MIT Joint Program Deputy Director Sergey Paltsev will serve as co-PI on an Imperial College-MIT project tackling climate change

The winning researchers of the latest Imperial College London-MIT seed fund have been announced by the British Consulate in Boston. Seven projects concerning air pollution measurements and tackling climate change will be supported by the fund. The initiative builds on decades of strong connections between Imperial and MIT, including thousands of top-tier journal papers, hundreds of student exchanges and scores of academic partnerships. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Joint Program Deputy Director Sergey Paltsev will serve as co-PI on “NASCA – Nature-based solutions for accelerating climate action”, one of seven projects supported by the Imperial-MIT seed fund. Dr Bonnie Waring from Imperial’s Grantham Institute – Climate Change and the Environment gave an insightful introduction to the Nature-Based Solutions For Accelerating Climate Action (NASCA) project. “All viable pathways to net zero rely not only on a sustained decrease in emissions from land use change and fossil fuels, but also uptake of already emitted carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. There are a variety of so-called negative emissions technologies that can remove carbon, but to date only one is feasible for scaling up to the entire globe and that is so-called nature-based solutions – including seagrass beds, mangroves and forests.” Dr Waring added their aim is to reach out to ecologists, economists, and sociologists and generate some holistic criteria to compare different nature-based climate solutions, and leverage this knowledge to inform policy.

The other winning projects and details are listed here.