2008 An Environmental Crossroads

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Global warming clouds our future. Pollution degrades our air, soil and water. Environmental toxins compromise the health of our children. Misuse threatens the sustainability of our forests, fisheries, wetlands and coasts, and the health of species that live there.

But there is reason for hope.

Through sound science and policy research, we're finding answers to these problems. Airborne lead and acid rain have been dramatically reduced. Industrial water pollution has decreased. Habitats are being preserved.

Faculty members from the Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences at Duke University are part of the effort to help find these answers and establish new environmental practices and policies to safeguard our natural resources for generations to come.

To contact our experts or learn more about what we're doing in states across the nation, click on the state you're interested in.

Air Quality
Despite being downwind from major sources of industrial pollution in the Midwest and southern Canada, Vermonters enjoy relatively clean air. The average Vermonter’s added cancer risk from hazardous air pollutants is just 270 per 1,000,000 – among the lowest risk levels east of the Mississippi. Nonetheless, high concentrations of diesel emissions and acrolein, a suspected carcinogen that’s produced by some pesticide products, pose health risks in isolated areas, and acid rain has harmed forest ecosystems in the Green and Taconic mountains.

Lori Snyder Bennear is an environmental economist who specializes in evaluating the effectiveness of environmental regulations.
tel: (919) 613-8083 e: lori.bennear@duke.edu

Research focus: Bennear's areas of specialization are environmental and natural resource economics, applied microeconomics and empirical methods. Her research focuses on estimating the effect of different regulatory innovations on measures of facility-level environmental performance, such as pollution levels, chemical use, and technology choice.

Her recent work has focused on measuring the effectiveness of management-based regulations, which require each regulated entity to develop its own internal rules and initiates to achieve reductions in pollution, as well as the effectiveness of regulations that mandate public reporting of toxic emissions.

Prasad Kasibhatla is an expert on the chemistry of air pollution and on regional-scale ozone and aerosol modeling.
tel: (919) 613-8075: e: psk9@duke.edu

Research focus: Atmospheric chemistry. Regional and global modeling. Atmospheric chemical data analysis. Natural and anthropogenic impacts on the chemical composition of the atmosphere.

In a recent Science article, Kasibhatla and his co-authors reported that drought-induced wildfires during El Nino climatic cycles may be undocumented sources of greenhouse gas emissions that cannot be traced to smokestacks, vehicular emissions and other known contributors. “This suggests that the variability and intensity of El Nino may be one of the most critical components of climate regulating future carbon loss,” he says.

William Schlesinger studies the effects of elevated CO₂ levels on the environment. His research does not reinforce the optimism of some policymakers who believe trees and soils can naturally absorb the increasing amounts of carbon dioxide produced by industrial or vehicular emissions.
tel: (919) 613-8004: e:schlesin@duke.edu

Research focus: Global environmental change, focusing on chemical changes in the environment, especially soils, that relate to changes in global climate and desertification.

Schlesinger’s research rebuts the hypothesis that trees and soils will be able to absorb ever-increasing amounts of carbon dioxide emissions in the air. Instead, he says, a better strategy would be to employ underground carbon sequestration. “It should be relatively easy to capture the CO₂ emitted from point-sources, such as coal-fired power plants, and inject it into the Earth's crust, where it can react with rock materials,” he says. “This would be easier to verify and more permanent than storage in trees and soils, which are subject to human disruptions like forest fires and cultivation. Several analyses suggest that we could use deep injection to capture a large fraction of the CO₂ emitted from electric power plants, which now account for about one-third of our nation's total emissions.”