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June 2008: Professor Ashwini Chhatre publishes in Science |
The article outlines three features of contemporary forest governance as decentralization of management in degraded forests, logging concessions in publicly-owned commercially valuable forests, and timber certification, primarily in temperate forests. Although a majority of forests continue to be owned formally by governments, the effectiveness of forest governance is increasingly independent of formal ownership. Growing and competing demands for food, biofuels, timber, and environmental services will pose severe challenges to effective forest governance in the future, especially in conjunction with the direct and indirect impacts of climate change. It argues for a greater role for community and market actors in forest governance.
October 2007: School professors and scientists share in NObel peace prize 
We are proud to announce that four University of Illinois Department of Atmospheric Sciences (DAS) Faculty, Professors Atul Jain, Michael Schlesinger, John Walsh, and Don Wuebbles, and four Department Research Scientists, Natalia Andronova, Katharine Hayhoe, Ken Patten, and William Chapman, served as authors, reviewers, or contributors of reports by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). All DAS faculty played leadership roles in the preparation of the IPCC reports, and with the DAS research scientists share in Nobel Peace Prize with their IPCC colleagues around the world.
The Nobel committee cited the IPCC's two decades of scientific reports, saying they have "created an ever-broader informed consensus about the connection between human activities and global warming." The IPCC, a group representing over 180 governments, operates under the auspices of the U.N. Environment Programme and the World Meteorological Organization. It commissions assessments of global climate change by hundreds of scientists who are experts in the field.