News Archive

As Alain Berset's successor, Beat Jans was elected to the Federal Council by the Federal Assembly on 13 December 2023. Beat Jans is an alumnus of ETH Environmental Sciences. We congratulate him on his election!

An international research team has presented the global carbon budget for 2022, with a forecast for 2023, at the UN Climate Change Conference in Dubai 2023 (COP28). More than 120 researchers have contributed to this year’s "Global Carbon Project". Also involved are ETH climate scientists Nicolas Gruber and Luke Gregor.

She really wanted to go abroad. And so 26-year-old Marion Muff, a Master's student in environmental sciences, turned her back on Switzerland for six months for her professional internship. At the Icelandic Seal Center in the northwest of Iceland, she dealt with the question of how visitors can be better informed and how the Seal Watching Sites can be better managed.

"Open your eyes 2023": Until 15 October 2023, the heart of Zurich will transform into a unique open-​air photo exhibition focusing on the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). ETH Zurich is the scientific partner of open your eyes 2023. Discover the contributions of our researchers to each Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) in detail.

Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) is a policy principle that shifts the burden of waste management from local authorities to producers. Yet, a study by Jakob Pruess suggests that EPR is much more than just an upstream shift of product take-back schemes. Comparative analyses should reflect the heterogeneity of EPR design, he argues, based on a statistical analysis of 25 European countries.

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are everywhere and their regulation is complex. Their persistence should be considered a direct component of chemical hazard, writes Martin Scheringer in an editorial in the journal Science. Martin Scheringer is a lecturer at the Department of Environmental Systems Sciences (D-USYS) at ETH Zurich and Professor of Environmental Chemistry at Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic.

He was Professor of Cell Biology and one of the founders of the Department and Division of Environmental Sciences. On 23 January 2023 our dear colleague Theodor Koller-Brenk passed away in his 87th year of life.

After graduating with a degree in Environmental Sciences, for many years Felix Etterlin worked as an expert in soil conservation. For a long while, he has aspired to pursue a very different career path. And he has now succeeded in making a fresh new start in his second chosen profession: despite a much lower wage and hectic routine, the fledgling paramedic is taking to his new job with new sense of ease.

Synthetic models of tropical cyclones (TCs) are a vital tool for TC risk assessment. They are specifically designed to overcome the spatial and temporal limitations imposed by historical TC data. A recent study presents the first global model intercomparison of four synthetic TC datasets in the impact space.

The project RUNRES, led by researchers of the Sustainable Agroecosystems Group and the Transdisciplinary Lab of ETH Zurich will be working in four different African countries and on four different food value chains: coffee, cassava, banana and vegetables. The goal of RUNRES is to close the nutrient cycle in city regions and build so-called circular economies, where nutrients from waste are recycled to be used in food production.

ETH is listed number one among the 200 best academic institutions in Earth & Environmental Sciences in the Nature Index 2018. This index is based on publications in the 82 journals selected as the most important journals by two panels of scientists, which are independent of the Nature Publishing Group.

The amplitude of the seasonal cycle of CO₂ in the world’s oceans is increasing. This has been verified by an international team of researchers, amongst them Nicolas Gruber, professor of climate physics at the Institute of Biogeochemistry and Pollutant Dynamics (IBP). The fluctuations are to be interpreted as a gigantic human footprint in the sea, which could considerably disturb a sensitive equilibrium in the world's oceans.  

The pristine atmosphere of the Southern Ocean is almost the only place on Earth where conditions closely resemble the preindustrial atmosphere. Back in Switzerland, researchers from D-USYS and the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) have started analysing the data collected during the Antarctic Circumpolar Expedition (ACE).  

In the newly structured course, «Environmental Problem Solving», roughly 150 environmental science students are concerned with a specific sustainability problem. In doing so, they learn to analyze complex topics, create suggestions for solutions and, above all keep their wits about themselves.

Conservation and land use entail many conflicts that have to be negotiated. A video, based on the Conservation Management field course run by ETH Zurich, explores these issues in the Highlands of Scotland.