Category: News

Originally published on April 30, 2024 by the Annenberg Public Policy Center.

From April 3-7, 2024, The Annenberg Public Policy Center (APPC) hosted the annual conference of the Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ), bringing the group of journalists from across North America to the University of Pennsylvania for #SEJ2024, focusing on Democracy, Disinformation, Activism… What’s Environmental Journalism’s Role?”

The conference, which drew over a thousand attendees to Philadelphia, not only showcased Penn faculty research in plenary sessions and workshops, but also made it possible for faculty and students take part in regional field trips.

The meeting, the SEJ’s first on the East Coast in several years, was hosted by APPC in honor of the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media (PCSSM).

In an opening night plenary session on Wednesday, April 3rd, APPC director Kathleen Hall Jamieson and PCSSM director Michael Mann engaged in a conversation moderated by Rick Weiss, director of SciLine, a program of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The plenary session also featured lightning-round presentations of the environmental work of six Penn faculty.

Scan the QR code

“Scan the QR code!”

With that repeated directive, and the QR code prominent on the screen behind her, Jamieson urged journalists at a lunchtime workshop and the evening plenary to connect with an APPC web page on climate communications that features an array of APPC and Penn resources. These include APPC survey data finding that people who report having experienced extreme weather are more likely to support climate-benefitting policies; a fact sheet on SciCheck, a program of APPC’s FactCheck.org that focuses on false and misleading scientific claims; a directory of Penn faculty experts on climate; and the announcement of APPC’s new Climate Communication division, directed by Annenberg School for Communication psychologist and neuroscientist Emily Falk, who led an SEJ mini-workshop on crafting impactful environmental narratives.

Also on Wednesday, as part of the SEJ’s daylong opening workshop on “Combating Climate and Science Disinformation,” Mann and Jamieson spoke at a lunchtime panel moderated by Weiss. In that forum, they discussed the communication landscape, climate science disinformation, and how to combat climate “doomism” – the belief it is already too late for action – and identified ways to effectively communicate with audiences about climate science.

Jamieson cited recent APPC survey data showing that trust in many institutions, including the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), remains high. “We still have reliable sources to which we as a culture turn, even in the face of a highly polarized environment – not to find ‘truth,’ but to find the best available [information] that’s knowable by our best people using the best tested methods and regularly updated across time,” she said.

In response to those who claim that it’s too late to stop climate change, Mann stressed that “every bit of carbon that we don’t burn makes us better off.”  Mann and Jamieson also took questions, including ones on the connection between attacks on democracy and attacks on climate scientists and how to respond to critics who claim that climate scientists are being influenced or “bought.” (Mann argued that while a small group of scientists may be influenced by fossil-fuel industry funding, the overall problem is almost the opposite, that “the scientific community has probably been overly conservative…with the way they’ve communicated the science to the public.”)

Disinformation and an election year

At the SEJ reception sponsored by APPC in the Feintuch Family Lobby of the Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, Penn’s 12 schools staffed tables displaying their climate-related research. Also on display was work from PCSSM and APPC, the latter featuring SciCheck.

Following the opening day reception and dinner, the conference opened its first plenary session in the Zellerbach Theatre, where Penn’s vice provost for research, Dawn Bonnell, welcomed the group to campus. Then Jamieson and Mann were rejoined by Weiss, who asked about the role of journalism in combating mis- and disinformation – and its importance in an election year.

Weiss also asked Mann about his personal fight against disinformation. In February, a jury awarded over a million dollars in punitive damages to Mann, who sued two conservative writers after they compared him and his work on global warming to a convicted child molester.

“Those of us in the climate science arena were introduced to the concepts of fake news and alternative facts decades ago before they became fashionable and part of our popular lexicon,” Mann said. “And in some sense, the bad faith debate that has existed for decades over human-caused climate change has sort of metastasized into this larger bad faith debate we have today over basic factual discourse. And so, there are some lessons to learn from what we have faced.…

“The two writers from these two organizations made defamatory allegations, accused me of fraud, compared me to a convicted child molester. You know, there is a role for good faith debate in science. It’s part of the self-correcting machinery that the great Carl Sagan described that keeps science on a path towards a better understanding of our world. But making false allegations about scientists, engaging in libelous attacks against them to discredit their science to advance a partisan or ideological agenda is not part of that good faith debate. At some point you need to draw a line. We felt it was important to draw that line when we were subject to these defamatory attacks 12 years ago,” Mann said.

Watch Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Michael Mann here.

Penn faculty take the stage

After the discussion moderated by Weiss, Jamieson introduced a half-dozen Penn faculty for two-minute mini-talks on their research. The first, Jennifer Pinto-Martin of Penn Nursing, appeared on video discussing “Climate change and eco-anxiety,” on her research in the Galapagos and in the Eastwick neighborhood of Philadelphia. She was followed at the Zellerbach by:

• William W. Braham (Weitzman School of Design) on how “Efficiency will not solve climate change.”
• Dipti Pitta (Penn Vet) on “Microbiome medicine: toward sustainable livestock systems,” and seeking to lower methane emissions from livestock.
• Joseph S. Francisco (Chemistry) on atmospheric chemistry, and the effects of global warming on the stratosphere.
• Simon Richter (German), an environmental humanist and co-director of the Penn Animation as Research Lab, on how the Netherlands is coping with rising sea levels.
• Katie Barott (Biology) on the ecosystem of the coral reef, the largest biologically built structure on our planet, and why coral bleaching occurs.

Watch faculty presentations here.

Originally published by Lindsay Bowen for SEJ on April 14, 2024.

By Gabriel Huang for The Daily Pennsylvanian originally published on April 8, 2024

The Society of Environmental Journalists held its annual conference at Penn from April 3-7, drawing hundreds of reporters to campus to explore climate stories and learn how to combat disinformation.

The five-day conference was hosted by Penn’s Annenberg Public Policy Center and Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media. The theme of this year’s conference was “Democracy, Disinformation, Activism – What’s Environmental Journalism’s Role?”

This year marked the 33rd conference organized by SEJ, a North American organization founded in 1990 for journalists who cover environmental issues. At the conference, participants were able to hear from distinguished speakers, attend seminars and workshops, and go on local bus tours in Philadelphia. Notable speakers this year included United States Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Michael Regan, as well as Penn professors Michael Mann and Kathleen Hall Jamieson.

Mann is the Presidential Distinguished Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Science and director of the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media. In a statement to The Daily Pennsylvanian, he discussed the importance of scientific communicators and journalists in combatting disinformation in everything from public health to climate change.

“Science is at the core of the great existential challenges we face today, and ideologically-motivated antiscience and disinformation has constituted a major threat to our efforts to confront these challenges,” Mann said.

Mann wrote that Penn was particularly well-suited to host this conference because of its strengths in communication.

“The threat of misinformation and disinformation to effective environmental communication is the key theme at this year’s SEJ, and Penn is a leader in understanding how to combat misinformation and disinformation,” Mann said.

Mann and Jamieson — who is the director of APPC — were featured panelists in a lunchtime session titled “The Intersection Between Disinformation Research and Climate Science.” In the conversation, Mann and Jamieson discussed Mann’s recent victory in a $1 defamation million suit against bloggers Rand Simberg and Mark Steyn. The case argued that the bloggers defamed Mann in a series of blog posts discrediting his climate change research in 2012.

“It’s a more common move now to discredit the person than to discredit the argument, and that’s the move that was made against Mike, to discredit the person on grounds that had nothing to do with the science to discredit the science,” Jamieson said.

Mann expressed hope that the ruling would encourage other scientists to speak out.

“There are basic protections out there, and I hope that my fellow scientists who are afraid to speak truth to power are more willing to do that now,” Mann said.

Participants were also able to take bus tours to engage in environmental journalism in the Philadelphia area — an aspect that Jamieson believes made Penn particularly attractive to the SEJ conference.

“Any large major metropolitan area is concerned about issues such as flooding and extreme weather that are increasingly likely,” Jamieson said. “As a result, being in a major metropolitan area lets a journalist feature the ways in which extreme weather is affecting that kind of a built environment.”

She added that East Coast cities with major fossil fuel production, including Philadelphia, face the additional concern of rising sea levels that disproportionately affect individuals who are already “disadvantaged by society.”

The conference featured several others Penn community members. Emily Falk, vice dean of the Annenberg School for Communication and professor of communication, psychology, and marketing, led a workshop on using psychological research and technology to cover environmental narratives.

Penn students also had the opportunity to participate in the conference. Currently, Mann and Jamieson co-teach an undergraduate and graduate level course called COMM 4330: “Climate Change and Communication: Theories and Applications.” As part of SEJ, students presented white papers on leading climate myths and conspiracies and conducted interviews with environmental journalists. They were able to interact with both speakers and participants at the conference.

“It was so awesome to be in a space with all these people who are so passionate about climate change and communication,” College junior Bronwyn Patterson, a student in the class, said.

Michael Muldoon, a second year in the Master of Environmental Studies program, said that while he does not want to pursue a career as a reporter, the conference gave him a different perspective on journalism.

“It was just a great experience in demystifying journalism, and not treating journalists like they’re some sort of alien species,” Muldoon said.

Originally published on April 2, 2024 by Annenberg Public Policy Center’s Climate Communication

As part of its 30^th anniversary celebration, the Annenberg Public Policy Center (APPC) has opened a new area of research, the Climate Communication division, led by Annenberg School for Communication vice dean Emily Falk.

“This moves the policy center into an important new area in which communication plays a critical role,” said APPC director Katheen Hall Jamieson.

The new climate division joins APPC’s Communication Science and Institutions of Democracy divisions, which are headed, respectively, by Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor Dolores Albarracín and political science professor Matt Levendusky.

Falk, a professor of communication, psychology, marketing, and operations, information and decision at the Annenberg School, directs Penn’s Communication Neuroscience Lab and studies the science of behavior change, using tools from psychology, neuroscience, and communication to explore the characteristics of persuasive messaging, and successful communication more broadly. She has been recognized as an outstanding early-career researcher by the International Communication Association, the Association for Psychological Science, the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, the National Institutes of Health, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

The Climate Communication division is envisioned as a hub for interdisciplinary, translational research on climate communication and the neural, psychological, and sociological mechanisms that motivate climate action. Its work will focus both on topics at both local scales (for instance, environmental justice initiatives in West Philadelphia) and global scales (such as the development and evaluation of media campaigns that communicate climate science knowledge).

“We’re hoping to bring together people from across Penn, the local community, nationally and internationally to create cutting-edge science about climate communication,” Falk said. She added that two areas were of special interest.

“One is focusing on the beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors relevant to climate in areas such as transportation, food, and energy,” she said. “The second is resilience and social connection. We’re particularly interested in working with young people to create the tools and psychological resources they need to innovate and develop new ways of thinking about climate and address the challenges we face as a global community.”

Falk said the division would collaborate closely with other research centers at Penn, including the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media, under the leadership of Michael Mann, and her own Communication Neuroscience Lab.

By Sophia Schmidt for WHYY – originally published April 2, 2024.

Hundreds of journalists covering climate change and the environment will converge in Philadelphia this week for the annual Society of Environmental Journalists conference.

Now in its 33rd year, the conference will focus on journalism’s role in democracy, disinformation and activism.

“It’s a hot topic these days,” said Annie Ropeik, an independent climate reporter based in Maine and secretary of SEJ’s board. “In an election year…  attracting a lot of those political reporters on the East Coast, we felt like we needed to deliver some resources on how to cover climate disinformation and misinformation accurately.”

The conference will be hosted by the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center — which runs FactCheck.org — and the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media. The conference includes panels, tours of the region, workshops and a keynote speech by EPA Administrator Michael Regan.

SEJ Executive Director Aparna Mukherjee, who previously worked at Resolve Philly, an organization that aims to rethink the practice of reporting, hopes SEJ gives members tools to pursue more community-centric journalism.

“Very credible, empirically researched, fact-based reporting: That has always been the hallmark of SEJ members’ work,” Mukherjee said. “But from the perspective of better understanding what community voice looks like in shaping coverage and thinking about what the impact of coverage could be, this part is very new I think for SEJ.”

The conference will also give journalists a space to think about how their work relates to advocacy, Ropeik said.

“Our ideas about what objectivity means are changing, our ideas about basically what we can say and what voices we center and what balance means are changing,” she said. “We’ve got a lot of those different perspectives in the mix in our membership… It’s a conversation that we really want to have and help people be better prepared to make those decisions about their own journalism.”

Sessions during this year’s conference include covering the energy transition, cutting through greenwashing, working with whistleblowers, finding stories in disaster data and representing rural communities fairly in environmental justice reporting.

Conference planners chose Philadelphia because it “reveals the potential of community resilience” — with residents fighting for trees to protect against hotter summers, neighborhoods free of trash and the right to breathe clean air — and because the political dynamics of Pennsylvania mirror much of the country.

Local residents who will speak during the conference include Youth Poet Laureate of Philadelphia Oyewumi Oyeniyi; journalist, organizer and fishmonger Feini Yin; abolitionist organizer Kermit O; Penn professors Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Michael Mann; and artist Eurhi Jones. Mayor Cherelle Parker and Gov. Josh Shapiro have also been invited to attend.

Meg McGuire, conference co-chair and publisher of Delaware Currents, hopes attendees “have fun and learn stuff” at the conference. She said spaces to socialize and share knowledge are key as more environmental journalists work as freelancers, rather than newsroom staff.

“Trying to find ways to support each other — enhance our commitment to telling people the truth of things as best we know at the time — is incredibly important,” McGuire said.

By Hailey Reissman for Annenberg School for Communication News – originally published March 18, 2024

Climate change is an undeniably complex global problem. It’s often challenging for individuals to feel like they can make an impact — if they even know how. Should you be turning off your lights more? Recycling? Taking public transit? Purchasing carbon offsets? Even when people understand what they should be doing, they often default to inaction because the crisis can seem so distant from everyday life or scary to think about.

To figure out how to effectively motivate people toward climate change action, researchers in the Communication Neuroscience Lab at the Annenberg School for Communication, the Climate Communication Division of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, and the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media at the University of Pennsylvania are testing numerous methods to educate people about climate change and spur them to take action. Ranging from quizzes to imagination exercises, the researchers hope to determine which strategies are most effective and for whom.

“Climate change is primarily a problem of human behavior. As psychologists and communication scientists, we have the tools to discover how we can motivate people to feel like they can and should take action,’” says Allie Sinclair, study leader and the Joan Bossert Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Communication Neuroscience Lab and the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media.

The interdisciplinary team has already run experiments with more than 6,000 people to test a range of different strategies informed by how the brain works.

After every intervention, participants are asked to rate their intentions to do things like engage in individual and community-focused climate mitigating actions, share articles about the climate crisis, or sign petitions about climate policy, as well as emotional aspects, such as how distant the climate crisis feels to them — in terms of time, geographic space, and personal impact.

“By using the tournament format, we can test many different behavioral interventions with the same group of people and see which intervention worked best for each goal, and for which demographic groups,” Sinclair says.

The team is using strategies that tap into a number of well-defined psychological processes.

For example, several interventions tap into people’s sense of what is relevant to them or to people they care about. In one intervention, participants reflect on why climate-related news matters to themselves or to people they know. Previous research from the team had people consider articles about health, climate change, voting, and COVID-19 and found that an individual is more likely to share information that they feel is meaningful to themselves or to the people they know.

Other groups of interventions are focused on imagining the future, and on the impact of different possible choices people can make.

The strategies focused on imagining the future are based on previous research led by Sinclair showing that when people fire up their imaginations to picture a COVID-related scenario — like a person contracting the virus at a party — it can change how dangerous they perceive various COVID-related risky behaviors to be, and whether or not they’re willing to do those risky behaviors. Finally, the strategies focused on impact are riffs on other commonly used intervention to engage people in climate action.

“We’ll take some of our top winners from this wave and pit them against each other, both to replicate our results and to see if combining them creates synergistic effects,” Sinclair says. “By testing them together, we hope to find an intervention that is even better at encouraging climate action.”

“Climate change is one of the most important issues of our time,” says Emily Falk, the senior author and lab director. “This work will provide actionable insights about what works and what doesn’t, so we can shape the future in positive ways.”

Members of the lab involved in the tournament include Director of the Communication Neuroscience Lab and Vice Dean of the Annenberg School Emily Falk, Research Director Dani Cosme, Senior Research Coordinator José Carreras-Tartak, Annenberg doctoral student Kirsten Lydic, as well as Penn Psychology doctoral students Taurean Butler and Christian Benitez. The team is also collaborating with Presidential Distinguished Professor Michael Mann and Administrative Coordinator Heather Kostick at the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media.

This material is based upon work supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) under Contract No. 140D0423C0048. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA); or its Contracting Agent, the U.S. Department of the Interior, Interior Business Center, Acquisition Services Directorate, Division V.

Originally published by Delger Erdenesanaa for The New York Times on February 8, 2024.

Feature image: Michael Mann leaving D.C. Superior Court on Wednesday.Credit…Pete Marovich for The New York Times

The researcher had sued two writers for libel and slander over comments about his work. The jury awarded him damages of more than $1 million.

Originally published by Joseph Romm for Moms Clean Air Force on February 5, 2024.

One of the most viral zingers from last year—the hottest year on record—was this tweet thumb-slammed in response to the global news of America’s beloved pop star taking up with Kansas City Chief’s All-Pro tight end Travis Kelce: “I wish Taylor Swift was in love with a climate scientist.” She’s not, but we climate-concerned folks still stan her.

Why? Because we know that the 14-time Grammy winner could spur massive action on climate change, which, unlike the outcome of the Super Bowl LVIII, will affect all of us beyond imagining. After all, she knows from “Cruel Summers.”

The first thing Taylor needs to do to be a climate hero is to take a look at her emissions. If we are being honest, right now she’s being a climate “Anti-Hero” in at least one important way: her flying preferences.

In mid-2022, her private jet was named “biggest celebrity CO2e polluter this year so far.” Of the toxic contributors that the wealthy have access to, private jets are probably the worst. Taylor has two. A 2023 study found the wealthiest 1% of air travelers cause half of all aviation emissions of heat-trapping carbon dioxide. It is a staggering—“It’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me”—stat.

To her credit, Swift has invested in carbon offsets—where you pay someone else to (supposedly) reduce their emissions or plant enough trees to balance your emissions, so the impact of your harmful output is seemingly minimized. A spokesperson explained that Taylor bought twice as many carbon credits “needed to offset all tour travel.” Understandably, though her heart is clearly in the right place, Taylor Swift has fallen for the shameless greenwashing that offsets sailed in on.

“The large majority are not real or are over-credited or both,” as one expert told me for a paper I wrote about the trend. That’s why so many companies, like Nestlé and Shell, abandoned them last year, and Taylor should follow suit. After all, she is an expert on things that look good but are really not: “Oh, my God, look at that face. You look like my next mistake” and “You’ll come back each time you leave ’cause, darling, I’m a nightmare dressed like a daydream” come to mind.

Taylor cares about climate disruption and the environment. In a 2020 interview, she said climate change was one of the “horrific situations that we find ourselves facing right now,” especially young people. And with her carbon credit purchases, she’s demonstrated her willingness to try out solutions. We hope she’ll consider these steps to raise the urgency of the climate issue.

STEP 1: Investments > offsets

Taylor Swift is in a position to make some very big statements about the mess we are in. In October, Bloomberg reported her net worth had hit $1.1 billion. If we may be so bold, why not create a climate fund to help finance renewable energy in developing countries? She could seed it with $100 million plus 10% of the future gross revenues of all her music and concerts. She could get other musicians to kick in money the way Bill Gates gets other billionaires to boost his efforts.

STEP 2: Get out the youth vote again and then some more

Another great strategy is one she has deployed already on a small scale. Taylor registered nearly 40,000 people last September after posting an Instagram Story for 24 hours urging her fans to do so at Vote.org.

Experts say a boost in young voter turnout could make the difference this year in swing states like Wisconsin, Georgia, and Arizona. Young people and women—her audiences—care about climate. A November poll found that climate-focused youth were much more likely to say they would vote in 2024.

Taylor can motivate political engagement and drive change. She can make another several major pushes nationally and in key states—first for voter registration and then for actually getting out to vote. Given her huge fan base, she truly could be the one who makes the difference.

STEP 3: We need a great climate anthem

Finally, Swift can devote some of her world-class storytelling talents to writing a catchy and smart—really, does anybody do it better than her?—climate song or two. She’s already written one political anthem in “Only The Young,” for her blockbuster 2019 Netflix documentary Miss Americana. A 2021 analysis of her albums Folklore and Evermore found she “uses nature-themed words seven times as frequently as the other pop songs do.” Nature metaphors spring up everywhere in her songs: “With you, I’d dance in a storm in my best dress fearless” and “The drought was the very worst when the flowers that we’d grown together died of thirst.”

That last line is a metaphor for the death of a once-flourishing relationship and the dreams and hopes that withered as a result. If Taylor comes to see that one of the greater things she could do is become a climate hero, maybe global warming won’t wither her fans’ dreams and hopes.

So come on, Taylor Swift: Give us a climate ballad of epic proportions, one that will last for generations.

Joseph Romm is a senior research fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media. He holds a Ph.D. in physics from MIT and has authored 10 books including, “Language Intelligence: Lessons on Persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga.” He is writing a book about Taylor Swift’s storytelling secrets.

By Scott Condon for Aspen Daily News – originally published on January 9, 2024.

Carbon offsets for air travel, carbon capture and storage in wells drilled far underground, heat pumps for heating and cooling of buildings and replacing fossil fuel burners with electric vehicles.

What’s real and what’s hype in the battle to save the planet from climate change? Joseph Romm is coming to Aspen to help those interested sort it out. And he said we all have skin in the game.

“People have to understand climate change simply because it’s going to have a very big impact on their lives and the lives of their children. It’s not going to go away,” said Romm, a senior research fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media.

Join our team! Please see below for current opportunities.

Civic Science Fellow – Deadline is January 15, 2024.

Civic Science Postdoctoral Fellowship in Climate Communication and Action at the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania
Are you passionate about using science to positively impact society? Are you motivated to find innovative ways to conduct science in partnership with communities? Do you want to join a network of individuals and organizations who are committed to advancing science and society through meaningful collaboration between scientists and community members? With support from the Rita Allen Foundation and Burroughs Wellcome fund, we’re recruiting a Postdoctoral Fellow who will serve as a 2024-2025 Civic Science Fellow and develop civically-oriented research projects focused on the science of climate communication, action, and resilience at the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania (APPC), working with APPC’s Climate Communication and Action and Science Communication Divisions, with APPC’s partner center the Penn Center for Science Sustainability and the Media, and with the university’s Netter Center for Community Partnerships. This appointment is expected to last 24 months, with an initial appointment from March 2024 to February 2025, and a second year, contingent on funding and satisfactory performance, from March 2025 to February 2026.

For more information, click here.

Sustainability and Conservation Science Postdoctoral Fellowship – Deadline is February 16, 2024.

PROGRAM GOALS
This postdoctoral fellowship program aims to bridge the excellence in academic research at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn) and in conservation practice at The Nature Conservancy (TNC) to confront climate change, while creating a new generation of sustainability and conservation leaders who combine the rigor of academic science with real-world application.

Penn and TNC join in recognizing climate change as the single greatest environmental threat to humanity. Climate change is an issue that tightly integrates the health of the planet with the economy, access to clean and reliable energy, water, and food production, and equity. To tackle these challenges, our world needs science that blends climatology, physics, economics, business, chemistry, engineering, technology and communications with conservation and ecology. As well, it must marry the best academic research with opportunities for rapid testing and deployment in the real world to address human well-being.

The specific program goals are to:

• Invest in the talent potential of a new generation of climate change leaders
• Recruit scientists who bring a diversity of culture, experience, and ideas to Penn and TNC
• Support innovative and impact-oriented research that helps deliver TNC outcomes
• Provide the fellows and Penn research community as a whole with access to real-world conservation professionals and issues.

Postdoctoral Fellows will be supported annually with a $65,000 stipend and benefits, a $10,000 research fund, and up-to $2,000 for professional travel. A one-time relocation reimbursement of up-to $2,000 is also available. Fellows will be eligible for support for up-to two consecutive years.

For more information, click here.