1/7/15 11:45 AM[January 2015 Newsletter] YCELP Year in Review

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YCELP Year in Review January 2015

Follow the YaleCenter for

Environmental Law& Policy onFacebook!

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Check out our blog - On the Environment!

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Follow us on Twitter!

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On theEnvironment

Podcast Series

Climate + Agriculture:A Conversation withPeter Lehner

Sacred Earth: AConversation withDekila Chungyalpa

Grasslands, Compost,and Climate ChangeMitigation: AConversation withWhendee Silver

From Forest toFarmland and Moraineto Meadow: When didthe AnthropoceneBegin?

Examining the CulturalMeaning of Place: aConversation withElizabeth BarlowRogers

A Note from the Associate Director

By Joshua Galperin, Associate Director, Yale Center for EnvironmentalLaw & Policy

It has been a year sincewe released the 2014EnvironmentalPerformance Index. It ishard to believe how timeflies, even harder tobelieve when you lookthrough this newsletterand see how much theEPI team has grown overthat year, and how muchthey have accomplished. Of course, the YaleCenter for EnvironmentalLaw & Policy has beenworking hard on otherprojects as well. Since last year we have launched the Yale ClimateDialogue, a project that seeks to energize the international climatenegotiation process by offering creative and politically realistic ideas forbroader and more effective climate leadership; we have brought in aseries of top-notch speakers including James Cameron, Peter Lehner, TomKizzia, and Mary Wood, among others; and we have continued to explorecutting-edge land use issues in collaboration with the Land Use LawCenter at Pace Law School. This time next year we will be releasing the 2016 EPI and this newslettergives a peak at the new innovations and insights that are likely to be apart of the next EPI. It also gives a profile of our expanding EPI team.

The EPI Team's Top Hits of 2014 By Alisa Zomer, Yale F&ES '14 and Jason Schwartz, Yale F&ES '13 The Environmental Protection Index (EPI) team had a hugely productive2014. We've brought in a lot of new talent, taken on vital research, gottencoverage in academic and popular journals, upped our communicationsgame, and widened our collaborations across sectors. To stay in touch,like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter @YaleEnviro. 2015 is going to be intense -- climate negotiations in Paris, shaping theSustainable Development goals, ramping up for the 2016 EPI. But we'refeeling ready to take it on. If you want to know why we're so confident,take a look at some of our accomplishments in 2014.

1/7/15 11:45 AM[January 2015 Newsletter] YCELP Year in Review

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Building a SocialNetwork for ClimateAction: a Conversationwith Alexander Verbeek

An integrated Approachto Climate Action: aConversation withAlexander Verbeek

Politics andEnvironment inIceland: aConversation withThora Arnorsdottir

Bottom-up EnergyProduction and Supply:a Conversation withErik Christiansen

The full collection isavailable on iTunesU and SoundCloud.

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Who's in YourCountry's

'SocialNetwork?'

Yale's EnvironmentalPerformanceIndex (EPI) team isconducting a survey tosee which countriespeople perceive ascomparable to theirown on issues of policydirection, economicmodels, and/orinstitutional reform.Using this data, wehope to reveal "social"relationships beyondtraditional countrygroupings by GDP orgeography.

Within the UnitedNations Climate talks,countries are oftenaligned in negotiationblocs. Brazil, SouthAfrica, India, and China- all major emergingeconomies - comprisethe BASIC group;small-island stateshave their own bloccalled AOSIS, or

#2014EPI takes off. We launched the 10th iteration of our index at theWorld Economic Forum. The launch came with a brand new interactivewebsite, which won the Platinum Award in the Creativity InternationalAwards, a silver medal in the W3 Awards, and was a Webby honoree inthe Science and Green categories. Explore the website here. India vs. China on city air pollution. EPI analysis showing that airquality in India is worse than China sparked a media storm, with coveragein the Guardian, the Economist, and New York Times (read the articlehere). Later in the year, India established a new air quality index forcities, largely based on our model. More here.

(LEFT: Forbidden City in Beijing, September 2005, photo by Brian JefferyBeggerly/Flickr. RIGHT: Connaught Place in New Delhi, November 2006,photo by Ville Miettinen/Flickr.)

Mobilizing citizens to track sustainability. The journal Naturepublished the EPI's article and infographic on how informationtechnologies can be used to crowdsource environmental data. Read thearticle here and check out the complete infographic.

1/7/15 11:45 AM[January 2015 Newsletter] YCELP Year in Review

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Alliance of Small IslandStates; and, the Like-Minded DevelopingCountries is made up ofa diverse group ofdeveloping nations.Ultimately, the goal ofthe survey is toharness the power ofbehavioral norms toelevate environmentalissues on the globalpolicy agenda andimprove the substanceand ambition ofenvironmentalperformance.

Do you think yourcountry is a leader inpolicy development?What countries aresimilar to yours?Please take a minuteto fill out thissurvey and add to agrowing dataset ofperspectives fromaround the globe. Thank you for yourhelp!

(Infographic by Anne Householder.) Smart-scaling the EPI. The EPI research agenda expanded significantlyto include sub-national applications of the EPI methodology and indicatordesign (in Iraq, Malaysia, Viet Nam, and the United States), as well asnew urban projects on urban governance, city metrics, civic science. Moreabout the projects here.

(Iraq delegation from the Ministries of Environment and Planning with theEPI team at Yale, June 2014.) Hacking the environment, for good. EPI participated in its first everEcoHackathon and produced a cool interactive map overlaying national airpollution quality with specific cities. The map was published by the Atlanticand republished by NASA-Earth Observatory on Facebook, receiving over12,000 likes, 6,000 shares, and 700 comments. Check out the interactivemap here. UNEP adopts new EPI Wastewater indicator. There was no gooddataset for wastewater, a critical determinant of water quality and humanhealth impacts. So EPI researcher Omar Malik decided to make one fromscratch with the aim of informing data and measurement for the newSustainable Development Goals. Already, the United Nations EnvironmentProgramme is using the indicator in its Transboundary Waters AssessmentProgram. More here. #MapMonday goes wild. Scientific American's #MapMonday blogfeatured three interactive maps produced by the EPI team - on airpollution, biodiversity, and pesticides. Shout out to @Tallitrigg for sharingand to EPI researcher Laura Johnson for making it POP.

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Greener, but browner in China. The Economist covered the 2014 EPIrelease with a special focus on China's positive environmentalperformance. Read the article here. Following on this, EPI did a deep diveon soil pollution in China, published by Scientific American andaccompanied by a sweet infographic. Check out the full image here.

Behind the EPI curtain. None of these milestones would be possiblewithout the hard work and dedication of the student researchers, writers,programmers, and designers who bring the data to life. This year, the EPIhad 13 amazing students including: Amy Weinfurter, Andrew Moffat, AnnaYoung, Anne Householder, Ariana Spawn, Daphne Yin, Diego TorresQuintanilla, Pamela Jao, Peter Hirsch, Susan Wang, Xiao Wu, WhitneyJohnson, and Yodi Melkinov. EPI team grows. In addition to the veritable army of students, the EPIfull time-staff got bigger. Angel Hsu received a joint faculty appointmentat Yale F&ES and Yale-NUS College. Jason Schwartz rejoined the team asthe full time EPI manager and communicator extraordinaire. And, AlisaZomer came on board to lend her all-star skills to kick-off the cities work. But amidst the growth is a huge loss. We are so sad to lose SusanneStahl, who has been the backbone of YCELP for four years. She led thesocial media and website overhaul for the 2014 EPI, and it is not anoverstatement to say this place wouldn't run without her. We will miss youSusanne.

1/7/15 11:45 AM[January 2015 Newsletter] YCELP Year in Review

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Okay 2015, we're ready to take you on with bigger and better datavisualizations, more interactive and engaging stories, and more tasty waysto digest and apply critical environmental performance data for decision-making.

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