Millennium Café

Cutting carbon emissions requires all hands and all tools on deck. Carbon offsets have gained interest and scrutiny as corporate commitments have led to a surge of investment in nature-based carbon offset projects. Do these deliver real impact? This talk will explore our framework to create high-integrity, socially responsible forest carbon offsets along the 'Atlantic transect' from Pennsylvania to Argentina, addressing dynamic research and educational strategies to empower communities and enhance carbon mitigation and climate adaptation.

Margarita Fernandez & Christopher Scott   |  Ecosystem Science and Management

Countries across the Global South face water management challenges at both ends of the spectrum: sometimes there is too much water in the case of flooding and at other times there is not enough water to support agriculture and development. This talk will examine how water management decisions – with the examples of dams in sub-Saharan Africa and rice production in India – exacerbate socio-economic vulnerability today and in the future. Ongoing and future research ideas will be presented with the aim of providing evidence to support policy-making in these contexts.

Mook Bangalore  |  School of Public Policy

Wood is an amazing biomaterial and can be used to produce paper, energy, and construction materials. Can we engineer wood to meet or even surpass the toughness and durability of carbon-intensive products like concrete and steel? I will discuss ongoing collaborative research that seeks to generate and characterize advanced materials from Northeastern hardwoods, which cover much of Pennsylvania and represent carbon sinks that can help build the bioeconomy.

Charlie Anderson  |  Biology

This talk will introduce the new political-industrial ecology research initiative at the Earth and Environmental Sciences Institute. Political-industrial ecology aims to better embed the resource flows supporting industrial systems, such as energy and agriculture, in their broader political economic and specific geographic contexts. By better understanding the specific ‘ecosystem’ of industrial society, political-industrial ecology can contribute to crafting more environmentally just industrial futures. 

Jennifer Baka  |  Geography
 

The scale of the CO2 emissions is such that any mitigation process must generate minimal waste byproducts. Molecular hydrogen (H2) could – in principle – reduce CO2 in a waste-free manner. Here, I will discuss the thermodynamic landscape for CO2 hydrogenation and how that landscape impacts catalyst design. This thermochemical viewpoint on catalysis represents our team’s approach in developing more sustainable chemical processes.

Jonathan Kuo  |  Chemistry
 

In this first climate solutions talk I will discuss how climate change and the push for clean energy might worsen dust-related health problems for miners and look for ways to fill the gaps in knowledge on how mining dust affects health.  This study presents an incontrovertible visual proof of prevalence of nano-sized mineral dust during raw material extraction, utilizing advanced techniques such as scanning electron microscopy (SEM).  The intricate elemental composition of nano-sized particulate identified through EDS analysis reveals the presence of elements such as silica and iron, which are known to contribute to lung pathologies when inhaled over prolonged periods. The outcomes of the statistical analyses reveal significant relationships between particle size and elemental composition, highlighting that smaller particles tend to have higher carbon content, while larger particles exhibit increased concentrations of elements like silica and aluminum. 

Shimin Liu  |  Energy & Mineral Engineering