Sustainability & Environment

Sheldon Whitehouse, Democratic senator from Rhode Island and co-chair of the U.S. Senate Climate Task Force, did not mince words in a panel discussion held as part of Harvard Climate Action Week: “If we want a path to climate safety, it’s going to require us to do what is economically and morally right, which is to price carbon pollution.”

At a June 10 discussion held during Harvard Climate Action Week, leading scholars from atmospheric chemistry, climate physics, economics, and philosophy discussed our current understanding of solar geoengineering.

Stricter new federal regulations on deadly fine particulate air pollution in the U.S. were announced on February 7, 2024, and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health research played a key role in the decision.

The Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability at Harvard announced a third round of seed grants for work on understudied and emerging topics in climate and sustainability—including 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.

Kari Nadeau MD ’92, PhD ’95, chair of the Harvard Chan School’s Department of Environmental Health, says there is strong evidence that climate change is driving a global epidemic of immune health problems.

Quino Energy—co-founded by Eugene Beh AB/AM ’09 and former Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences postdoc Meisam Bahari—has begun production on the startup’s redox flow batteries, which use solutions of molecules called quinones to provide a cheaper, safer way to store surplus electricity from renewable sources.

In an op-ed in the Boston Globe, Steven Wofsy, the Harvard scientist behind MethaneSAT—a satellite-based spectrometer that measures global methane emissions—says that the data from this tool will empower us all to make more informed decisions that can help reduce emissions of this planet-warming gas.

Harvard Graduate School of Design students traveled to Monterrey, Mexico, to help devise design strategies along the Santa Catarina watershed to increase water security and to reduce flood risk. 

At a talk hosted by Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, renowned climate scientist Michael Mann, author of Our Fragile Moment, said that while keeping the Earth’s warming below the 1.5-degree Celsius threshold is a tall task, climate “doomism” isn’t justified by the science and could lead us down a path of inaction.

Harvard Business School alumni are using new technologies to transform the apparel industry—responsible for 10 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions—into a more circular economy.