NRDC’s Science Office aims to drive, shape, and support our ability to protect public health, preserve wild spaces, build a strong environmental movement, and advance social justice. Our goal is to bridge the gap between science and the people, wildlife, and ecosystems it serves.
The Science Office will serve as a home base to innovate, evaluate, communicate, and connect in fulfilling the goal of science, which is to better explore and understand our world. We aim to harness science as a tool to support a greater environmental movement that centers communities most harmed by environmental and climate impacts.
Alexandra Bowman for NRDC
Our main functions work in concert with one another:
- Ensuring accountability through peer review and assessing and evaluating our impact
- Providing data and scientific analysis to help shape and guide NRDC’s policies and positions
- Enhancing NRDC’s scientific expertise and capacity through external partnerships, such as community groups, think tanks, and other academic scientists
Portfolio
Sometimes you have to wade through a lot of data to see the big picture, but NRDC’s first chief science officer Kristi Pullen Fedinick sees beauty in the details.
We are working hard to put our values of diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice into practice—and we are committed. Here’s how we’re getting started.
While the Safe Drinking Water Act guarantees all Americans access to clean, drinkable water, it hasn’t worked out that way in practice.
We need to stop making decisions about climate-impacting projects based on the way things are now—and start making them based on the future and what we want that future to be.
Scientist Kim Knowlton monitors the inextricable connections between the planet's fragile health and our own.
Teniope Adewumi-Gunn combines her scientific expertise with her mission to help keep workers—from hairstylists to day laborers—safe and healthy.
Between 2018 and 2020, 56 percent of the U.S. population drank from drinking-water systems detecting lead at levels that exceeded recommendations.
Vijay Limaye is pushing for public health safeguards and policy solutions in service of the communities most vulnerable to the effects of climate change.
Climate change is already costing us billions through wildfires, smog, infectious disease, and other events. We can’t wait any longer to take action.
Climate change is a “threat multiplier” that is worsening existing health and economic burdens, particularly for the most vulnerable among us.
When it comes to safe drinking water in America, race still matters.
Persistent heat creates dangerous conditions across the globe, leaving many workers at risk of serious heat-related health problems. Thankfully, solutions already exist.