UC Santa Barbara’s Bren School of Environmental Science and Management released a statement today that simultaneously praised the recent Nobel Prize win by former Vice-President Al Gore and the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and pointed out that its own Professor Charles Kolstad played a hand into the research that made the win possible. “We are proud of the collaborative work being conducted by our distinguished colleagues at the Bren School and across the disciplines on climate change issues,” said UC Santa Barbara Chancellor Henry T. Yang in the written statement. “We also appreciate the role of our faculty, staff, and students in making UC Santa Barbara a leader and exemplary ‘living laboratory’ for environmental sustainability.”
Kolstad, who is currently on sabbatical from the Bren School, served as panel’s lead author on the chapter “Policies, Instruments and Co-operative Arrangements,” which was incorporated into a larger report that formed one-third of the IPCC’s assessment of its work on climate change. “There are maybe 3,000 people involved in this important shared effort,” Kolstad said in the statement. Also lauded for his work on the climate change study was Nicholas Burger, a Bren graduate who is now pursuing his Ph.D. in economics via UCSB’s Economics of Environmental Science program.