Confronting the most urgent and complex challenges
Our three signature strengths — wellbeing and inclusion; environmental sustainability; and food and nutritional security — are recognized within the field of global development as leading challenges in this century. Among the current Sustainable Development Goals, equity and environmental integrity — including a sustainable global climate — are notable for trending in the wrong direction. Sustainable food systems are an important entry point for effecting transformational change in the world, with impacts on nutrition and food security, as well as on a wider range of development goals including health, gender, peace, and the environment. There are many interactions among the three areas, and much of the interest and potential takes place at the intersections among them.
“Sustainable and Sustaining Food Systems”
Building sustainable agricultural and food systems that also sustain the livelihoods and nutritional security of communities and the people who produce our food is a complex and urgent challenge. These systems must be at once economic engines for poverty alleviation, ecological hubs for maintaining essential life systems, and social spaces for advancing food security and economic equality. We work with partners at the nexus of technological innovation, social change, and progressive policy to identify pathways to sustainable food systems, while investigating the social and political dynamics of these systems across the cycle from cultivation to distribution, consumption, and recycling.
“A Greener World and Greener Economies”
Human-driven resource depletion, climate change, and environmental pollution are not simply major obstacles to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals; they represent existential threats. Our teaching, research, and engagement address strategies to mitigate or reverse the effects of these threats and help people and communities adapt to new environmental realities. We also pursue research on the social and political dimensions of human-environment interactions, paying particular attention to the uneven effects of climate change, environmental change, and energy transitions underway around the globe.
“A World that Leaves No One Behind”
Poverty, inequality, and inclusion are defining challenges of our time. We work toward a world that leaves no one behind, not just economically, but also in terms of the full range of liberties and human aspirations. To that end, our teaching, research and engagement address the factors and policies to foster inclusion and wellbeing by addressing structural impediments — including rectifying historical injustices — that trap far too many people in poverty locally, nationally and globally. We study the causes, manifestations and consequences of poverty and inequality in the global political economy, the histories and legacies of development projects, and alternative models to promote wellbeing.
Our Vision
To advance a more equitable and resilient world by uniting people and ideas across disciplinary and geographical boundaries
Engaging at the intersections of agricultural, environmental, life, and social sciences
Cornell Farmworker Program mobilizes protections for NY farmworkers
As COVID-19 bore down on New York state, the Cornell Farmworker Program stepped up to support the state's more than 55,000 farmworkers. The program sewed and distributed face masks and used mobile phone technology to provide rapid guidance and clear health information in multiple languages to the state’s farmworkers.
Protecting community land rights in a globalized world
Indigenous communities in the tropical lowlands of Latin America have for generations faced insecure claims on their lands. In recent years, efforts to formally recognize land rights have merged with environmental policies to protect forests and mitigate climate change. As part of his doctoral research, Fernando Galeana Rodriguez, Ph.D. ’21 combined his passions for environmental justice and indigenous land rights to study and support the Miskitu population of Honduras.
Shifting demographics, transforming generations
One in five Africans are now between the ages of 15 and 24. This generation of more than 200 million people — known by demographers as Africa’s “youth bulge” — raises critical social questions: what can be done to harness the energy and talents of this generation to promote social equity and economic growth, and what can global policy do to take advantage of surging population trends?
Tackling climate change alongside farmers in Armenia
Climate change is having dire consequences all over the world, especially in agriculture. Keelin Kelly '20 worked directly with farmers in Armenia to help them adapt to a changing world.
Advancing Women in Agriculture through Research and Education (AWARE)
AWARE is built on the belief that focusing on women in agriculture as an underserved majority will improve food security, reduce poverty, and positively impact rural development in developing countries.
Power and place in ecological systems
Power dynamics shape the contours of our lives, influencing just as much the physical environment as the social worlds we inhabit. In the best cases, power is wielded for equitable means; but more often, these dynamics play out to destructive ends.
Agribusiness vies with democracy in California
A four-generation struggle for social and economic justice across California’s fertile agricultural fields is illuminated for the first time in a new book revealing dire consequences of land consolidation to rural livelihoods, civic interests and democracy itself.
Tackling environmental justice and policy
A new course investigates the disproportionate impacts of climate change and related adaptation and mitigation efforts on vulnerable groups, especially communities of color and indigenous communities, and looks at policy drivers and levers that may carve opportunities for change for the future.
Humphrey Program: improving lives and building trust worldwide through leadership in public service
The Fulbright exchange Hubert H. Humphrey Fellowship Program provides accomplished professionals from countries with emerging economies an international enrichment opportunity in leadership and public service. At Cornell, our Humphrey Fellows focus in one of three, often overlapping, areas of interest: agriculture, rural development, and natural resource management.
Innovation Lab for Crop Improvement boosts climate resilience, nutrition in West Africa
In West Africa, the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Crop Improvement (ILCI) works with smallholder farmers and rural populations to develop sustainable crop innovations that address climate change and other social challenges.
Heat stress for cattle may cost billions by century’s end
Looming climate change may be economically hard for low-income cattle farmers in resource-poor countries due to increasing heat stress on the animals, according to research from Professor Mario Herrero.
UN climate author warns of ‘rapidly closing window’
In a cautionary tale to the world, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has issued a 1,024-page report that presents a scientific basis and blueprint to pull humanity back from dire, planet-wide environmental ruin.
Uniting people and ideas across disciplinary and geographical boundaries to advance a more equitable and resilient world.