric into new products. “We want students to make real products out of the material,” Lewis said.

Last spring, a group of students, faculty, staff and community residents “upcycled” discarded fabric and other materials into new clothing and jewelry, including a dress made from newspaper and necklaces created from ties.

Green ambassadors remain focused on increasing the number of certified green offices and labs and creating new strategies to improve the college’s sustainability efforts. To help increase participation in the program, the college also plans to continue awarding $1,000 grants for student research on evidence-based behavior-intervention projects.

“What we’re trying to do now is figure out how to engage more people and get them excited to participate,” said Jones-Rounds.

This article is written by Sherrie Negrea and was published in the Cornell Chronicle on March 2, 2017.

Basu: Economics of climate change will affect world poverty

Basu: Economics of climate change will affect world poverty

In a warming environment, visible climate change meets the “invisible hand” of economics, according to economist Kaushik Basu.

“You can feel it. Two years ago … I visited Beijing and Delhi back-to-back,” said Basu, Cornell’s C. Marks Professor of International Studies and professor of economics, in the College of Arts and Sciences. “You look up at the sky in both places and you realize that this is a problem that has been left for far too long – and now you have to work in a hurry. … You don’t have to read about it anymore. You need to look up and you are aware that something needs to be done.”

Speaking at the Perspectives on the Climate Change Challenge seminar March 6, Basu lectured on “Inequality, Poverty and Climate.”

At one time the “hard” sciences of the environment and the social science of economics were separated, but now they are linked, Basu said, although “economists have arrived at this topic – climate change, environmental economics and what we should do in terms of policy – rather late.”

Basu explained that basics like food and water are usually very cheap. But with global warming and a changing environment, even basic goods can become scarce and force rising prices. In an economic sense, the poor can be pushed out.

“As the climate situation gets worse, the poor will be affected in a very big way,” he said. “But in choosing policy you have to be careful. When it comes to economic policy, when you try to make corrections, there are some steps that are friendly to the poor and those steps which are not.”

The World Bank – where Basu served as senior vice president and chief economist from 2012 to 2016 – tracks poverty to understand how the poor are distributed internationally. The threshold of poverty is the equivalent of $1.90 per day. That is, anybody consuming less than that per day is counted as poor. This translates into about 900 million people, Basu said. That is, roughly one-seventh of the world’s population lives below the poverty line.

“What a partitioned world we live in,” he said. “Most of us don’t know a single person who lives below that line. As climate deteriorates, the poor get hit hard. Given that the world has such a large mass of people who are poor, you have to be sensitive to [environmental and economic policies].”

Why were economists late to climate change issues? Basu referenced Adam Smith, who in 1776 wrote “An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations,” a seminal book that describes the concept of the “invisible hand” – how market forces work.

The invisible hand of economics allows individually selfish actions to nevertheless reach an equilibrium, which is good for society as a whole. For example, the town baker bakes bread, and the butcher offers animal protein; they’re centered on themselves yet fulfill a societal need. Basu said Smith was acutely aware that for society to prosper “altruism plays a role, benevolence plays a role, and trust and integrity play a role,” but they have been given short shrift in mainstream economics.

If the world’s climate changes dramatically, societal equilibrium and the economics of market forces fall apart.

“[Destroying the] environment is a … case where the invisible hand goes berserk. It backfires,” said Basu. “Because if you just think of your self interest – in matters of climate and the environment … your actions may have negative implications for others and be bad for society as a whole.”

Perspectives on the Climate Change Challenge seminars are held each Monday afternoon through May 8 and are presented by the Department of Biological and Environmental Engineering in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, the Cornell Institute for Climate Smart Solutions and the Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future.

This article is written by Blaine Friedlander and was published in the Cornell Chronicle on March 8, 2017.

Sociologist discusses links between breastfeeding, fertility

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Sociologist discusses links between breastfeeding, fertility

The Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies (FGSS) Program launched its lunch series Feb. 14 in Rockefeller Hall with a talk by sociologist Vida Maralani.

“People working in gender studies around the university don’t have enough opportunities to talk together,” said FGSS director Kathleen Long, professor of Romance studies in the College of Arts and Sciences. “These lunches will give us that chance.”

Maralani, associate professor of sociology, focused on her research on breastfeeding and fertility, conducted with her former graduate student, Samuel Stabler. One reason the topic interested her, she said, is that breastfeeding is a “culturally and emotionally charged” topic in the U.S. with many different stakeholders. Although the cultural messages span the continuum, from strong support to strong resistance, the reality is few women meet the guidelines recommended by the American Association of Pediatricians to breastfeed exclusively for six months. In 2002, only 35 percent of U.S. infants were breastfed at all for six months and only 13 percent were breastfed exclusively.

Maralani pointed out that breastfeeding rates differ greatly by mother’s education, age and marital status. For some, breastfeeding has become part of historic changes in the norms and values of parenting. Breastfeeding is part of the “intensive parenting” approach in which parents with more resources engage, she said. This particular investment is expensive in terms of the mother’s time; she added that “breastfeeding epitomizes the complex intersection of gender, culture, power and agency in the construction of contemporary motherhood.”

But fundamentally breastfeeding is part of the reproductive process, and demographers study it in relationship to childbearing. No studies exist, however, on the relationship between breastfeeding and fertility in the U.S., so Maralani and Stabler set out to examine the relationship between breastfeeding duration and how many children women expect to have and actually bear.

“Many of our existing theories suggested that breastfeeding for longer should be associated with lower fertility,” Maralani said.

But the researchers found the opposite – breastfeeding was associated with having more children, on average. They used a nationally representative 30-year longitudinal dataset, which provides information on a cohort of women who have reached the end of their childbearing years. These data allow the authors to account for many potentially confounding characteristics, including education, age, marital status, income and work histories.

“No matter what we account for in our statistical models, there’s no meaningful difference in how many children women expected by breastfeeding duration (although those who did not breastfeed at all expected fewer children),” said Maralani, “but women who breastfeed for at least 5 months are more likely to have three or more children and less likely to have only one child.”

They also found that breastfeeding duration was correlated with other time-intensive child investments, such as more time spent reading to very young children.

“Studying breastfeeding is one way to shed light on families that take a time investment approach to parenting,” Maralani said. “I see breastfeeding duration as a practice that is equally consistent with better-off families being able to spend both more time and money on their children and a gendered, embodied inequality where ‘mom does everything.’”

This article is written by Linda B. Glaser and was published in the Cornell Chronicle on February 23, 2017.

New online platform plays matchmaker for the public good

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New online platform plays matchmaker for the public good

Levine

When Adam Levine was beginning his career, he was constantly seeking points of connection – opportunities to collaborate with the nonprofit and government sectors that could turn academic research into real-world results. Such collaborations usually emerged through old-fashioned networking: a chance meeting over lunch at conference, an introduction from a friend, an interesting article shared via a social network.

But Levine, assistant professor of government and a fellow at the Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future, imagined a better way for potential collaborators to find each other that could yield more productive partnerships. Such a platform didn’t exist, so he created one.

Last week, Levine and co-founders Jake Bowers from the University of Illinois and Donald P. Green from Columbia University launched Research4Impact (r4i), a networking site that connects people from the academic, nonprofit and government sectors who are interested in collaborating.

“Think of r4i as a cross between Match.com and LinkedIn for academics, nonprofits and those working in the governmental sector,” said Levine. “These groups often share a desire to use evidence and data to help achieve their goals, and in many cases the topics they’re interested in overlap. We’ve known for a long time that there is demand for collaboration across these spaces.”

What’s been missing, until now, is an easy way for potential collaborators to find each other. Like other social networking sites, r4i begins when you create a profile that tells others about your interests. You can offer an overview of your past work, your current research goals and the type of collaboration you are seeking. From there, you can search the site for others who share your interests and introduce yourself.

Feeling shy? R4i provides a “Board of Matchmakers” that actively reads profiles and reaches out to members to make introductions and suggest possible matches – a virtual group of research wing-men and wing-women ready to help grease the wheels.

While r4i was initially designed for political scientists, economists, policy analysts, nonprofit leaders and others working on pressing problems in the public and private spheres, Levine says the model is easily expandable to other fields: “It’s a great tool for anyone interested in working with others outside their organization, discipline or comfort zone.”

Levine’s commitment to facilitating such collaborations is no surprise given his research and teaching focus. His work in Cornell’s Department of Government focuses on political communication, and as an Atkinson Center humanities, social sciences and arts fellow he has established collaborations with organizations including environmental groups based in Washington, D.C., and Boston. Funding the site was a collaborative process, too.

“At various conferences over the past year I’ve been approached by many people interested in how I initiated partnerships with nonprofits. That was the initial spark that inspired me to bring people together in a workshop setting,” he said. “Along with Jake and Don we then proposed the idea to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and they agreed to fund an in-person event in D.C. but also encouraged us to explore ways for these interactions to take place online.”

From there, Levine secured additional sponsors, including the Skoll Global Threats Fund and Surface 51, a web development firm based in Champaign, Illinois, that agreed to build the site in what seemed like an impossible timeframe: less than two months.

“We knew we were on to something when we started shopping the idea around and it generated excitement with nearly everyone we approached,” said Levine.

On Jan. 30, more than 100 attendees came together in a packed room to preview r4i, participate in workshops and provide feedback at an event at the National Press Club in D.C. That same group has since played a crucial role in helping the team beta test the site and troubleshoot issues prior to last week’s launch.

“The old ways of connecting were often one-sided and only available to a select group of people,” Levine said. “Our hope is to democratize collaboration, making it easier and more effective. Ultimately, these collaborations can answer important questions facing society and improve our quality of life.”

This article is written by Kate Franzer and was published in the Cornell Chronicle on March 2, 2017.

Group blazes path to efficient, eco-friendly deep-ultraviolet LED

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Group blazes path to efficient, eco-friendly deep-ultraviolet LED

Provided
Members of the Jena-Xing Research Group – Debdeep Jena, Moudud Islam, Huili (Grace) Xing, Vladimir Protasenko, Kevin Lee and Shyam Bharadwaj – are pictured in front of one of the molecular beam epitaxy systems used in their latest work.

The darkest form of ultraviolet light, known as UV-C, is unique because of its reputation as a killer – of harmful organisms.

With wavelengths of between 200 and 280 nanometers, this particular form of UV light penetrates the membranes of viruses, bacteria, mold and dust mites, attacking their DNA and killing them. Sanitization with UV-C light has been around for more than 100 years, following Niels Finsen’s discovery of UV light as an antidote to tuberculosis, which won the Faroese-Danish physician the 1903 Nobel Prize for Medicine.

Currently, most deep-UV lamps are mercury-based. They pose a threat to the environment, and are bulky and inefficient. A Cornell research group led by Huili (Grace) Xing and Debdeep Jena, along with collaborators from the University of Notre Dame, has reported progress in creating a smaller, more earth-friendly alternative.

Using atomically controlled thin monolayers of gallium nitride (GaN) and aluminum nitride (AlN) as active regions, the group has shown the ability to produce deep-UV emission with a light-emitting diode (LED) between 232 and 270 nanometer wavelengths. Their 232- nanometer emission represents the shortest recorded wavelength using GaN as the light-emitting material. The previous record was 239 nanometers, by a group in Japan.

“MBE-grown 232-270 nm deep-UV LEDs using monolayer thin binary GaN/AlN quantum heterostructures” was published online Jan. 27 in Applied Physics Letters.

Postdoctoral researcher SM (Moudud) Islam, the lead author, said: “UV-C light is very attractive because it can destroy the DNA of species that cause infectious diseases, which cause contamination of water and air.”

One of the major challenges with ultraviolet LEDs is efficiency, which is measured in three areas: injection efficiency – the proportion of electrons passing through the device that are injected into the active region; internal quantum efficiency (IQE) – the proportion of all electrons in the active region that produce photons or UV light; and light extraction efficiency – the proportion of photons generated in the active region that can be extracted from the device and are actually useful.

“If you have 50 percent efficiency in all three components … multiply all of these and you get one-eighth,” Islam said. “You’re already down to 12 percent efficiency.”

In the deep-UV range, all three efficiency factors suffer, but this group found that by using gallium nitride instead of conventional aluminum gallium nitride, both IQE and light extraction efficiency are enhanced.

Injection efficiency is improved through the use of a polarization-induced doping scheme for both the negative (electron) and positive (hole) carrier regions, a technique the group explored in previous work.

Now that the group has proven its concept of enhanced deep-UV LED efficiency, its next task is packaging it in a device that could one day go on the market. Deep-UV LEDs are used in food preservation and counterfeit currency detection, among other things.

Further study will include packaging both the new technology and existing technologies in otherwise similar devices, for the purpose of comparison.

“In terms of quantifying the efficiency, we do want to package it within the next few months and test it as if it was a product, and try to benchmark it against a product with one of the available technologies,” Jena said.

Other Cornell collaborators included research associate Vladimir Protasenko and electrical and computer engineering doctoral students Kevin Lee and Shyam Bharadwaj.

The work was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research.

This article is written by Tom Fleischman and was published in the Cornell Chronicle on March 1, 2017.

Housefly’s love of manure could lead to sustainable feed

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Housefly’s love of manure could lead to sustainable feed

Lindsay France/University Photography
Vimal Selvaraj, left, associate professor of integrative physiology, works with Josh Goddard ’18.

Could the common housefly, which has evolved to recycle nutrients from waste products, help address the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations’ warning that food production will need to double by 2050 to feed a growing world population?

An interdisciplinary team of Cornell researchers in animal science, entomology, nutritional sciences, business, microbiology and immunology is investigating a system for using housefly larvae to biodegrade manure and harvest the larvae for use as protein-rich animal feed. Their research is published in the Feb. 7 issue of the journal PLOS One.

Larva meal could address a pressing need to replace fishmeal in aquaculture. The massive demand for fishmeal to feed all kinds of livestock has led to overfishing of fish stocks worldwide. Larva feed is proving to be a sustainable alternative; it contains the right nutritional ingredients for feeding fish, poultry and other livestock.

“I think feed from insects is the future of animal farming,” said Vimal Selvaraj, associate professor of integrative physiology in the Department of Animal Science and a senior author of the study. “We are talking about something that has been untapped. Insects are very rapid biomass generators, and they do not have negative impacts when used as meal, as far as we know.”

The researchers – for the first time – analyzed how efficiently housefly larvae recycled nutrients from dairy cattle manure, and they measured the nutritional value of the resulting larva meal as a feed ingredient.

“We concluded from the study that the overall composition of larva meal with respect to all nutrients, including amino acids and minerals, is comparable to fishmeal and would be a good alternative for use as a protein-rich feed ingredient for livestock,” Selvaraj said.

Their analysis showed that fly larvae lessened the overall mass of the manure and reduced total nitrogen by nearly 25 percent and phosphorus by more than 6 percent. Reducing levels of these nutrients in manure makes a more suitable compost. Otherwise, untreated manure used as fertilizer leads to runoff of excess nitrogen and phosphorus into streams and rivers, which causes eutrophication in lakes and oceans, contaminates groundwater and can spread disease.

When researchers measured the nutritional values of the larva meal, they found it rivaled the highest protein feed ingredients, including widely used fishmeal. The larva meal contained 60 percent protein, had a well-balanced amino acid profile and 20 percent fat that was high in monounsaturated fats. The meal was also found to be a good source of calcium and phosphorus.

Fly larvae yields equal about 2 percent of manure weight, which has led some economists to question the profitability of fly larva meal. Yet the U.S. livestock industry generates some 335 million tons of dry manure per year.

“In farming-dense regions there is enough manure available to have a substantial impact on larva meal production,” Selvaraj said, adding, “This paper is a first step toward realizing this potential.”

Mahmoud Hussein is a postdoctoral associate in Selvaraj’s lab and is the paper’s first author. Co-authors include Jan Nyrop, professor of entomology; Patricia Johnson, professor of animal science; Mark Milstein, director of the Center for Sustainable Global Enterprise and clinical professor of management and organizations in the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management; Helene Marquis, professor of microbiology; Thomas Brenna, professor of nutritional sciences; Quirine Ketterings, professor of animal science; and Josh Goddard ‘18, an undergraduate studying animal science.

The study was funded by the Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future at Cornell University and a College of Agriculture and Life Sciences Charitable Trust Undergraduate Research Grant.

This article is written by Krishna Ramanujan and was published in the Cornell Chronicle on March 1, 2017.

Sociologist joins poverty, sustainability experts at UN

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A United Nations initiative to meet global sustainable development goals will include a leading Cornell voice in issues surrounding population and socio-economic inequality. Parfait Eloundou-Enyegue, professor and chair of the Department of Development Sociology in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, joins a group of 15 experts convening in…

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Save the Date: May 4, 2017 Antimicrobial Resistance Symposium

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Current projects and discoveries from Cornell Ithaca, Weill Cornell Medicine and colleagues Thursday May 4th 2017, 10:30AM – 5:30PM Nevin Welcome Center, Cornell Botanic Gardens, Ithaca, NY Keynote Address: Arjun Srinivasan, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (bio) Confirmed Speakers Include: Ilana Brito, Biomedical Engineering David Calfee, Infectious Disease, Weill Cornell…

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Salmonella food poisoning could damage your DNA

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Salmonella food poisoning could damage your DNA

Salmonella food poisoning wallops you for several days, but new research by Cornell food scientists indicates that some of its serotypes – variations of the bacterial species – can have permanent repercussions. It may damage your DNA.

Miller

Wiedmann

“Not all salmonella serotypes are equal,” said author Rachel Miller, a doctoral candidate in food science.

Salmonella causes about 1.2 million non-typhoidal salmonella illnesses and about 450 deaths annually in the United States, according to Center for Disease Control statistics. There are over 2,500 serotypes for salmonella, but fewer than 100 serotypes cause the vast majority of foodborne illness, according to the CDC.

Miller and Martin Wiedmann, the Gellert Family Professor in Food Safety, examined multiple serotypes of salmonella that encode for cytolethal distending toxin, or S-CDT, a virulence component for serotype Typhi – the cause of typhoid fever. As it happens, the salmonella serotypes called Javiana, Montevideo, Oranienburg and Mississippi – common culprits in the foodborne illness world – also carry the genetic material that encodes S-CDT, the researchers found.

In human cells grown in the lab, Salmonella strains with S-CDT were also found to lead to hallmark signatures that indicate the presence of DNA damage. The ability to cause DNA damage may contribute to long-term disease consequences, Miller said.

“Think about possible DNA damage this way: We apply sunscreen to keep the sun from damaging our skin. If you don’t apply sunscreen, you can get a sunburn – and possibly develop skin problems later in life,” said Miller. “While not the sun, salmonella bacteria may work in a similar way. The more you expose your body’s cells to DNA damage, the more DNA damage that needs to be repaired, and there may one day be a chance that the DNA damage is not correctly repaired. We don’t really know right now the true permanent damage from these salmonella infections.”

For a half-century, scientists have used salmonella serotyping to track foodborne illness outbreaks and their sources.

“A person’s damaged DNA from salmonella could lead to long-term health consequences after the infection subsides, such as longer bouts with foodborne illness,” said Wiedmann.

Salmonella is named for Daniel Elmer Salmon (Cornell B.V.M. 1872, D.V.M 1876), who received the first doctorate of veterinary medicine in the United States.

The research, “The Cytolethal Distending Toxin Produced by Nontyphoidal Salmonella SerotypesJaviana, Montevideo, Oranienburg, and Mississippi Induces DNA Damage in a Manner Similar to That of Serotype Typhi,” was published in the journal mBio (November/December 2016), published by the American Society of Microbiology. The U.S. Department of Agriculture provided funding.

This article is written by Blaine Friedlander and was published in the Cornell Chronicle on February 21, 2017.

Climate change in Vietnam spurs students to speak up

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Thúy Tranviet/Provided
Students harvest vegetables on a farm in Bến Tre, the Mekong Delta, Vietnam.

Climate change in Vietnam spurs students to speak up

Ten Cornell students spent two weeks of their winter break on a journey through Vietnam, listening to farmers and community members, and seeing the effects of climate change firsthand.

The trip was part of an interdisciplinary course, “Climate Change Awareness and Service Learning in the Mekong Delta,” led by Michael Hoffmann and Thúy Tranviet. In the fall, the students took classes that introduced them to global climate change and Vietnamese language, culture and history.

From Jan. 3-18 the group traveled throughout the Mekong Delta, attending lectures from experts at Can Tho and Ton Duc Thang universities, and engaging in service learning activities in the local communities.

Vietnam, with more than 2,000 miles of coastline, is a major exporter of fish and shrimp, valued at about $7 billion per year. The country is also the second-largest producer of coffee and one of the top exporters of rice in the world.

“Vietnam grows much of its own food but is also an important agricultural exporter,” said Hoffmann, the executive director of the Cornell Institute for Climate Smart Solutions and professor of entomology in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. “The Vietnamese are resilient, but climate change will be a real test.”

The Mekong Delta, where 17 million people live, is one of the most at-risk areas in the world from climate change, Hoffmann said. Farmers in the region depend on a stable environment to cultivate crops at 5 feet above sea level. Salt water intrusion, due in part to sea level rise, is already affecting agriculture in the region, as Marc Alessi ’18 saw firsthand.

“Last year, Vietnamese farmers suffered the worst drought ever recorded,” Alessi said. “In one commune, 100 percent of their rice crop was destroyed due to salt intrusion and drought.”

Vietnam farming

Thúy Tranviet/Provided Cornell students plant mangrove trees in Cần Giờ Biosphere Reserve in Vietnam.

Tranviet, senior lecturer in the Department of Asian Studies in the College of Arts and Sciences and a 2016 Engaged Faculty Fellow, said, “The purpose of the course is not just to tell the story of climate change, but to put a face to it, of the people who are directly impacted by it. The service-learning activities are crucial in providing the students opportunities to engage with the communities to have a more meaningful experience.”

For Jeff Fralick ’18, the trip was a chance to talk directly to people already experiencing the consequences of a changing climate. The environmental science and sustainability major said Vietnamese farmers would rarely have an opportunity to come to the U.S. to share their experience, and he felt it was important to give a voice for their concerns.

“In Vietnam, the sea levels are rising,” he said. “There are droughts. The rains are increasing and fall at different times than they did in the past. It’s important to come back and tell that story.”

Both instructors will team up again this semester for the third component of the course. This spring, the class is holding weekly meetings where the students reflect and report on the trip, give presentations, develop media outreach and complete final projects. Plans are also in the works to visit Washington, D.C., where students will share the facts about climate change and the impacts it is already having.

Climate change can be a charged topic for some in the U.S. So says Kerry Mullins ’18, a student in the course: “I know that for most Americans, climate change is not on their list of top concerns.”

That is, if it’s on their list at all. “We have people here who don’t even think it exists,” said Alessi.

It’s why part of this spring’s portion of the course is focused on outreach and communication about what the students learned. It’s an effort that started with blog posts the students wrote while in Vietnam. Hoffmann said they’ll be looking for “any and all ways to tell the story.”

Students like Stevanica Augustine ’19 and Gail Fletcher ‘17 know that a story focused on people will be more effective in communicating the experience of the farmers in the Mekong Delta. “I want to make climate change as personal as possible,” Augustine said.

“Statistics can only illustrate so much,” Fletcher said, “and have a limit to how much change they can incite.”

This article is written by Melanie Cordova and was published in the Cornell Chronicle on February 22, 2017.