Climate Change, Global Governance, Sustainability, Power & Security A multidisciplinary approach to considering the Earth’s changing systems

PWH Visiting Fellows Erin Sikorsky and Koko Warner were both guest speakers in a new Penn course on climate change and the environment, profiled in Penn Today.

In the bright, newly open Anthropology Commons on the third floor of the Penn Museum, professional-looking posters hang on the walls as groups of students discuss their research, occasionally pulling down a mask to take a sip of seltzer. 

On one side of the room, professors Kathleen Morrison and Joseph Francisco chat animatedly with senior Kerry Hsu about her poster on minimizing greenhouse gas emissions related to food. On the side opposite, Fernando Manrique, a junior economics major from Lima, Peru, talks with peers about his project, on the environmental and economic impacts of chemical fertilizer runoff....

In April, one of those guest speakers, Erin Sikorsky, a Perry World House visiting fellow and director of the Center for Climate and Security, told the auditorium of students, “We’re entering a world that has no analogue.” Based off her years of experience in the national intelligence community, Sikorsky described for students the ways in which national security is increasingly taking into account the changing climate. “Climate change is at the top of our national security concerns,” she says....

Other guest speakers have included the Water Center’s Ellen Kohler, Eugenie Birch of the Penn Institute for Urban Research, Sustainability Director Nina Morris along with Sustainability Coordinator Natalie Walker, Jon Hawkings of the Department of Earth and Environmental Science, Farah Hussain of the Perelman School of Medicine, and Koko Warner, another Perry World House Fellow, with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. 

Read more in Penn Today >>