Climate Action

Sustainability facculty members Dr. Susan Clark and Dr. Nicholas Rajkovich will be moderators for two upcoming NYS webinars discussing the social and infrastrucutral impacts of extreme heat.

Sustianability Month at UB is about celebrating our faculty, staff, and student work in making progress towards the goals of our university-wide Climate Action Plan. 

Fifteen students from UB have been recognized for their outstanding achievements in leadership, community service, campus involvement, or the arts, earning the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Student Excellence, the highest student award offered by SUNY. 

SUNY Distinguished Professor Andrew Whittaker is part of a cohort led by TerraPraxis, a non-profit focused on action for climate and prosperity, that is developing a digital platform to repower coal plants using advanced nuclear energy. 

A plan to offset carbon emissions by converting brownfields to fields of bamboo. An “ecoscaping” initiative that would encourage even the busiest of people to grow food in their backyard by using ready-to-install garden beds. 

In another instance of your mother being right, the presenter of this year’s Richard V. Lee, MD, Lectureship in Global Health showed how the weather — specifically absolute humidity — can affect our health.

Clean energy is critical to solving our climate crisis. But we need to consider the full environmental and human health impacts of solar energy generation across its entire lifecycle, including mining, manufacturing, use, decommissioning and recycling. This requires us to identify critical stages in the production process, and how choices in materials and chemicals at different stages of production influence each other.

Urban design students have once again shown what UB has to offer to the community. This month, students submitted proposals for transforming vacant spaces on Buffalo’s East Side between Zenner and Kilhoffer Street into areas for urban infrastructure and potential housing.

UB is advancing its climate action efforts by installing 30 new electric vehicle plugs for EV owners on the North and South campuses.

UB’s GRoW Clean Energy Center is officially open for use as a tour, meeting and event space for small groups.

UB has been named a recipient of a $1.5 million grant from the National Institute of Standards and Technology to develop technology to improve on the U.S.'s emerging clean energy economy. In addition to these technological developments, the new Center for Accelerated Innovation through Materials hub will support workforce training and fund graduate student research.

A UB research team will investigate why stocked fish in Lake Ontario are not reproducing. The effort is being funded by New York Sea Grant, which recently announced eight projects totaling $1.3 million.

A UB-led research team has just secured $1.5 million in funding, including $1.17 million from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), to develop a two-year project that works to produce clean hydrogen, furthering UB's committment to achiveing carbon neutrality across campuses by 2030.

UB researcher Dr. Scott Santos is analyzing Halocaridina rubra, or tiny red shrimp, to study ocean population vulnerability and transformation in the face of climate change. 

From Sept. 20-26, UB students, faculty and staff are encouraged to participate by utilizing green transit options to get to and around the university’s three campuses. People who take part can share details of their commute using the hashtags #UBuffalo and #GTG21 on social media.

In a continuation of the university’s climate neutrality efforts, UB will serve as a host site for an innovative battery technology system that uses zinc and air as fuel. The technology, developed by Vancouver-based Zinc8 Energy Solutions, provides a cost-effective solution for energy storage, making clean energy reliable and available as and when required.

Carbon offsets are a key component of UB's 10 in 10, the university's climate action plan.

Recently, researchers have been exploring how to turbo charge a passive cooling technique — known as radiative or sky cooling — with sun-blocking nanomaterials that emit heat away from building rooftops. While progress has been made, this eco-friendly technology isn’t commonplace because researchers have struggled to maximize its cooling capabilities.

UB researchers were the driving force behind the publication last week of a major report that details strategies local governments in low- and middle-income countries can use to create more innovative and equitable community food systems.

New York residents and businesses generate up to 20 million waste tires each year. Tire dumps are breeding grounds for mosquitos and pollute the air and water when they burn.

Thanks to the entrepreneurial success of the late Carl V. Granger, founder of Uniform Data System for Medical Rehabilitation (UDSmr), a venture he created in partnership with UB and the UB Foundation, the university has received a $10 million gift to its Boldly Buffalo campaign.

This Black Lives Matter Poster Project exhibit in Silverman Library aims to expand understanding of what it means to be Black in America. Photo: Meredith Forrest Kulwicki.

Diversity has always been an issue in STEM. Although a 2018 Pew report found that women make up half of the U.S. workforce in STEM occupations, it also found that their presence varies widely across occupational clusters and education levels.

In a burst of climate orders, the president also ordered federal agencies to begin the process of reinstating environmental regulations reversed under the Trump administration.

The array of directives — touching on international relations, drilling policy, employment and national security, among other things — elevate climate change across every level of the federal government.

At the Biden/Harris inauguration on Wednesday, poet Amanda Gorman, dressed in the yellow of the Sun, realigned the planets with her recitation of a poem called The Hill We Climb.

In December, we asked the readers of our newsletter Climate Fwd: and our Twitter followers what they were planning on doing differently in 2021. We got some amazing responses. If you’re thinking of making a “green” New Year’s resolution, here are a few ideas, collected from those replies.

Rayshard Brooks. George Floyd. Daniel Prude. Breonna Taylor. These are the now-familiar names of just a few of the many Black people killed by police in 2020.

More and more organizations are adopting a new approach: that of servant leadership, in which leaders prioritize multiple stakeholders and improve society, while prospering financially.

Picture this: World leaders have just unleashed utter chaos, launching nuclear missiles in a global war. The world as we know it is now a nuclear wasteland.

Anticipated to begin operation in early 2022, UB's second mobile dental clinic is expected to expand the dental school’s outreach by more than 1,000 patients annually.

Jeffrey and Irene Jacobson have endowed the Irene and Jeffrey Jacobson Fellowship for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in the School of Management. The two-year fellowship will fund a first- and second-year MBA student every year.

The University at Buffalo has played a crucial role in advancing the University Global Coalition’s SDG 13 Decade of Action, alongside the University of Waterloo and the Universidad Carlos III Madrid. As part of this leadership initiative, UB senior Netra Mittal joined an international plenary panel detailing a new study the working group commissioned.

UB Sustainability worked with various campus partners to host the Earth Day event as part of Sustainability Month at UB. Billed as a candid conversation, the program challenged members of the campus community to think about what they might be willing to sacrifice to advance UB’s climate action plan (CAP) and its aggressive goal of achieving carbon neutrality by 2030.

Partnerships are a vital part of Sustainability Month at UB, and many of the signature events occurring across campus throughout April reflect the growing partnerships being built as the university strives toward implementation of its recently updated climate action plan and achieving climate neutrality by 2030.

In a barren field in the shadows of towering grain elevators at Silo City, a group of UB architecture students have created a beautiful structure that will continue to evolve and take shape. And they did it amid the stops and starts of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“How can we save the climate?” “What about ending fossil fuels?” “But what about lowering emissions?” “How does that affect biodiversity?” These are dire questions the world is facing, but you’d be surprised by who is asking them and feeling the urgency to act. 

New York State officials released a groundbreaking climate change report featuring crucial contributions from the University at Buffalo. In partnership with UB's Resilient Buildings Lab, the report offers vital strategies for safeguarding against climate impacts, showcasing UB's leadership in climate resilience research. UB's pivotal role underscores its commitment to addressing climate change, aligning with Vice President Kamala Harris's recognition of UB's sustainability research as a national model.

After a two-year hiatus, the Carbon Reduction Challenge returned this semester to connect students with organizations around WNY, offering insight and problem-solving skills to provide solutions as to how these companies can reduce their overall carbon footprint. 

A new UB-led research project — funded by a $2 million U.S. Department of Energy grant - is working to cheapen and optimize algal biofuel production through the integration of polyculture farming, artificial intelligence, microscopy, and various other interdisciplinary research techniques.

UB Professor of Art Joan Linder unveils her botanical illustration exhibit "Inhabit," at One World Cafe. This installation showcases four types of native and non-native species that can be found on UB's campuses, with each being either medicinal or edible. 

At Triad Recycling and Energy Corporation in Tonawanda, employees take waste that's headed to the dump, and recycle it. Drywall gets shredded and turned into flooring for cattle. Foam from mattresses gets shredded too, and is made into carpet padding. 

UB has once again been recognized as a leader in sustainability in higher education, garnering high marks in two recent rankings. UB fared well across a number of categories in the Times Higher Education 2022 Impact Rankings, which assess universities around the globe against the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). 

When UB graduate student Matt Taboni began working at a local bakery in the summer of 2020, he realized how much food was wasted when he cut off the tops of cakes and tossed them into the trash. There wasn’t a proper system to store the scraps and donate them to local food pantries.

UB will receive $4.5 million from the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation to create a new research center for improving plastic recycling.

Larry Asp grew up playing shinny outside in this tiny rural town he calls home again after 40 years away. Since returning, he also holds the keys to the outdoor “Rink of Dreams” that gives the 90 local residents the chance to skate outside during the keen Canadian winters.

A team co-led by researchers at UB has just developed a reference genome they believe is pivotal in deciphering the effects of climate change on various plant species, focusing particularly on Arabica, one of the beloved coffee species across the globe.

Each day's events will correlate with one of the 17 United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals.

On Earth Day last year, UB rolled out its updated climate action plan, called UB’s 10 in 10. University leaders will gather virtually on April 22 to update the campus community on the plan’s progress over the past year.