Eight full-time M.S. in Climate students were honored with the inaugural Dean's Graduate Scholarship, a prestigious award reserved for recognizing academic and professional excellence in the field. The $50,000 scholarship aims to financially support students as they continue their academic journey at the Climate School.
In the environmental nonprofit sector, "centering frontline voices" has become a familiar slogan, often detached from how decisions are made or resources allocated. It appears in grant proposals, conference agendas, and organizational values statements. And yet, too often, those voices are still positioned as illustrative rather than authoritative-invited to animate strategies already decided, asked to translate lived experience into language legible to funders, or flattened into narratives that travel more easily than the truths they carry.
In his "Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination," Robin D.G. Kelley explains that "a map to the new world is in the imagination." There are so many emergencies right now-ICE abductions, decriminalization of anti-Black racism, the political hijack of the struggle against antisemitism and anti-Blackness, unauthorized military aggression abroad, a climate crisis accelerated-that it's hard to know where to direct our resistance.
It was a tense moment. A group of about 50 people from the Munduruku, an Indigenous people in the Amazon basin, had blocked the entrance to the Cop30 venue in protest, causing long lines of delegates to snake down access roads, simmering in the morning heat. The Munduruku, unhappy about the ruination of their forest and rivers by industry and their lack of voice at Cop30, demanded to speak to Lula da Silva, Brazil's president.
Papua New Guinea has voiced frustration after Australia ditched a bid to co-host next year's UN climate talks with its Pacific island neighbours. We are all not happy. And disappointed it's ended up like this, foreign minister Justin Tkatchenko told Agence France-Presse after Australia ceded hosting rights to Turkey. Australia had been pushing to host Cop31 next year alongside south Pacific nations which are increasingly threatened by rising seas and climate-fuelled disasters.
The Lebanese-American designer, writer and advocate's entire oeuvre - from her research to her art - is rooted in the belief that everything is political. Having been displaced from Lebanon to Canada as a child, a survivor of war and a refugee, this is something she experienced first hand at a young age. An enormous truism whittled down to three words, 'Everything is Political'; at once a tagline - and the title of Semaan's digital and print publication ( EIP ).