We provide opportunities for students.

Our students learn from and work with people and partners on campus and throughout the world. Together, we confront environment and sustainability challenges head-on and with confidence. We aim to be bold. We take heart in working together to sustain and restore healthy conditions that sustain people and the diverse wonders of our planet.

We span the resources of Cornell.

As a cross-college major, we are available to students in the College of Arts & Sciences and the College of Agriculture & Life Sciences. Five Cornell colleges are represented by faculty and courses associated with the major. Cornell programs and facilities throughout the U.S. and other countries further extend our reach beyond the Ithaca campus.

We work across the globe.

Our network of faculty, staff and alumni support our undergraduate students throughout their time on campus and beyond. Faculty and alumni provide connections with a broad range of local, regional, national and international off-campus organizations and institutions working together with common purpose.

A single solar panel in the foreground and McGraw Tower in the background at dusk.
Campus partners
Three students working in a group near Beebe Lake
Learning goals

Making a positive impact

Student experiences, alumni pathways, news and other environment and sustainability stories.

Cornell doctoral student Isabella Marie Errigo and Indigenous partners collect eDNA samples from a remote river in the Ecuadorian Amazon, helping communities assess aquatic biodiversity and ecosystem health across a range of environmental conditions.

News

Student, Indigenous partners use eDNA to aid biodiversity in Ecuador

A Cornell graduate student and indigenous Ecuadorian partners are sampling eDNA in Amazonian riverways to understand how gold mining and other human disturbances impact aquatic biodiversity and ecosystem health.

  • Cornell Atkinson
  • Ashley School of Global Development and the Environment
  • Biodiversity
image of patrick webb

News

Patrick Webb, a globally influential scholar of nutrition, food and agriculture policy, and humanitarian assistance, will join Cornell July 1 as the inaugural executive director of the Ashley School of Global Development and the Environment in...
  • Ashley School of Global Development and the Environment
  • Global Development Section
  • Natural Resources and the Environment Section
Yuqing Chen, a doctoral student and the study’s first author, searches for and counts baby oysters attached to shells in trays in Yonkers, New York.

News

A new study offers genetic evidence and proof that farmed eastern oysters are adding to and breeding with wild eastern oyster populations in the western and central Long Island Sound.

  • Ashley School of Global Development and the Environment
  • Natural Resources and the Environment Section
  • Biodiversity
Illustration of sturgeon swimming with yellow sound waves in the background

News

The finding gives New York state another tool to locate and understand the behavior of the endangered Atlantic sturgeon, an iconic species decimated by overfishing.

  • New York State Water Resources Institute
  • Ashley School of Global Development and the Environment
  • Water

News

Senior Research Associate Jim Watkins and graduate student Kayden Nasworthy attended the annual conference of the American Society of Limnology and Oceanography in Montreal, Quebec from May 12-17. Watkins presented data on nearshore zooplankton...

  • Biological Field Station
  • Ashley School of Global Development and the Environment
  • Natural Resources and the Environment Section