Human fossil fuel use, agriculture, and shifts in land management are significantly increasing the abundance of greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere, resulting in ongoing climate warming and pervasive environmental impacts. Although there is robust consensus that rapid and steep cuts to anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions must represent the core of climate mitigation, there is also increasingly broad consensus that significant residual greenhouse gas emissions will remain through the end of the century even under aggressive decarbonization scenarios. Limiting net climate warming in the coming decades will thus require both reducing emissions from hard-to-abate sectors and carbon dioxide removal (CDR) – directed intervention in Earth’s carbon cycle with the aim of transiently or permanently removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

After providing a brief overview of our motivations and the range of systems we work on, this seminar will use agriculture as a concrete example of our approach toward understanding and deploying pathways that can reduce the net greenhouse gas emissions of key human systems. In the agricultural sphere this includes basic and applied research on the end-to-end impacts of soil acidity management in cropland systems and attendant carbon, nitrogen, and alkalinity flow, along with the development of open-source decision-support tools for land managers. In parallel, we pursue policy engagement across technical practitioners, jurisdictional agencies, and philanthropic non-profit groups with the aim of developing greenhouse gas management and carbon dioxide removal as public goods.

*Refreshments: 10:30 AM - 11:00 AM (Atrium)