Engineering Education “Today in History” Blog: 10 Percent of the Amazon Rain Forest is Preserved
by Alice Agogino
closeAuthor: Alice Agogino
Name: Alice Agogino
Email: agogino@berkeley.edu
Site: http://www.me.berkeley.edu/faculty/agogino/
About: Alice M. Agogino is the Roscoe and Elizabeth Hughes Professor of Mechanical Engineering and is affiliated faculty at the Haas School of Business in their Operations and Information Technology Management Group. Her research interests include: community-based design; sustainable engineering; intelligent learning systems; information retrieval and data mining; multiobjective and strategic product design; nonlinear optimization; probabilistic modeling; intelligent control and manufacturing; sensor validation, fusion and diagnostics; wireless sensor networks; multimedia and computer-aided design; design databases; design theory and methods; MEMS/NEMS synthesis and computer-aided design; artificial intelligence and decision and expert systems; and gender/ethnic equity.
She has served in a number of administrative positions at UC Berkeley, including Chair of the Faculty Senate, Associate Dean of Engineering and Faculty Assistant to the Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost in Educational Development and Technology. Prof. Agogino also served as Director for Synthesis, an NSF-sponsored coalition of eight universities with the goal of reforming undergraduate engineering education, and continues as PI for the NEEDS (www.needs.org) and SMETE.ORG digital libraries of courseware in science, mathematics, engineering and technology.
Prof. Agogino received a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of New Mexico (1975), M.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering (1978) from the University of California at Berkeley and Ph.D. from the Department of Engineering-Economic Systems at Stanford University (1984). Prior to joining the faculty at UC Berkeley, she worked in industry for Dow Chemical, General Electric and SRI International. She has authored over 150 scholarly publications; has won numerous teaching, best paper and research awards; and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE). At NAE she served on the Committee on Engineering Education, working on the Technologically Speaking and the Engineer 2020 projects. She is currently a member of the National Research Council's Board on Education and the Women in Academic Science Engineering Committee. She has supervised 66 MS projects/theses, 26 doctoral dissertations and numerous undergraduate researchers.See Authors Posts (864) · April 29th, 2012 · 1 Comment
Today in History – April 29, 1998 – Ten percent of the Amazon rain forest is preserved. On this day, Brazil agreed to set aside about 25 million ha (62 million ac) of the Amazon rain forest for conservation in cooperation with the World Bank and the World Wildlife Fund. This initiative will protect 10% of its forests by the year 2000. The estimated cost of setting aside this land the size of Great Britain is between $84 million and $156 million.
The plant-rich Amazon ecosystem is sometimes called “the lungs of the Earth” with one-fifth of the world’s plants, one sixth of all the world’s birds, one in 11 of the world’s mammals and one in 15 of the world’s reptiles.
Alas, massive deforestation and development have polluted the environment and now Brazil is one of the world’s top four emitters of greenhouse gases. Between May 2002 and May 2003, it is reported that Brazil lost more than 24,000 square kilometers of forest – an area larger than the size of Israel.
This 1998 initiative has been followed by more recent efforts, but the work seems to be trying to hold back the tide. A recent news article claims: “Since reaching a recent peak of 10,588 square miles of forest destroyed in the Amazon in 2004, deforestation dropped for the next three years, before rising slightly this year to 4,621 square miles, according to data from Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research, which monitors deforestation. “
The good news is that Brazil has decided recently to set a target for reducing deforestation by 70 percent over the next decade. The success of these plans for set asides require finding economic alternatives for the people living in the rain forests and close monitoring for illegal clear cutting.
For more information, see the Engineering Pathway’s educational resources on rain forest preservation and global warming or view our Environmental Engineering Education community site.
Tags: Environmental Engineering · General Engineering, Engineering Science · Geological Engineering
1 response so far ↓
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