From the Director

Research Center Director, John P. Holdren

The Center’s work addresses today’s great challenges at the intersection of environmental science and the human condition. We focus particularly on the human uses and modification of land, soils, and vegetation; on the resulting impacts on the carbon cycle, the nitrogen cycle, and the hydrologic cycle; and on how these patterns of use, modification, and impact are influencing global climate change and being influenced by it. We work not only on the science of these issues but also on the social, political, and regulatory dimensions of strategies through which human societies can meet their economic aspirations without wrecking the environmental resources on which human well-being equally depends.

We do this interdisciplinary, science-based, solution-oriented work at every geographic and political scale from the local to the global. We do it in the labs and offices of our Woods Hole headquarters – the Gilman Ordway Campus, the functionality and resource-conserving properties of which are perfectly matched to the Center’s mission; and we do it “on the ground” at sites in New England, the mid-Atlantic states, Alaska, Canada, Siberia, the Amazon, and sub-Saharan Africa, working hand-in-hand with other scientists and policy specialists based in these regions and with small and large landowners, businesses, NGOs, and governmental agencies ranging from village councils to the United Nations.

Our institutional collaborators in this work include a number of the other scientific institutions in Woods Hole, the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, the Harvard University Center for the Environment, the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, the Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental Da Amazonia (IPAM) in Belem, the St. Petersburg Research Institute of Forestry, and the Central Africa Regional Program for the Environment (CARPE). Our funders include a variety of US government agencies, several private foundations, and a large number of generous corporate and individual donors.

If you are interested in the interaction of the environment and the human future, you will find much of interest at this site. My colleagues and I invite your browsing and, if you are so moved, your inquiries for further details.

©Woods Hole Research Center, 2008