This paper examines the impact of women’s political representation on deforestation rates in Brazil. Using close election regression discontinuity design, we show that women, when elected to office, are more likely to drive improved environmental outcomes due to factors such as reduced access to corrupt networks that influence the enforcement of environmental laws at the local level. Altogether, our findings demonstrate that women’s political representation significantly reduces deforestation rates in the Brazil.

This paper examines the impact of women’s political representation on deforestation rates in Brazil. Using close election regression discontinuity design, we show that women, when elected to office, are more likely to drive improved environmental outcomes due to factors such as reduced access to corrupt networks that influence the enforcement of environmental laws at the local level. Altogether, our findings demonstrate that women’s political representation significantly reduces deforestation rates in the Brazil.

This event is hybrid, to attend remotely register at the ticket link.

Presented in collaboration with the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs

Reception to follow. Last summer, 16 young plaintiffs won a pioneering lawsuit against the state of Montana. Their claim: By failing to consider the climate impact of fossil fuel projects, the state had violated children’s rights to a clean and healthful environment. The lawsuit is represented and supported by the public interest, nonprofit law firm Our Children’s Trust, which has filed a similar case in Hawaii, as well as federal lawsuits. Our panelists, including Julia Olson, executive director and chief legal counsel at Our Children’s Trust, will discuss the novel legal strategy and share insights on new tactics for protecting the planet and our collective health and wellbeing from climate change, drawing on examples from the U.S. and Latin America. Speakers: Kari Nadeau, Chair, Department of Environmental Health, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health Julia Olson, Executive Director and Chief Legal Counsel, Our Children’s Trust Alicia Ely Yamin, Lecturer on Law, Harvard Law School, and Adjunct Senior Lecturer on Health Policy and Management, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health Moderator: Christopher Golden, Associate Professor and Director of the Program in Nutrition and Planetary Health, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health

To tide us over in the meantime, please join us on April 2nd from 2-3pm for a tour of Harvard's plants and fungi with Don Pfister, Professor of Systematic Biology, who is a mycologist and the curator of the University's Herbarium. We will meet at the Harvard Herbaria, 22 Divinity Ave., Cambridge, MA. Registration is required.

In February 2020, a group of Kanaka ‘Ōiwi cultural practitioners arrived in Cambridge, England, to repatriate ancestral remains stolen from Hawaiʻi in the late nineteenth century. This article explores the possession, return, and interpretation of these remains, specifically 14 iwi poʻo (human skulls) originating from the Pali, an important historic battle site in the Koʻolau mountain range of Oʻahu. In telling the story of their possession and dispossession, I draw upon theories of haunting from Indigenous studies and Black studies in order to challenge the way that settler colonial structures work to limit and potentially foreclose Hawaiian relationships to spiritual presence and placemaking. Drawing upon the Native Hawaiian concept of hoʻopahulu, which encompasses both spectrality and the exhaustion of land from over-farming in ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi (Hawaiian language), this article highlights connections between land, spirit, and haunting that provide a more comprehensive framework for understanding spectral placemaking beyond colonial geographies. In doing so, I argue against possessive logics, showing how contemporary Hawaiian cultural geogrpahies fundamentally refuse, upend, and replant relations that exceed the American state.

This event is co-sponsored by the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability

For full details, visit: https://mahindrahumanities.fas.harvard.edu/event/environment-forum-hi%E2%80%99ilei-hobart-what-returns-what-remains-story-about-hawaiian