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- Green Innovation & Justice, led by Prof. David Winickoff of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management
- Developing Carbon Energy and Environmental Services Budgets for Management Strategies in Multifunctional Rangeland Production Systems, led by Prof. James Bartolome of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management
- Governance and the California Delta, led by Prof. Rick Frank, Director of the California Center for Environmental Law and Policy.
- Improved Cookstoves to Fight Illness, Poverty, Environmental Degradation, and Global Warming, led by Prof. David Levine, Haas School of Business
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“The UC Berkeley campus leadership has recognized research in the environment is a high priority,” says Prof. Inez Fung, Co-Director of BIE. “The BIE Roundtables are presented as the seed to make new collaborations happen…to pull people together. The goal is that when the Roundtables mature, they will go to the next level and write a proposal for large-scale funding. This the progression we want to see. We are excited about this academic year’s recipients of the Rountable award, and we think these four have great potential to produce significant advancement here at UC Berkeley”
BIE envisions the Roundtables as its core research activity and the lead faculty of each Roundtable as the Institute’s core affiliated faculty. The investment by BIE in each faculty team is expected to produce significant intellectual development in the topic, either in the form of a scholarly report or paper, or in the form of a proposal for funding. This year BIE will assist each team in producing a campus symposium on their Roundtable topic. For this year’s call for proposals the funding for the Roundtable was increased from $10,000 to $20,000.
The Roundtable, Critical Innovation for Urban Sustainability, is focused on the idea that the development of green technology does not guarantee effective deployment or the equitable distribution of the risks and benefits. This Roundtable will focus on the development of a critical approach to innovation that will help bring procedural and distributive justice within green technology development and transfer to the fore, targeting large technological and urban policy innovations in the areas of environmental and health monitoring, water and energy provision, and green-collar job development.
Developing Carbon Energy and Environmental Services Budgets for Management Strategies in Multifunctional Rangeland Production Systems is focused on the multiple benefits and services that rangeland systems provide and the fact that management strategies, markets, and policies significantly impact these benefits. Rangelands have the potential to produce benefits that are relevant for climate change policy, such as biofuel production and carbon credits. This Roundtable will examine the state of the knowledge and research possibilities of rangeland systems in conjointly addressing biodiversity, carbon sequestration, biofuels, and other environmental services.
Governance and the California Delta is focused on the water crisis facing California. 23 million rely on the Delta as a source of water; however the sustainability of that water is in question. Federal courts have ordered reductions in pumping to protect biodiversity in the Delta and the fragile levee system is ever vulnerable to seismic and flood event. Climate change events are likely to exacerbate these challenges. This Roundtable seeks to focus on promising environmental governance initiatives in the European Union exploring if similar approaches might be successful in the California Delta Region.
Improved Cookstoves to Fight Illness, Poverty, Environmental Degradation, and Global Warming explores the global reality that over 3 billion people use primitive solid biomass for their daily cooking needs and desperately need safe, clean, and efficient alternatives to reduce death from indoor air pollution, to fight poverty, and to reduce deforestation. This Roundtable will seek to develop methods and data needed to enable distributors of improved cookstoves to access credits for reductions in greenhouse gases and to demonstrate a financially sustainable business model.
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