Salata Institute Funds Eight New Climate Research Projects
Today, the Salata Institute announced a third round of seed grant awards for work on understudied and emerging topics in climate and sustainability. The funded proposals, which includes one from the Harvard-China Project, include research into new methods of direct air capture of carbon dioxide, the role animals play in global carbon cycles, new frameworks for climate migration, and more.
The Salata Institute Seed Grant Program supports new research, encourages new interdisciplinary partnerships, and enables faculty whose work is not normally in climate and sustainability to apply their expertise to the climate challenge. With the addition of these eight awards, the Salata Institute now supports 27 research projects on understudied and emerging climate topics through this program.
This program is part of the Salata Institute’s aggressive efforts to expand climate and sustainability research at Harvard University. Since its launch in June 2022, the Institute has awarded over $8.68M in climate and sustainability research funding, supporting the work of 62 faculty from across Harvard University.
International Workshop on Climate-Resilient Development in Southeast Asia
Principal Investigator: Michael McElroy, Gilbert Butler Professor of Environmental Studies,
Harvard Paulson School of Engineering & Applied Sciences (SEAS) and FAS Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Harvard University
Climate change is projected to cause growing loss and damage to societies around the world in the near future, even if current mitigation goals are met. How to maintain and enhance “climate resilience” – the capacity of socio-ecosystems to survive and develop in a changing climate – is of utmost importance.
Countries in Southeast Asia are developing social and economic systems and building capacity to cope with global warming and the possibility of a climate “overshoot” (a scenario in which the world warms by greater than 1.5 degrees Celsius for some period). Yet several important knowledge gaps persist. Harvard researchers point to a geographical bias to study resilience in big cities and coastal areas; a lack of focus on connections between climate resilience and environmental health; a lack of modeling in developing contexts; and a failure to reconcile the scientific drivers of climate change with planning on how to effectively deliver assistance.
With seed grant funding from the Salata Institute, Principal Investigator Michael McElroy along with Co-Principal Investigators Dr. Michael VanRooyen and Liang Emlyn Yang will host a two-day workshop in July to promote research exchange among scholars and inform climate resilient development pathways in Southeast Asia.
“Promoting climate-resilient development is a key priority in fields like civil protection, urban planning, health care and others. This workshop will bring together a diversity of regions, disciplines, methodologies, and scholars at varying career stages to foster international climate resilience research,” said McElroy.
