Any time you can find a different way to look at the world, you learn something you couldn't imagine before. In general, failure of imagination is our biggest hindrance to progress, whether it is legitimate or willful ignorance. Satellites tell us about melting ice and rising seas, and also about the evolution of cities, which are continuing to grow rapidly all around the world.
Yale geographer Karen Seto uses satellite imagery to find out what urban growth is doing to the planet.
Karen Seto, the Frederick C. Hixon Professor of Geography and Urbanization Science at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, studies urbanization and its impact on the environment, including climate change. She uses satellite images to study and demonstrate urban growth, especially in rapidly developing places such as China and India. She led the chapter on how cities can mitigate climate change for the fifth climate report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, published in 2015, and she is leading the same chapter on the sixth report. She is the coauthor, with research associate Meredith Reba ’14MESc, of City Unseen: New Visions of an Urban Planet, a book of satellite images published in 2018 by Yale University Press.
We have seen how cities are tackling the problem. They estimate that they have control of about half of the problem in the US.
Renewable Monday: America's Cities Redeem COP25
Renewable Friday: Divestment Toolkit for Cities
More of Seto's Work
We need to think about resilience at a completely different scale.
There is a wonderful set of photos on that page, and there are many more.
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Building up or spreading out? Typologies of urban growth across 478 cities of 1 million+
Richa Mahtta; Anjali Mahendra; Karen C. Seto
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Research gaps in knowledge of the impact of urban growth on biodiversity
Robert I. McDonald; Andressa V. Mansur; Fernando Ascensão; M’lisa Colbert; Katie Crossman; Thomas Elmqvist; Andrew Gonzalez; Burak Güneralp; Dagmar Haase; Maike Hamann; Oliver Hillel; Kangning Huang; Belinda Kahnt; David Maddox; Andrea Pacheco; Henrique M. Pereira; Karen C. Seto; Rohan Simkin; Brenna Walsh; Alexandra S. Werner; Carly Ziter
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Projecting global urban land expansion and heat island intensification through 2050
Kangning Huang; Xia Li; Xiaoping Liu; Karen C. Seto
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Characterizing urban infrastructural transitions for the Sustainable Development Goals using multi-temporal land, population, and nighttime light data
Eleanor C. Stokes; Karen C. Seto
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Urban Land Use: Central to Building a Sustainable Future
Karen C. Seto; Bhartendu Pandey
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Conceptualizing and characterizing micro-urbanization: A new perspective applied to Africa
Baohui Chai; Karen C. Seto
Other Universities
North American universities announce University Climate Change Coalition (UC3)
UC3 operates in close partnership with Second Nature’s Climate Leadership Network, a group of hundreds of colleges and universities that have committed to taking action on climate.
UC3 Members
- Arizona State University
- Boston University
- California Institute of Technology
- Tecnológico de Monterrey
- La Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
- Queen’s University
- The Ohio State University
- The State University of New York
- University of Arizona
- The University of British Columbia
- The University of California
- University of Colorado, Boulder
- The University of Connecticut
- University of Maryland, College Park
- University of Michigan
- The University of New Mexico
- The University of South Florida
- University of Toronto
- The University of Utah
- The University of Washington
- Washington University in St. Louis
More on Cities and Climate Change
Activities going on in cities produce three quarters of all manmade greenhouse gases.
Sara's work examines the choices city governments make about climate change, water resources, and waste management, the political and economic factors that shape those choices, and how alternative strategies can gain traction in the complex realm of urban politics.
What are the impacts of large urban environments on the global economy, and the local environment?
Sara Hughes identifies policies and strategies cities can use to become more sustainable. She is an assistant professor in the political science department at the University of Toronto, where she teaches urban politics and policy making.