Graduation Date: June 2010
Degree(s): B.S. Chemistry

Leah Kuritzky worked jointly with the NRDC’s Center for Market Innovation, Air and Energy Program and Lands Program to develop two major deliverables for her three-month fellowship. The first was a major literature review and critical analysis of the land and water use research for nine electricity generation technologies: wind, PV, CSP, large hydro, geothermal, coal, natural gas, nuclear and biomass. This analysis underscored the wide range of values calculated and the various metrics that led to those values. Further, it emphasized the importance of weighing a multitude of factors in project-specific impact assessments, rather than using land use calculations as sole proxies for environmental impact.

Leah’s second project employed an Excel model for land use change emissions to reproduce some of the results from a recent report on biomass vs. fossil fuels emissions from the Manomet Center for Conservation Sciences. This required modifying and extending the existing model to generate outputs that were directly comparable to the Manomet study. The results were used to generate recommendations for how the existing land use change emissions model could be improved to calculate more complex land and harvest scenarios that will help inform NRDC’s advocacy on biomass issues.

“I learned a ton about each of the electricity generation processes by doing specific research on the land use, water use, and environmental impacts of each.”

“Leah’s land use report was very helpful in synthesizing a broad and somewhat conflicting array of data and advancing our internal knowledge on these issues. It will inform our advocacy going forward and we are planning on publishing this study.”