Center for Environment and Population (CEP): About Us

About Us

The Center for Environment and Population (CEP) was founded in 1999 to ensure that the best available science-based knowledge on human population's environmental impacts is actively integrated into policies and public outreach at the community to international levels.

The environmental impacts of human population are occurring at rates, scales, and types never before experienced. The analyses of these issues--particularly the most current scientific thinking and emerging trends in the field--are rarely fully reflected in public policies, outreach, and advocacy efforts. Scientists and other experts seldom have the opportunity to communicate their research or knowledge broadly, so decision makers and the general public do not often benefit from their findings.

The Center fills this gap by partnering with leading organizations (such as the National Wildlife Federation, Communications Consortium Media Center, Population Resource Center, Yale University, local community organizations, and others (see Partners) to form a critical triangle from science, to policy, to outreach, on the population and environmental relationship.

CEP generally organizes the partnerships, and additionally, brings the best and latest science to the table. Its organizational partners--with expertise in policy implications and in reaching opinion leaders and the public through advocacy and media--contribute those aspects . So as to avoid duplication, the partners try to build on already existing policy and outreach efforts.

CEP focuses on two Program areas:

Emerging Issues in Environment and Population, and;

Building New Population-Environment Leadership.

Under these Programs, activities include:

Producing cutting-edge reports and other materials;

Follow-up activities (using the reports and materials), including Town Hall Meetings, grassroots activists' workshops, UN and other influentials' briefings, and media and policy makers' briefings;

Establishing opportunities for new young leaders on the issues through internships, fellowships, and other means;

Maintaining the CEP website to, among other things, include PDF files of CEP publications, and links to partner organizations, and;

Developing ways to understand and address the American population's environmental impacts, from the local community level, to state, regional and national levels, to the U.S. role within the global context.