Since our founding in 1900 as The Yale Forest School to our present as the Yale School of the Environment, our school has been at the forefront of environmental science and scholarship, training generations of leaders who have tackled some of the most pressing challenges of their time. Today, we continue to build on this solid foundation by providing research, teaching, and public engagement aimed at creating a more sustainable world.

Our faculty, students, and alumni are bringing a science-to-solutions focus to tackling the climate crisis, biodiversity loss, and a wide scope of critical environmental issues. They are engaged in novel cross-disciplinary scholarship and practice in energy policy, ecosystem science and biogeochemistry, green chemistry, urban science, environmental justice, and environmental economics, among many other areas. The teaching and study of forestry has been, and remains, a core strength. The Forest School at YSE is a hub for practitioners and land stewards in forest-related fields worldwide, bringing together multidisciplinary research and practice to find solutions to the challenges that face the world’s forests. 

While expanding our traditional strengths in forest and ecosystem science with the appointment of new faculty with deep expertise in tropical forest ecology, temperate forest resilience, and disturbance ecology and ecosystem dynamics, we have also added new faculty expertise in key emerging areas, such as water resource management and policy, urban planning and data science, climate migration, and sustainable resource use, through the lens of economics and market design.

Our school continues to forge new partnerships and initiatives aimed at addressing urgent global environmental challenges. Interdisciplinary teams at YSE have worked with external partners on efforts to advance the scientific integrity of voluntary carbon markets, develop a sustainability agenda for the international trade system, and mitigate the environmental impacts of artificial intelligence.

In the past several years, we have also made great progress in expanding our capacity to support emerging climate leaders around the world. In 2022, YSE partnered with the Three Cairns Group to launch the Three Cairns Climate Program for the Global South. The cornerstone of the program is Three Cairns Scholars, which allows YSE to meet 100 percent of the demonstrated tuition need for qualified master’s students from the Global South. The first cohort of scholars graduated last year and are already making an impact on climate and sustainability challenges throughout the Global South.

In the fall of 2023, we were thrilled to be able to launch the Bekenstein Climate Leaders Program which is aimed at increasing the number of Yale graduates working to address the climate crisis and accelerate climate change mitigation efforts. With the window of time to reduce emissions rapidly closing, the initial primary focus of the Bekenstein Climate Leaders Program is on climate change mitigation.

As part of our efforts to expand access to advanced environmental education and training to environmental professionals across the globe, we have expanded our portfolio of online certificate programs in recent years, launching new programs in urban climate leadership, equitable energy development, green chemistry for climate and sustainability, environmental data science, and strategic climate change communications. Participants in these programs often report being able to put into practice almost immediately what they’ve learned in the program.

This deep integration of environmental practice, policy, science, and education has made our school resilient and enabled our faculty and alumni to shape practice and policy around the world for the past 126 years. The next decade will be critical for our planet, and I am confident that YSE will continue to be a place where science meets solutions and where every student leaves ready to make an impact in the world.

Indy C. Burke
Carl W. Knobloch, Jr. Dean
School of the Environment