Stanford University announced a $1.1 billion gift Wednesday to an ambitious new school designed to accelerate interdisciplinary scholarship on climate and sustainability issues.
The Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, the university’s first new school in 70 years, is expected to launch in September and tackle urgent questions facing the planet. The scale of the initiative positions the university to catalyze efforts to combat climate change worldwide.
“We are facing the defining issue of the 21st century,” said Arun Majumdar, who has been named the first dean of the school. The issue encompasses climate, water, food and other complex problems the planet faces, so the goal is to have “a global movement to address these challenges at scale, and at speed. … This decade is the most important,” he said.