Giving Compass' Take:

• Researchers in Venezuela are struggling to save and preserve the scientific legacy of their once extensive glaciers whose unique organisms are threatened by climate change. 

• Environmental professors and researchers are extremely underfunding across the world, how can donors help drive awareness to their cause and jobs?

• Here's some other problems environmental science is encountering. 

In 1976, alejandra melfo and her family joined the tens of thousands of Uruguayans fleeing their country’s military dictatorship. Melfo, who was 11 when her family arrived in Venezuela, remembers delighting in the lighthearted Venezuelan national anthem, and realizing that her blond hair and pale skin were unremarkable in a country where generations of Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian immigrants had also found refuge and opportunity.

When Melfo was a teenager, she and her family moved to the prosperous university city of Mérida, in the mountains of western Venezuela, and she became one of the many foreign-born students at the University of the Andes. The Venezuelan government had invested a sizable portion of the country’s oil wealth in education and research, and the university—the first in Latin America to be connected to the internet—was known throughout the continent and beyond for its scientific accomplishments. For Melfo, it became a professional home: A theoretical physicist, she joined the faculty even before she completed her doctorate, and served as a professor at the university for 25 years.

Read the full article on the scientific cost of glacial melting by Jean Freddy Gutierrez & Maria Fernanda Rodriguez at The Atlantic