Environment@Harvard

Spring/Summer 2010

Environment @Harvard H a r v a rd U n i ve r s i t y C e n t e r f o r t h e E nv i r o n m e n t www.environment.harvard.edu

Hope in Copenhagen?

Economists and scientists reflect on the latest climate accord—and the path forward

by Alvin Powell

Canada 6,400

Russia 17,600

E. U. 46,400

China 48,700

U. S. 63,800 India 12,500

Africa 10,800 Central & S. America 11,800

Australia 4,200 Cumulative Emissions of Carbon Dioxide due to Energy Consumption from 1998 to 2008 (Million Metric Tons)

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n December 2009, the nations of the world gathered in Copenhagen, Denmark, for what had originally been planned as a landmark conference on climate change. The goal was to negotiate a global treaty to reduce greenhouse gas emissions responsible for climate change,

an agreement that would succeed the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012.

Though expectations fell dramatically as the conference approached, even those diminished expectations proved optimistic after reports emerged of an organizational and political mess. One U.S. climate ne-

gotiator described the meeting to the New York Times as a “snarling, aggravated, chaotic event.”

By most accounts, the last-minute diplomacy of U.S. President Barack Obama and a handful of world leaders salvaged at least a commitment to move forward,

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“Copenhagen illustrated problems with the process… . About 190 countries are talking, when 20—counting the EU as one—account for 80 percent of global emissions.”

Pratt professor of business and government Robert N. Stavins of the Harvard Kennedy School directs the Harvard Environmental Economics Program and the Harvard Project on International Climate Agreements.

with most participating nations “noting” a short, nonbinding accord, providing at least some guidelines for action and cause for hope.

The months since have allowed time for reflection on Copenhagen and on what meaningful action might come next, perhaps as soon as the next such meeting, scheduled for Cancun, Mexico in December 2010.

To better understand where these complex issues stand today, the Harvard University Center for the Environment (HUCE) posed questions on the Copenhagen meeting, its implications,

in

this

issue

Hope in Copenhagen?

Economists and scientists assess the successes and failures of the Copenhagen climate conference—and the way forward.

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Mostafavi about the intersection of sustainability and design principles.

13 Food in the Balance In the global battle against hunger, climate change introduces a host of new uncertainties.

Letter from the Director

10 Re-envisioning Sustainability

as a Design Art HUCE director Dan Schrag talks with Graduate School of Design dean Mohsen 2

and the best way forward to a handful of HUCE-affiliated faculty members involved in climate change science and policy.

Participants include: Robert Stavins, Pratt professor of business and government at the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) and director of the Harvard Project on International Climate Agreements; Jeffrey Frankel, Harpel professor of capital formation and growth at HKS; Richard Cooper, Boas professor of international economics; James G. Anderson, Weld professor of atmospheric chemistry; Peter Huybers, assistant professor of earth and planetary sciences; Steven Wofsy, Rotch professor of atmospheric and environmental science; Michael McElroy, Butler professor of environmental studies; and HUCE director Daniel Schrag, Hooper professor of geology.

Spring/Summer 2010

20 Implications of a Nuclear Renaissance Is nuclear power a viable source of energy for the future? Leading policy experts discuss the potential and the pitfalls.

E@H: Would you characterize Copenhagen as a success?

Robert Stavins: It would have been very unfortunate to achieve what some participants would have defined as “success” in Copenhagen. That would have been a signed international agreement, glowing press releases, and photo opportunities.

The reason I say “unfortunate” is that there is only one possible agreement that would have met those characteristics. That would have been the Kyoto Protocol on steroids. In other words, more stringent targets for the Annex 1 countries—that’s the industrialized world; no meaningful action by the key emerging economies— China, India, Brazil, South Africa, Korea, Mexico, and a couple of others. That would have meant no emissions reductions globally. It also would have meant no ratification by the United States Senate, which would have been just like Kyoto—no real progress on climate change.

There was political grandstanding and a lack of consensus. But at the last minute, quite dramatically, there were direct negotiations by key national leaders. This was virtually unprecedented because it’s usually people four levels down in the respective ministries that do the negotiations.

That saved the conference from complete collapse and produced a significant political—not legal, but political—agreement that has been labeled the Copenhagen Accord.

The accord takes a “portfolio of domestic commitments” approach—each country essentially commits to do what it has on the books domestically. It addresses two very important deficiencies of the Kyoto Protocol. One is it expands the coalition of meaningful commitments to include all the major emitters. And it expands the timeframe of action.

So the Copenhagen accord has both good news and bad news. The good news

Letter from the Director A

t a Harvard University Center for the Environment event six years ago, then Harvard president Larry Summers mused that it would take a long, long time for Washington to take serious action on an issue as difficult as climate change. Looking at the current political landscape, those words seem prophetic. During the last presidential campaign, both McCain and Obama supported cap-and-trade legislation as part of a comprehensive energy policy. Today, climate change seems more partisan than ever. Some members of Congress deny that human activities are responsible. Others among our elected representatives think there is no point in taking action unless we are joined at the outset by China and India,

Against the backdrop of political wrangling over climate change, the gulf oil spill reminds us that our energy choices have immense environmental consequences.

Whether it is oil drilling in Alaska and California, or offshore wind in Massachusetts and Maine, each energy decision we make is rife with environmental risks and repercussions. As I write this letter, oil continues to gush from the seafloor in untold thousands of barrelfuls daily—evidence that even the best science and engineering cannot guarantee that the energy systems we build will be free from accidents. And the specter of such disasters haunts the future of many new energy technologies that will be important in a low-carbon future, including nuclear power, carbon capture and storage, and shale gas.

The challenge we face is clear: we must essentially rebuild our energy systems to respond to concerns for security, economic well-being, and the environmental condition of future generations. This will require tough choices and trade-offs.

Navigating these difficult decisions takes thoughtful analysis, good technology, and forward-looking leadership.

At that same HUCE event six years ago, Larry Summers said that when action finally did come on climate change, it would come swiftly, and likely

“We have an opportunity at Harvard to take advantage of our convening power, of the intellectual strength of our faculty, and of the enormous potential of our students to influence how the country and the world will respond to the energy-climate challenge when it is finally ready to take serious steps to solve the problem.” the major greenhouse gas emitters among developing countries. And some merely bend to the influence of the powerful coal and fossil fuel lobbies. The new Kerry-Lieberman bill, which was intended to be a bipartisan approach to breaking the stalemate, had the wind taken from its sails when Senator Graham, Republican of South Carolina, withdrew his support amidst the bitterness of the health care and immigration debates.

And there is more disheartening news.

without the opportunity for the careful analysis required to make good policy. He therefore argued for the special role of this University in addressing such grand societal challenges, as Harvard is one of the few places capable of assembling the diverse, multidisciplinary expertise needed to plan the best course of action beyond the short timescale of the next election or quarterly report. This is not to say that Harvard should try to devise solutions without reference to

social and political realities; to the contrary, our efforts are greatly strengthened by our frequent interactions with perspectives from governments and industries around the world. We have an opportunity at Harvard to take advantage of our convening power, of the intellectual strength of our faculty, and of the enormous potential of our students to influence how the country and the world will respond to the energy-climate challenge when it is finally ready to take serious steps to solve the problem.

At the Center for the Environment, we are working hard to live up to Larry’s vision. With a dynamic community of faculty associates from around the University, now numbering almost 250, HUCE has become a hub for all manner of scholarship and education on the environmental challenges we face. Our new programs in graduate and undergraduate education are underway: I am delighted to report that twenty-five doctoral students have completed their interdisciplinary work in the Graduate Consortium on Energy and Environment. And our Environmental Fellows program—highlighted in this issue— continues to nurture some of the best young minds in diverse areas of scholarship. I am confident that these post-doctoral associates will make great contributions to our environmental challenges in the years ahead.

In this issue of Environment@Harvard, you will see a sampling of the efforts around the University in defining and resolving the hard choices that confront us. In our cover feature, my colleagues in the sciences and economics offer their reflections on the best way forward from the Copenhagen meetings on climate change last December.

Inside the newsletter we bring you an examination of the impending effects of climate change on global nutrition, as well as an indepth look at the prospects and obstacles of nuclear power as a clean energy solution. I also talk with Mohsen Mostafavi, dean of the Graduate School of Design, about the challenges of addressing questions of sustainability through novel approaches to design.

I hope that these articles give you a sense of the vibrant community that continues to flourish here at Harvard.

With best wishes for the coming summer,

Dan Schrag

Harvard University Center for the Environment

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Jeffrey Frankel, Harpel professor of capital formation and growth at the Harvard Kennedy School.

is it provides real cuts on greenhouse gas emissions by all the major emitters. It establishes a transparent framework for evaluating countries’ performances. It initiates a substantial flow of resources to help poor, vulnerable nations carry out mitigation and adaptation.

But there’s bad news. This is certainly not on track for a two degree centigrade, or a 450 parts per million (ppm) stabilization of CO2; but neither is any other policy, including a hypothetical Kyoto agreement on steroids.

Jeffrey Frankel: My definition of progress is steps toward specific, credible commitments by a large number of countries. And in that sense, we actually had some good news. January 31 [2010] was the deadline under the Copenhagen Accord [to specify 2020 emissions targets] and 106 countries responded. Six big, emerging market countries set targets. Many of them are vague about the base year and they clearly resist saying this is a legal commitment— that’s obviously a limitation. The fact that they’re taking this seriously means that Obama’s personal breakthrough there on the last day may indeed lead somewhere.

Richard Cooper: It was even worse than I expected it to be. I forecast two years ago that it would fail on substantive grounds.

But the process is a throwback to 30 to 35 4

Spring/Summer 2010

years ago, which I think is sad for the international community.

The G-77 [the group that represents developing world countries] is unable to negotiate.

They get together ahead of time and decide what their demands are going to be.

Once they decide what their position is going to be, they find it impossible to change, in a give-andtake sense.

E@H: Some have argued that the United Nations process is unworkable and will never lead to a meaningful treaty. What are the prospects for progress going forward?

Robert Stavins: Copenhagen illustrated problems with the process under the United Nations, particularly what’s called the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change [UNFCCC].

The first problem is the size. About 190 countries are talking, when the 20 largest economies—counting the EU as one— account for more than 80 percent of global emissions. Getting agreements among the full set of 190 countries on anything is difficult. What exacerbates that is that the U.N. culture tends to polarize factions, particularly the industrialized world versus the developing world. And then there’s the UNFCCC voting rule: unanimity is required. It was the lack of consensus on the Copenhagen Accord that led to it being noted, not adopted.

So what are alternative institutions going forward? For the Harvard Project on International Climate Agreements, this is a major focus of research for the next six to nine months. One possible venue is the Major Economies Forum, an initiative launched by the Bush Administration as the Major Emitters Meeting. At the time, it was lambasted by environmental advocacy groups in the U.S. and Europe and by the E.U. as a diversion from the U.N. process. Wisely, the Obama administration

recognized that it made a lot of sense, so they changed its name but kept it. Now it’s called the Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate. And again, more than 80 percent of global emissions are covered by the 17 participating countries and regions.

Another important potential forum going forward is the G-20. For the most part this has been finance ministers focusing on economic issues, but they think more broadly. It has the advantage of not being the creature of a single nation, which is a limitation of the Major Economies Forum.

I believe it’s too early to write the obituary of the UNFCCC. For one thing, the Kyoto Protocol is going to be with us until 2012. Even more important is that it has a huge constituency, namely a majority of countries in the world—those are the developing countries. They would like everything to stay within the UNFCCC. In fact, they’d like to extend the Kyoto Protocol to become the exclusive focus of negotiations, for clear reasons that are in their self interest. But there is also international legitimacy for anything under the United Nations versus something that is the creation of a single nation.

Jeff Frankel: Copenhagen was pretty discouraging. Progress is not possible solely in the U.N. framework because small member nations will obstruct the process.

It isn’t just the one country-one vote thing; the WTO [World Trade Organization] is the same way. Technically, one country can hold it up but in that forum they never do.

Because the big guys decide what the deal is, then the others take it or leave it and they usually take it.

The important decisions can only be made by a small steering group, as has long been true with multilateral governance.

And in the past it’s always the G-7. After years and years of talking about giving major emerging markets a voice and doing nothing, suddenly in 2009, the G-20 supplanted the G-7. That means they have representation for the first time. This is good news generally, that big emerging markets have been given a voice in world governance.

Richard Cooper: For a variety of reasons, I think this forum cannot negotiate an agreement on climate change, but it’s not going to go away either, because the COP [Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change] are a regular part of the UNFC-

“Two things have to happen. One, people have to get scared about climate change. And two, the strategy for dealing with it has to look a little bit cheaper and a little bit more doable.”

CC process. So I think we need to have a negotiation outside and present them with the outcome of the negotiation. The negotiations have to be sensitive to the interests of the key developing countries and present it to them as, “this is what the deal is.”

Dan Schrag: If out of Copenhagen and what President Obama did, we see a move to negotiations between a smaller number of key countries: the U.S., China, India, Brazil, the EU—the G-8 plus a handful— as opposed to all of the countries, I think that’s a positive move because it’s more likely to get something done.

But at the same time no international treaty is going to be useful if people aren’t convinced that this is a serious problem. Nobody’s going to follow through on an agreement if they’re not actually concerned about the problem.

It’s too expensive.

Part of me feels like Copenhagen and the whole Kyoto process is almost irrelevant to the real activity around climate change, which is focused on industry, both in terms of alternative energy—bringing the cost down—and also things like carbon capture and storage, which means allowing us to still use fossil fuels and not pollute the atmosphere.

Things are happening because companies are anticipating regulation. Coal plants: five years ago, six years ago there were 200 coal plants, roughly, in permitting. Two years ago, before the economy collapsed, they had almost all gone: banks weren’t taking those sorts of risks. In Detroit, there’s a competition [The Progressive X Prize to get super fuel efficient vehicles]. I have no idea whether they’ll succeed, but it’s a sign of work that’s being done that could be the foundation.

There’s a similarity with the Montreal Protocol with CFC’s [ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons]. That was only agreed to after DuPont developed an alternative to CFCs. They complained they couldn’t do it until they came up with an alternative, then all of a sudden, the Montreal Protocol followed that.

Two things have to happen. One, people

have to get scared about climate change.

And two, the strategy for dealing with it has to look a little bit cheaper and a little bit more doable. Right now it looks awfully expensive, it’s not clear who the winner is and you have some of the most powerful industries in the world campaigning against it.

E@H: How will a meaningful agreement come about?

Richard Cooper: First I think there should be bilateral conversations between the United States and China. We are the two elephants in the room and we’re not playing at the moment. We need to have serious, technical-level discussions—with political guidance of course—with the Chinese about what they’re willing to accept and what we’re willing to accept, what we think we can get through Congress.

If it goes reasonably well, I think we could roll it out in the G-20. I don’t have any expectation that the U.S.-China discussions will produce something in time for the Seoul summit. But I think we should get the process going, because India is going to be a problem. The Indian leadership at the moment is outstanding, but they have the practical political problem of dealing with the Indian parliament which is at least as fractious as the U.S. Congress. This is a multi-year process, it’s not something that’s going to happen quickly.

Robert Stavins: From a policy perspective, the cliché we often hear about the baseball season applies even more so to international climate policy: it is a marathon, not a sprint.

International climate negotiations are best thought of as an ongoing process, perhaps somewhat like trade talks. Not a single task with a clear endpoint, whether Copenhagen, Cancun, whatever.

E@H: What would we need to happen— scientifically or in the natural world—to change the game and really push things forward at this point?

Dan Schrag: There are lots of things you can talk about: A big piece of ice breaking off of Antarctica. You can talk about heat waves, droughts, or floods. My fear is that none of them will ever be clear enough to enough people, especially when there’s a $300 million communications campaign paid for by the fossil fuel industry to confuse the issue. By the time people do get scared, it may be too late. That’s my worry.

I think realistically you’re not going to see China and India and any other developing countries commit to serious reductions until they’re, quite frankly, just scared about the consequences of letting CO2 emissions continue. Right now, I

Richard Cooper, Boas professor of international economics.

don’t think they’re scared enough. And it’s clear that reducing emissions for them and reducing future emissions will limit their ability to grow their economies, and that’s the focus for them. So it’s a really tough problem.

Richard Cooper: If we were to have three really blistering summers in a row, or a

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serious drought in the plains states that people could analogize with Oklahoma in ‘33 and ‘34—the Dust Bowl—the U.S. dialogue on this would change radically.

Honest climatologists will tell you that you cannot really attribute those events to climate change, but it would catch the public’s attention.

Peter Huybers: My sense is we’re kind of in this for the long run. As time passes, we expect the climate to change and the evidence for that change to become increasingly obvious.

Our understanding of ice dynamics is very thin. So an advance in our ability to predict what the cryosphere is doing

James G. Anderson, Weld professor of atmospheric chemistry.

[might have an impact], as would an understanding of the feedbacks associated with the carbon cycle in the Arctic tundra.

It is my understanding there is a lot of uncertainty there.

If history is a good indicator of what’s to come, we’re going to have incremental progress toward a treaty. Even at the rate of the IPCC reports, every five years—if you’re to measure that in an academic time scale, that’s the amount of time to produce a thesis. A thesis is likely to present some advance in our understanding, but nothing dramatic.

E@H: Are you concerned about the pace of action? Are there possible ramifications for going slowly on a climate change treaty?

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Spring/Summer 2010

“On our current trajectory, given political momentum…we’re headed for 600 to 700 parts per million in carbon dioxide. That carries us back 30 million years in history and at that point there was no ice at all in the northern hemisphere.”

Jim Anderson: My feeling is that China is going to set the pace here, because they recognize they’re going to lose those key snowpack and glacial systems that provide critical parts of their water supply. It doesn’t matter if it’s 10 years or 50 years because the conclusion of any public policy…is exactly the same and you have to start taking very rapid corrective action right now. The minute they make that decision, they’ll go wholesale into making these [renewable] energy systems because they want to sell them internationally.

So the United States has a couple of choices. We can look back at the twentieth century and “drill, baby, drill” and continue with the kind of public policy we had, or we can say, “If we don’t turn around and get moving very quickly and we don’t apply our technology…we’ll be buying all this stuff from China.”

We’ve passed the point of stability— once you get above 350 ppm, which is 50 ppm in the rearview mirror, the glacial ice systems are no longer stable. From that perspective, we have a great deal of difficulty seeing a solution in any cutback in carbon dioxide unless it’s draconian.

On our current trajectory, given political momentum…we’re headed for 600 to 700 parts per million in carbon dioxide.

That carries us back 30 million years in history and at that point there was no ice at all in the northern hemisphere. There

was a little bit forming in the Antarctic. It now becomes a question of how rapidly this process occurs.

Dan Schrag: At what point will it be too late? The honest answer is we don’t know.

We do know there are thresholds in the system: things like the breaking off of the Ross Ice Shelf, which would accelerate the demise of the Antarctic ice sheet; or the melting of the permafrost. But exactly where those thresholds are, we don’t know.

My suspicion is we’re not going to know very well until it’s already happening.

It’s possible that maybe 450 or 500 ppm is okay. Maybe it’s not catastrophic. So that’s a reason for optimism. Of course the problem is, if that’s not catastrophic, we’ll probably get to six or seven [hundred parts per million].

Steve Wofsy: Delaying isn’t a very good idea. The discussion shouldn’t just be about climate change. The discussion should be about the whole energy economy of the developed world. What we’re currently doing is unsustainable anyway, it’s bad for the environment, it’s costing us a lot of money, and a lot of things happen in the geopolitical framework that are pretty bad.

The greenhouse gases we put in the atmosphere stay there for a very long time.

They take a long time to work themselves out. Delay is dangerous and it is expensive.

Jeff Frankel: My answer to this question has always been the same. There is nothing magic about this year. Or next year. Or any year. But the problem isn’t going to get any easier by postponing it. All the issues will be the same in the future…but just a little tougher.

E@H: Once an agreement is struck, how long will it take before we are technically capable of transitioning to a lower-carbon energy system?

Mike McElroy: I think we can make a difference on a timescale of 20 years, and it’s hard to go much faster than that. But we have to make that commitment if we’re going to get there. If we’re serious about

it, we can have a different kind of energy system by 2030: a lot less coal, a lot more non-carbon sources. I think it’ll probably be wind, maybe solar will come along. I don’t think nuclear will grow very much.

I think we’ll have a transportation system that will be more electrical: plug-in hybrids, maybe even all-electric cars. Natural gas may be a player in big vehicles, interstate trucks and buses.

E@H: What would an alternative energy system look like, here or elsewhere around the globe?

Jim Anderson: We’re endowed with wind power and solar thermal like no other nation on earth. The only other nation with wind power and solar thermal resources that can compare to ours is China.

We have this massive resource, we could completely eliminate our import of petroleum products by switching to electrified vehicles and removing fuel oil we burn in our homes. We’d have no imports of petroleum at all. All of the energy would be generated here, all the jobs created by producing those systems and installing them would be here.

Mike McElroy: The challenge for the United States is to reduce our dependence on coal in the electricity generating sector and to reduce oil in the transportation sector. There are two good reasons to do so.

One is the climate issue. The second is the fact that even at $80 a barrel, we’re sending $375 billion a year to other countries.

We have a number of alternatives to coal: nuclear, wind, solar. Natural gas is increasingly the fuel of choice, particularly with gas prices dirt cheap.

We’ve done studies on what the potential is for wind in the U.S. as well as in China. The U.S. has abundant sources of wind, particularly in the Midwest down the central part of the country. You can generate that energy at prices that are currently competitive with alternatives. One of the problems with renewable sources of energy such as wind and solar is the intrinsic variability of the source, and the lack of ability to store electricity.

There are three unconnected grids in the United States: East, West and Texas.

We have access to the data on hourly electricity demand in the Texas region for the last few years. So what we’re doing is asking how you would realistically integrate wind into that system, and what are the problems and costs associated with that?

As you go to more wind, the problem you confront is there will be times of the year—in the winter, at night—when there will be more electricity generated than you can use. But there will also be times when you’re short, during the summer, in the day. The way you get around the shortage is by having backup, and that means generally gas. That increases the cost because you have to pay the capital cost of equipment that is staying idle for a significant fraction of the year.

When you have excess, you can produce cheap hydrogen. There are lots of things you can do with it.

The first and most obvious is make nitrogen fertilizer. There are other creative things you could imagine doing with it. If you have hydrogen and CO2, you could make methanol and make fuel to run in automobiles.

If we had a better grid—which should be a serious emphasis—if I was short of electricity in Texas I could buy it from wherever they don’t need it. The chances are pretty high that when the wind isn’t blowing in Texas, it’s blowing in Massachusetts or somewhere else.

E@H: Are there particular research priorities that should be set to advance either the science or the policy of climate change?

Jim Anderson: What’s really crucial are the feedbacks within the climate structure that control the way heat, thermal energy, is flowing into the major climate reservoirs, the arctic ice cap, and the glacial systems.

We don’t know how rapidly heat is flowing into the ocean because we don’t have the observing systems. We don’t know how rapidly the climate structure—determined by temperature, water vapor, and cloud systems—is changing, because we don’t have the observations. We don’t know how the ocean currents are changing in response to recent increases in carbon dioxide because we don’t have the observations. We don’t know how fast Greenland is losing its glacial structure because we don’t have observations there, either.

We don’t know how fast carbon is coming out of melt zones in both the Siberian and Alaskan tundra, nor the oceans, because we don’t have the observations. So here we are, with an extremely time-de-

Peter Huybers, assistant professor of earth and planetary sciences.

pendent problem that is predictable only if we have these basic pieces of information on how the system is responding— and we don’t have any of the required observations.

These aren’t expensive observations… we’re not talking about even a minor blip on the economic structure.

Steve Wofsy: [In March] there was a National Academy of Sciences report out on measuring and understanding the sources of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

This report basically asks the question, “If we have a treaty to restrain emissions of greenhouse gases, how well can it be verified?” If you read the material coming out of Copenhagen, you realize that monitoring and verification were at the center of the debate between Obama and the prime minister of China.

The NAS panel laid down several parallel approaches. One is to improve self-reporting mechanisms. Another parallel track is to try to make measurements—either in the atmosphere or proxy measurement of economic activities—that you can use to validate these inventories. The question

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“Climate change is the kind of thing that at any one point in time, never looks like the most important thing.

Healthcare or wars or deficits… there’s always a more pressing issue.

I think 50 years from now when we look back we’ll say, “Oh my! What did we do to this planet?” then arises, how well can you do that, and how do you do it?

I speak mostly to the atmospheric measurements. You have three tiers: satellite data that gives you a global picture, very blurry, that sets the framework for everything else. Then you have ground stations and limited aircraft measurements in which you can do a better job estimating what’s coming from a region or a country.

The third tier is to actually go hunting where the ducks are. If I identify the largest sources in a country, where are they?

How many sources do I have to measure if

I want to get, say, 70 percent of the sources?

It turns out it’s not that many, perhaps 300. So one of the questions we’re asking right around Harvard is: Suppose I make atmospheric measurements in a big urban area, how accurately can I detect a trend, a change? If someone says we’ve cut our greenhouse gas emissions by five percent, can I check?

We have a sensor on top of one of the buildings in Boston and another in Harvard Forest and I am putting one up in Worcester. This is all to ask the question: If you make measurements hour-by-hour, year in and year out at these places, can you detect changes in emissions? Emissions have a very strong fingerprint that they leave, but there’s a lot of variability in the atmosphere. So it’s a research question: How accurately can you detect a change? That hasn’t been looked at very much.

The hope is within a year’s time we’ll have results that can help in negotiations, that people can really believe in and that can be demonstrated.

E@H: When you think about your children and grandchildren, what kind of world do you think they’ll live in?

Steven Wofsy, Rotch professor of atmospheric and environmental sciences.

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Michael B. McElroy, Butler professor of environmental studies.

Mike McElroy: My grandchildren will live in a world with nine and a half billion people. The increasing disparity between the haves and have-nots, between rich and poor, even within countries, is going to be a challenge.

I also think they’ll live in a world where the winners and losers will be different from what they have been historically.

If I were to guess at what future climate is likely to be, I would say that Canada and Russia are likely to be major beneficiaries, and I would say the countries in the tropics, the poorer countries, are likely to be the major losers. Countries at mid-latitudes, like the United States and China, will be winners and losers. But the idea that we have warmer winters, open seas, longer growing seasons at high latitudes, the obvious places to benefit from that would be the big countries at high latitudes.

You also have to worry here—and it’s not trivial—about the possibility of a catastrophic collapse of some of the major land-based ice sheets. You can sit back and say maybe that’s 100 years away.

But the fact is we’ve been significantly and frequently surprised by how rapidly things are happening, and it is clear we don’t understand very well the stability of large ice sheets. The collapse of the [Larsen] Ice Shelf in Antarctica was not anticipated. And the best one can tell in retrospect is it was not caused by surface warming, it was actually caused by some relatively deep ocean water that was

warmer than it used to be coming into contact underneath. That was enough to trigger a collapse of the sea-based ice. In turn, what does that do to the pinning of the land-based ice? That is a problem that serious people are seriously concerned about.

Jeff Frankel: While I definitely believe that we ought to take action, I don’t experience the same emotional reaction that many others feel, to be honest. In part, this is because I think that whenever we try to imagine the Earth as our children and grandchildren will experience it, we always imagine wrong—and wrong in ways that are impossible to anticipate.

It is also because, if we have a general continuation of the peace and prosperity of the last half-century, even in a worst case climate scenario, which would be pretty bad, I think my son and his children would still probably be better off than if they had lived in the first half of the 20th century (World Wars, depression) or in earlier periods of history. I hesitate to say that, because I don’t want to understate the problem we face, but it does offer a little perspective.

Dan Schrag: I think it’ll be different in many ways that are hard to predict.

One of the challenges of climate change is that thus far, it’s happening slowly enough that we get used to it. So my kids are growing up in New England used to warmer winters, used to being able to plant roses the first weekend in April. If you were here 50 years ago, that wouldn’t be the case.

Mostly, I think many people, especially the more privileged among us, will bungle through it. And I hope my children will work hard to make the world as good a place as it can be. But we’re passing on a stacked deck to them.

I think climate change is the kind of thing that at any one point in time, never looks like the most important thing.

Healthcare or wars or deficits or who’s the next Supreme Court justice—there’s always a more pressing issue. I think 50 years from now when we look back—I’m hopeful I’ll live that long—we’ll say, “Oh my! What did we do to this planet?”

I understand this as a geologist.

We’re returning the planet to a state it hasn’t been in for tens of millions of years. And every living thing on Earth will be affected.

F acult y P rofile

Colleen M. Hansel

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ownriver from many former coal and metal mines, water runs yolk yellow, lava red and electric green—a stew of heavy metals called acid mine drainage (AMD). Toxic, unsightly, and expensive to clean up, AMD puts vegetation, wildlife, and entire ecosystems at risk. Colleen M. Hansel, assistant professor of environmental microbiology at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, hopes to create a cost-effective way to bring these ravaged regions back to life.

Current clean-up methods, Hansel says, involve costly and labor-intensive efforts such as digging limestone-filled pits to neutralize the water’s acidic pH. But the remediators she has in mind are plentiful, highly effective, and work for free. They are microorganisms that metabolize and detoxify iron, arsenic, and chromium, as well as fungi that remove toxic levels of manganese by making reactive minerals.

The trick is figuring out exactly how the microorganisms perform these feats and then stimulating or seeding optimal microbial populations in polluted habitats.

“Minerals are nature’s reagents for cleaning up contaminated surface and groundwater,” says Hansel. “What we try to do is figure out how to use microbes to make the needed minerals—or dissolve them— depending on the nature of the remediation needed.” Hansel became captivated

by the idea that you could use organisms to clean up groundwater in the late 1990s, while studying soil chemistry and mineralogy at the University of Idaho; researchers had just discovered that common soil bacteria such as Shewanella oneidensis could survive miles underground without oxygen or sunlight. “The whole idea that there were little critters living in the soil that breathe metals like we breathe oxygen” she recalls, “ sounded like science fiction.”

Later, while at Harvard, Hansel and collaborators at Penn State and at a nonprofit group intent on saving Appalachian rivers were surprised to discover that some fungi— multi-cellular microorganisms sporting long root-like tendrils—appear to be even better than bacteria at removing metals from water.

Fungi come in more than 1.5 million species and are found virtually everywhere, so it is perhaps surprising when Hansel says that “We know essentially nothing about metal-transforming fungi.” Researchers have an even longer way to go to figure out how these organisms work so that they can be used to clean up toxins in the environment.

“But considering the magnitude of the problem worldwide,” Hansel says, “it would be great if we could make a magic potion out of a mixed microbial community that we could then introduce into these systems to clean them up.”

—Deborah Halber

Harvard University Center for the Environment

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Re-envisioning Sustainability as a Design Art An interview with Mohsen Mostafavi

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ohsen Mostafavi, who became dean of the Graduate School of Design (GSD) in January 2008, was previously dean of the College of Architecture, Art, and Planning at Cornell.

His arrival in Cambridge was a homecoming of sorts: in the 1990s he spent five years at the GSD as an associate professor, and directed the school’s Master in Architecture I program. Harvard University Center for the Environment Director Dan Schrag spoke with Mostafavi on March 31, 2010. Edited excerpts of their conversation follow:

Dan Schrag: We have talked many times about the gradual transition at the GSD from a concern about buildings to a concern about their relationship to the environment in general. How is that evolving?

Mohsen Mostafavi: One of the things that your readers might not know is that unlike some of the other professional schools at Harvard, the GSD has three departments that reflect different professional careers: architecture, landscape architecture, and urban planning and design. They go through separate processes of accreditation, and therefore have an au-

tonomy that doesn’t exist in most of Harvard’s professional schools. This puts the emphasis on specific disciplines and what one can achieve in terms of depth within a discipline. The challenge is identifying how what you do in one particular profession—or particular discipline—relates to a series of other initiatives that for all intents and purposes are in separate departments.

Another point worth stating is that despite the fact that much of the energy use across the globe is focused on the construction industry, the primary emphasis—in terms of metrics and evaluation of the repercussions of sustainability—has been placed on single objects, on individual buildings, and not so much on the larger environmental issues of infrastructure, bridges, and the sustainability of cities. Those two things are not the same.

Part of the challenge when it comes to understanding sustainability in relation

F acult y P rofile

William Hogan

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ill Hogan has spent three-and-a-half decades as an energy expert, a distinction he first earned nearly overnight. As just the second person to join the Pentagon’s new Office of Energy and Data Analysis in 1973, Hogan had a modeling and analysis background thanks to his graduate studies in quantitative methods at UCLA, but had zero experience working in the energy sector.

During his first few days on the job, the Arab Oil embargo thrust his fledging office into the national spotlight. He experienced the attention firsthand when his boss asked him to take the media heat at a press conference about what the oil interruption would mean to the U.S. “He said, ‘Bill, I think you’re ready,’” Hogan recalls with a laugh.

Hogan left the Pentagon in 1976 and took a job at Stanford University, where he helped start the still-active Energy Modeling Forum, an international working group with representatives from academia as well as the public and private sectors. Two years later he came to Harvard as the director of the Energy and Environmental Policy Center at the Kennedy School, and has been there ever since, serving currently as Plank professor of global energy policy and director of the Harvard Electricity Policy Group.

A longtime electricity market researcher,

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Hogan developed a greater interest in environmental issues in 1993 after reading an article

by Yale economist William Nordhaus in Science magazine that discussed the creation of economic models to deal with climate change. “That’s when I started really focusing on [climate change],” says Hogan. “It became obvious to me pretty quickly how important it would become.” He has since used the article as the basis for class assignments, asking his students to prepare memos to the President offering a plan that balanced economic realities against desired environmental goals.

Assessing the Obama administration’s plan—an 80 percent reduction in greenhouse gases by 2050 (now also the stated goal of all G-8 countries)—Hogan says it will require dramatic change in short order. “An 80 percent reduction involves eliminating coal—or finding some way to capture and sequester CO2 from coal—and eliminating hydrocarbons from the transportation sector,” he says. “This is a grand challenge.” And expanding the solution beyond the borders of the US, Hogan feels is a policy challenge

without precedent. “It’s hard to construct an example of the policy change that we are talking about,” he says. “We have to do many, many things relatively quickly, and get the rest of the world involved.”

But he also believes there are answers. First, there has to be a price for emitting carbon, and it has to be costly enough to affect people’s choices. We also need to get China and India, he says, to agree to such a policy. And we must find clean-fuel technology that is as reliable and cheap as fossil fuels and make it accessible. “The phrase that is overused but still correct is that it is silver buckshot as opposed to a silver bullet,” Hogan says. “There is no one solution to all of this.”

— Dan Morrell

Mohsen Mostafavi, dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Design and Wiley professor of design.

of buildings can be measured. This is still problematic in some ways.

courtesy of harvard graduate school of design

to architecture is that it has a long history. People have been working on making buildings more sustainable for a long time, but the original pioneers were more like sustainability warriors. In England, in my first year of architecture school, one teacher was living in a shared caravan in a parking lot, trying to be sustainable through recycling and actions like this. What people did was very basic, and it had more to do with a moral and ethical commitment than with the quality of what they produced as a result of the interrelationship between sustainability and design imagination.

Dan Schrag: And aesthetics?

Mohsen Mostafavi: And aesthetics. Yes. So for a very long time this whole project of design and its relationship to sustainability has been linked to a notion of social good and betterment—values associated with sustainability—but to be honest, devoid of any significant aesthetic value or contribution. In fact, often against any aesthetic value, because the people who did these things tended to produce some horrendously ugly buildings and projects.

Dan Schrag: So basically, they were people who were trying to reduce the water consumption or the energy consumption of a house as much as possible. And then produced ugly houses.

Mohsen Mostafavi: Yes. The technology was fairly rudimentary, and they were trying to see how they could sustain themselves without relying too much on largescale infrastructure—pursuing a form of independence. It was quite recently that architects began to think about how the relationship between aesthetics and sustainability can produce different possibilities for architecture.

There are some early examples. The Malaysian architect Kenneth Yeang did an early building for IBM in Kuala Lumpur and a series of other buildings where he introduced, at least symbolically, the notion of “green” in planted, outdoor spaces on balconies and terraces that provides shading— basically taking the typical Western office building but incorporating into that kind of structure the idea of landscape, if you like, and as a result of that, bringing cooling.

Those buildings started the experimenta-

tion with the appearance of the building— the incorporation of sustainability as something that would also have an aesthetic quality. This kind of work pays homage to an earlier London-based project on the study of tropical architecture: the way in which buildings in the tropics, as vernacular architecture, had a certain sensibility and sensitivity toward the environment, in terms of their structure, shading, ventilation, and dealing with the rain—all these kinds of things. This happened after the emphasis in international architecture that design should be the same in many parts of the world.

Dan Schrag: Was the study of vernacular forms a kind of pushback in response to that international hegemony?

Mohsen Mostafavi: It was a pushback emphasizing appropriateness to locality.

The idea that different locations have different climatic conditions to which architecture can respond.

Fast-forwarding to the present, what happened is that we got better at understanding the metrics of sustainability when it comes to buildings. So now we have LEED certification [Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, a voluntary program of the U.S. Green Building Council for rating structures on criteria such as energy efficiency, use of recycled materials, and light pollution]. We have this preconception that the sustainability

Dan Schrag: We’ve discussed this with respect to the Zofnass project (a GSD program to develop sustainability standards for infrastructure and large-scale development).

Mohsen Mostafavi: Metrics provide quantitative figures. They are not deeply rooted in the principles of sustainability. They simply measure the relative performance of buildings, as opposed to the principles behind their modes of design. How can the focus on the object be expanded onto broader issues? The Zofnass program has guided us toward the research that we will do on sustainability of infrastructure and sustainability of large-scale development.

For the GSD, our strategy is to show that not only architecture, but landscape also, has a history of relationship to sustainability and ecology, and that urban planning and design does, too. How can we strengthen those relationships? What are the opportunities for interaction among these different professions, these different practices? The common thread is the emphasis on sustainable infrastructure and the sustainability of large-scale development, especially at the interface of urban planning and landscape.

Dan Schrag: There has been an incredible opening up of the Graduate School of Design, an increased engagement with colleagues around the University, hasn’t there?

Mohsen Mostafavi: We are very fortunate to have a number of colleagues who are interested in collaborations, and we actually want to expand on that with future appointments. And we would love to figure out how we can work more closely with engineering. In the past, architecture’s engagement with sustainability has led architects to design buildings and then collaborate with structural engineers. The relationship was architecture first, and engineering as something that supports it, literally and metaphorically.

More recently, a number of architects have been working more closely with engineers, to the point where the relationship

Harvard University Center for the Environment

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“For the GSD, our strategy is to show that, not only architecture, but landscape also has a history of relationship to sustainability and ecology; and that urban planning and design does, too.” becomes quite blurred in terms of who had what idea at what point. In the work of a number of major contemporary architects, engineering has had a significant role in the formation of architectural ideas and architectural space. I put together a book, Structure as Space, which focused on the idea that certain principles of engineering actually produce new spatial forms.

What’s happening more and more now in architecture—and I think we’re also witnessing it in art practice—is this shift from the structural, to what many people call the thermodynamic approach, whereby design is no longer focused just on the structure, but the whole feel of the building, the atmosphere and the thermal environment, not just in terms of performance—how much insulation it has and so forth—but really at a much more tactile level, dealing more directly with the senses; it emphasizes greater interplay between space and the body. You see this also in the work of a number of artists who are experimenting with atmospheres, the idea of environments that have atmospheric qualities. Broadly, the senses are becoming part of the discussion of sustainability in the consideration of interiors of buildings that we inhabit.

Dan Schrag: The topic of the first major conference that you organized as dean was ecological urbanism. Why ecological?

Mohsen Mostafavi: As teachers we have a responsibility to focus on the development of methods—modes of practice—as much as we do on outcomes. In fact, when I was in London, I set up a graduate program focused on the development of new methods of thinking in relation to urbanism.

Later, I decided that the focus on methods in some ways missed opportunities that a broader approach—thinking through the framework of ecology—could provide. I didn’t want the sustainability of the city to be framed solely in quantitative terms.

Dan Schrag: Let’s design the water systems or the air conditioning systems— Mohsen Mostafavi: —and then reduce the energy. We want to be very aware of 12

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efficiency, but what we really want to ask is, could ecological practices, sustainable practices, give us a new mode of thinking?

A new mode of addressing the city more broadly? So instead of just focusing on single elements, ecological urbanism could give us a toolkit for imagining new possibilities for urbanism. The conference was a first attempt at a more holistic approach, with the idea that the wealth of knowledge that we bring to this should not be solely technical knowledge. We were very keen that sustainability and ecology should be seen as a cultural as well as a scientific project.

Dan Schrag: One of the goals of the Center for the Environment is to bring different parts of the University together. When you get different disciplines to talk to each other, that’s where a lot of new knowledge is created. We’ve been very successful bringing the sciences together with the social sciences, with public policy, with business and with law. For us, that has been easy compared to connecting with the arts and humanities. The GSD has been more successful at this: at the ecological urbanism conference, it was Homi Bhahba, director of the Center for the Humanities, who gave the keynote— Mohsen Mostafavi: Yes. Homi Bhabha and Rem Koolhaas jointly— Dan Schrag: And that’s in some ways spectacular.

Mohsen Mostafavi: We had people from divinity, history, English, and economics.

We had people from almost every part of the University. That led to a book, Ecological Urbanism—a sort of manual that people are not expected to read cover to cover, but that covers a range of things that they can refer to from time to time, depending on their interest.

The other thing that is really great about the state of contemporary ecological practice is the link to art. This approach allows architects to look at our urban environments through the lens of their practice, almost as artists—to start seeing the environment not always in practical terms.

You want it to be practical, but how can it be more than just practical? How can

everyday elements of our environment be, in a way, twisted? Turned? Represented in a different way when we take elements of everyday infrastructure and show them in a different light? And that’s also an interesting way in which art is not just something that’s in the gallery. Art is something that takes place on the street.

Dan Schrag: What are the critical next steps for the GSD? How can HUCE draw on the rest of the University to help you achieve those?

Mohsen Mostafavi: Part of it is about giving issues like sustainability a platform and a voice and encouraging people. Our modest inroads include, for example, a new cross-departmental course on sustainability taught by associate professor of landscape architecture Christian Werthmann.

But now we have to reflect and ask what it means for architecture. What does it mean for landscape? And what does it mean for urban planning and design?

Dan Schrag: Because at the end of the day you still have those disciplines and professional training that you need to maintain.

Mohsen Mostafavi: Absolutely. So going back to what we started with, the fact of the matter is we still don’t know what sustainability and architecture can produce in terms of innovations. We only have certain hints. Very few architects worldwide are turning their work on sustainability into something innovative as far as design excellence is concerned. Again, remember that we want to get away from this idea of sustainability as solely associated with social good and moralistic values. We want to say that sustainability actually produces a kind of limit. This limit is a productive thing and it produces beauty.

Our challenge is to bring that mode of thinking into our design studios and our practice so that people don’t see sustainability as a form of hegemony—as a form of fundamentalism promoted by people who are so driven by one principle that they don’t really care about quality. The challenge is, How do we do all of that through design, and how do we strengthen each of our departments so that there are more people who can collaborate? That means we also need people from the rest of the University to bring the cultural conditions and the engineering knowledge—so we can all work together in a more collaborative fashion.

Food in the Balance Climate Change and Human Nutrition

by Courtney Humphries

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million

rought. Floods. Cyclones. Melting unknown. Climate change is likely to alter soil; fish stocks are being depleted through ice. Rising seas. The potential concloud cover and change the intensity of overfishing and loss of ecosystems; and sequences of climate change are dramatic solar radiation and, therefore, the capacity habitat loss threatens other wild species and transformative. But how will they afof plants to engage in photosynthesis, but hunted for food. Environmental changes fect the most basic human activity—feedwhether these effects will be beneficial or also threaten pollinators like honeybees, ing ourselves? Humans rely on a delicate harmful remains unclear. which are critical for helping certain crops balance of environmental conditions, reRecent research has begun to put some reproduce. sources, and social and economic systems of these issues in focus: a 2009 study in Climate change, in other words, is to provide food for more than six billion the Proceedings of the National Academy of destabilizing a system already stretched inhabitants on Earth. Even in today’s Sciences predicted that, unless significant thin. “Think about what it takes to grow conditions, the system isn’t perfect: curefforts were made to adapt, higher temcrops,” Myers says. “It takes sunlight, soil, rently, one-sixth of the world water, seeds, the right range lives in hunger, and an even of climate and temperature, Undernourished Population, 1990-2009 (in millions) greater proportion lacks the protection from pests and proper balance of nutrients pathogens—in some cases it 1,200 for good health. takes pollination. It turns out “Having a quality diet is that every single one of these 1,020 something that’s fundamenthings may be constrained by 923 963 tal to health,” says Walter climate change.”

848 900 842 832 Willett, chair of the DepartRecent events support the ment of Nutrition at the idea that new climate patHarvard School of Public terns could harm agriculture.

600 Health (HSPH). “There are For instance, when Europe 1990 1994 1998 2002 2006 2010 really very few things more experienced record high temvital than that.” Yet a growperatures in 2003, crop yields Source: Sam Myers, The Worldwatch Institute, Washington, DC ing body of research shows dropped a devastating 30 perthat global agriculture is vulnerable beperatures would reduce soybean, corn and cent. Farmers were forced to use more wacause it is highly sensitive to environmencotton production in the U.S. roughly 40 ter, livestock animals became stressed, and tal conditions, which can change rapidly in to 70 percent by the end of this century. fruit and grain harvests suffered. Based on response to climatic disruption. The yields Other studies show that crops grown at current climate projections, a 2008 study of the major grains—the largest source of elevated concentrations of atmospheric led by David Lobell at Stanford University calories for the world’s population—are carbon dioxide contain significantly lower predicted that several important crops in susceptible to changes in temperature, levels of critical nutrients. But while conSouth Asia and Southern Africa would ground-level ozone, and availability of cerns are beginning to grow, “there’s been be critically affected by climate change, water, all of which are expected to be a lag in the realization of how important threatening populations that already lack negatively impacted by climate change. this is,” believes Sam Myers, an affiliate of secure food sources. In a study published Increasingly frequent and intense natural the Harvard University Center for the En- last year, David Battisti at the University of disasters, including storms, heat waves, vironment (HUCE) and an instructor of Washington used 23 global climate models droughts, forest fires, and floods, have the medicine at Harvard Medical School. to calculate to a greater than 90 percent potential to wreak havoc on local harvests.

Under the auspices of the HUCE, likeprobability that, by the end of this century, Low-lying coastal areas face a series of minded researchers including Willett, growing season temperatures in the tropics threats: rising sea levels, more severe coast- plant physiologist Michele Holbrook, and and subtropics will climb to a level higher al storms, and the progressive loss of natu- disaster response and relief experts Michael than the hottest seasonal temperatures on ral coastal barriers (coral reefs, mangrove Van Rooyen and Jennifer Leaning, have record there. forests, vegetated dunes, and wetlands). As joined forces in order to develop a multiThe industrialization of world agriculture, these areas become inundated, fertile land dimensional view of the problem. rather than eliminating hunger, has raised will be lost and salt water may intrude into The incipient challenges posed by clithe stakes by dramatically increasing the fresh water aquifers. mate change are truly multidisciplinary, number of people who rely on its continued Climate change is also expected to alter and are taking place against a backdrop of success. During the 20th century, the “Green the relationships between pests, pathogens, environmental disasters that already threat- Revolution” in crop production supported a quadrupling of the global population, while pollinators, and plants; its effect on earthen global agriculture. Farmland is being the area of farmland only doubled. Critidwelling microbes, which play a critical lost to urban development or degraded cally, the achievement depended on being role in maintaining soil fertility, remains through erosion or a buildup of salt in the Harvard University Center for the Environment

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able to control the environment in which crops grew: adding fertilizer to artificially enrich soil, bringing more water in through irrigation, keeping pests and pathogens at bay, and—through intensive breeding— controlling the attributes of plants themselves. Exported to developing countries, this scientific approach to agriculture vastly improved crop yields. At the time, many people assumed that with improved efficiency, hunger would disappear in a matter of years. But instead, populations in most of these regions skyrocketed, canceling out the gains in per capita food production. Because the world’s population is expected to grow to more than nine billion by 2050, many scientists now question whether continued advancements in agriculture can keep pace with demand for food. Simultaneously, the paradigm of environmental control appears to be in jeopardy because of climate change.

Willett, the Stare professor of epide-

“Although the United Nations set a goal of 2015 to halve the number of hungry people in the world, the ranks of the hungry actually grew in 2007 and 2008 because of escalating food prices.”

ness of nutrition and to improve access to healthy food.

Willett points out that most people in the world eat a diet that is out of balance—relying too much on staple grains while consuming too few fruits, vegetables, proteins, and plant oils. Research has made clear the connections between diet and disease—whether the deficiency diseases seen in poorer populations or the high rates of heart disease and diabetes found in richer societies. Willett’s research has highlighted the fact that even when food is abundant, people still have difficulty accessing a healthy diet, often resorting to high-calorie, nutrientpoor fare. This makes the quality of food all the more critical. “To have a more balanced diet will require more resources— more water, land, and energy,” he says. Given these existing challenges, “to be in a situation where the basic food production has plateaued is very worrisome.”

Willett believes the nutrition community needs to pay more attention to climate change as a serious issue now.

Not only is the world’s population climbing, but in areas such as India and China, Willett notes, Samuel Myers, instructor in medicine at Harvard Medical School. diets are changing. There Myers is collaborating on an HUCE-funded interdisciplinary study is a growing demand for to determine how the loss of key nutrients could affect human meat; raising livestock nutrition and global public health. requires more grain production and land than miology and nutrition at HSPH, and a plant-based diets. Some researchers also professor of medicine at Harvard Medical worry that global demand for biofuels School, is one of those who are concerned. will further strain the availability of crops Perhaps the world’s foremost expert on for food. “The most troublesome impacts nutrition, he has been instrumental in fur- are likely to be in situations where there’s thering research on the connections bealready stress,” he says, including parts of tween diet and disease through the largeAfrica already losing arable land to desert scale Nurses Health Study, and he has and drought, and India, which is facing worked with industry and governments a loss of dependable water sources. Wilaround the world to raise public awarelett recently served as an advisor to India’s 14

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Ministry of Health on these issues. In these places, many people “are right at the margin of adequate nutrition.”

The Emergency Room of Global Health Some climate-related changes will be gradual, while others, including sudden disasters such as droughts, floods, and severe storms require a different kind of preparation. Such events have immediate and often life-threatening effects on populations and their food sources. To address these unpredictable but inevitable disasters, HUCE has sought out the expertise of Jennifer Leaning, Bagnoud professor of the practice of health and human rights and director of the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights, along with associate professor of global health and population and director of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative Michael VanRooyen, who bring a wealth of experience in dealing with crises. He and Leaning focus on humanitarian crises, whether caused by human or natural forces. “We’re the emergency room of global health,” VanRooyen says.

Food is at the forefront of concerns when disaster strikes. People displaced from their homes by famine, floods, or wars over natural resources require immediate delivery of food aid, and can face long-term problems accessing food, particularly if they relied on farming or fishing for part of their diet. “When people are forced to flee, they become much more vulnerable,” Leaning says. For many people, leaving their homes means abandoning their self-sufficiency. “They have more difficulty fending for themselves and are more dependent on external relief.

They congregate where they can find shelter and supplies that are delivered from the outside.”

Climate change is expected to make sudden disastrous events more frequent and severe—and will also lead to new crises that develop gradually over time.

When land becomes unusable for crops or grazing—through drought, soil depletion, or repetitive flooding—people eventually drift to new places. In Ethiopia, for

Inaugural Consortium Students Honored

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wenty-five doctoral students were recognized at an end-of-year luncheon in April for the Harvard Graduate Consortium on Energy and Environment, an interdisciplinary program for graduate students begun in 2009. The “graduates,” many of whom are pictured above, were honored for successfully completing the course requirements of the Consortium.

Consortium students represent six schools and thirteen departments, giving the program a unique interdisciplinary scope. Any doctoral student at Harvard whose research pertains to energy and has basic science prerequisites may apply for admission to the Consortium; as a result, the Consortium is building a new community of young scholars that benefits from multiple perspectives and pooled expertise. For students like Holly Wasilowski from the Graduate School of Design, “The opportunity to meet other students working on

energy issues and learn about their research is a highlight of the Consortium.”

Students who are accepted into the Consortium take three of four courses: energy consequences, energy technology, and energy policy—or, in a new offering in 2010—energy security. Each course is designed to give doctoral students an introduction to critical aspects of energy issues. Students also participate in a weekly reading seminar led by rotating faculty from around the university, which provides an overview of the energy field from a wide range of perspectives. Past seminar topics have ranged from human health impacts of climate change to patterns of urban development and carbon dioxide emissions, and from carbon capture and storage to climate change and agriculture.

Says Kevin Vora from the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), “Friday seminars are an opportunity for students

to hear from leaders in their fields in an informal setting.” Niall Mangan, also from SEAS, concurs: “The seminars are often very conversational, with ample opportunities for asking questions. They have exposed me not just to a wide range of information but also to a breadth of political backgrounds and different ways of looking at energy issues.”

Through seminars and coursework, Consortium students become well-versed in the broad, interconnected issues of energy and environment and are able to identify the obstacles, highlight the opportunities, and define the discussion of an energy strategy for the 21st century and beyond. More information about the program, including the online application form, is available at www.energy.harvard.edu.

The Consortium is made possible by generous support from Robert Ziff ’88, along with his brothers, Dirk and Daniel.

Harvard University Center for the Environment

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be resolved through negotiation and political processes, but in places that are already unstable, mass migrations and competition for dwindling food and water could precipitate hostilities.

All of these situations can disrupt the normal systems for growing, distributing, and purchasing food. Though humanitarian groups can provide emergency care, many crises require the long-term follow-up assistance of development organizations that work with local people to develop new systems for providing life’s basic necessities. Leaning says that many international public health groups are now adapting their missions to include climate change in their agendas.

As part of their preparations to respond to climate change disasters, relief organizations depend on reliable predictions of what conditions are likely to develop in a given location, and Leaning says HHI is

Manganese

Zinc

Iron

Magnesium

Sulfur

Calcium

Potassium

Phosphorus

5.0

Nitrogen

Change in mean concentration (%)

Nutrient Composition: Micronutrient levels in crops grown at elevated atmospheric CO2

-5.0 -15.0 all plants (foliar) wheat

-25.0

Source: Irakli Loladze

Above: Percentage declines in the mean concentration of essential elements in plants grown in CO2 levels twice those of ambient conditions.

Left: A meta-analysis of data showing the percentage declines in protein concentration under elevated levels of CO2.

Reduced protein in crops grown at elevated atmospheric CO2 Barley Rice Wheat Soybean Potato -20

-15

-10

-5

Source: Daniel Taub, Brian Miller, and Holly Allen/Southwestern University

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0

5

working closely with climate modelers to identify key problem areas. James Hammitt, HSPH professor of economics and decision sciences, specializes in developing

quantitative methods for analyzing health and environmental policy issues in order to guide decision-making. His type of expertise is essential in order to translate knowledge about climate and crops into sound policies. But he acknowledges that it’s extremely difficult to predict the exact consequences of climate change, because people will adopt strategies to offset its effects—developing drought-resistant crops, for instance. Environmental policy decisions are also complicated by the scientific uncertainties inherent in predictions of future conditions. But in the meantime, governments must decide on the best policies to enact. One thing is clear, Hammitt says: uncertainty should not prevent action. Although details are difficult to predict, “we know more than nothing about the direction of local shifts,” and this knowledge can help guide policy planning.

Impacts on Plants and Nutrition While climate change threatens to reduce the total quantity of global food production—either gradually or catastrophically—it also threatens the quality of that food.

Humans don’t rely on food solely for its caloric content; they need a balance of carbohydrates, fats, proteins, vitamins, and minerals to support the body’s health. A team of HUCE-affiliated researchers is now focusing on an emerging finding: that climate change may impact the nutritional quality of the food we eat, resulting in crops that provide fewer nutrients for the same yield. Studies conducted on fields of grain crops grown under higher concentrations of carbon dioxide have consistently shown a drop in levels of protein and other nutrients.

This drop in nutrient levels—on the order of 10 or 20 percent—could pose an important risk to human nutrition in the future. Collaborating in the study of this problem are Willett; Myers; Michele Holbrook, a plant biologist; and HUCE director Dan Schrag. The team was recently awarded a one-year Harvard Catalyst Pilot Grant to study how the loss of key nutrients, particularly iron and zinc, could affect human nutrition and public health globally. (Catalyst grants are designed to promote innovative cross-disciplinary projects that harness Harvard’s diverse resources to

Copper

example, parts of the land have gradually turned to desert and the population has moved to more habitable environs. These migrations, even if they are not as sudden as evacuating a flooded area, can provoke humanitarian crises. When people seek out better conditions, VanRooyen says, “they migrate into populations that are already under stress.” Often people move to cities, which puts a strain on those unused to dealing with urban life as well as on the infrastructure of the city itself.

VanRooyen says that the global humanitarian community is further concerned because climate change will likely lead to conflicts among different populations— manifest, for instance, in battles over disappearing farmland and water resources, or as social tensions when one group moves into territory traditionally occupied by another. In areas where governments are stable, he says, these conflicts can often

reduce the burden of human illness.)

The team’s first work will be to estimate, based on available data, says Meyers, “what would happen if these changes occurred even if caloric intake were kept constant?

What would be the additional burden of disease?” Answering these questions will require study of the importance of grain crops in providing nutrients to a range of populations; already, the group’s preliminary investigations show that many people receive the vast majority of dietary iron and zinc from crops that appear to be affected by elevated CO2. Women and children are likely to be especially vulnerable to nutrient deficiencies because they are not able to access as much meat as adult men do. In their case, the nutrients in staple grains are particularly critical to health.

The next stage of the project will identify gaps in current data that need to be filled to more fully understand the potential impacts. In the developed world, many crop studies are performed on plants that have ready access to water, fertilizer, and good soil. Less is known about how crops in more difficult environments will fare as carbon dioxide levels rise. And few studies have addressed prospective effects on other kinds of staple crops such as cassava, sorghum, and millet, which populations often rely on in times when the food supply is unstable.

Eventually, the team hopes to use their initial studies as a path to launch a longerterm research project to address these gaps in knowledge. “Ultimately,” Myers says, “we’d like to study real-world conditions

Jennifer Leaning, Bagnoud professor of the practice of health and human rights at the Harvard School of Public Health, associate professor of medicine at the Harvard Medical School, and director of the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights. Leaning also directs the InterUniversity Initiative on Humanitarian Studies and Field Practice, which operates in conjunction with MIT and Tufts University.

with real-world crops.”

Willett points out that the prospect of less nutritious crops is particularly alarming given the number people in the world already suffering the effects of inadequate nutrition. Although the United Nations set a goal of 2015 to halve the number of hungry people in the world, the trend is going the other way: according to the UN World Food Program, the ranks of the hungry actually grew in 2007 and 2008 because of escalating food prices.

An even greater number of people worldwide suffer from malnutrition because they lack specific nutrients important for health.

Nutrient-poor crops are likely to exacerbate the existing prevalence of iron- and zinc-deficiency diseases that take a toll on health: anemia caused by too little iron in the diet is the most common dietary deficiency disease, leading to fatigue and weakness; zinc deficiency is thought to affect a quarter of the world’s populaNoel Michele Holbook, Bullard professor of forestry and professor of biology. Holbrook specializes in the physiology of plants.

tion, and can exacerbate diarrhea and other illnesses and even impair growth in infants and children. Protein deficiencies can be devastating to children’s growth and brain development. The toll is measured not only at the level of personal health: by diminishing the productivity of workers and placing burdens on health care systems, nutrient deficiencies damage local economies. And although people in wealthier societies will be less susceptible to both deficiencies and economic disruptions, their health could also suffer. “In affluent countries, if the amount of carbohydrates relative to protein in crops goes up, it’s likely to have an effect on heart disease and other lifestyle diseases,” Willett says.

Michele Holbrook, Bullard professor of forestry, brings a different kind of expertise to the HUCE team: a deep understanding of the complex physiological relationship between crops and their environment.

Holbrook says the way crops respond to climate change “will affect what people grow and what food they produce in what amounts, which will affect pricing, which then affects what people can afford to buy and eat.” Although broad predictions about crop yields can provide a big-picture scenario about agriculture in the future, Holbrook says that understanding exactly how crops will respond to climate change requires looking more deeply at the physiology of plants.

Since individual plants can’t move when conditions change, they respond to environmental stresses by internally moving

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Michael VanRooyen, associate professor at the Harvard School of Public Health and Harvard Medical School, and director of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative.

resources around to better suit current conditions. Sitting at a picnic table in a courtyard near her lab at Harvard, Holbrook points out that the surrounding plants—from the smallest shrub to the tallest tree—are structured to facilitate the movement of water from the soil up to the leaves where photosynthesis takes place.

The carbohydrates produced from photosynthesis must then be transferred to areas where they are most needed. Holbrook’s research focuses on how this internal transport takes place, particularly in situations of drought. In the collaborative Catalyst project, “my contribution is to understand the rules or mechanisms the plant uses to control its allocation strategies, so we can then make predictions under these

multifactorial future conditions.”

At first glance, it might seem that global warming is a boon to crops; after all, Holbrook explains, if you put a plant in a greenhouse with plenty of carbon dioxide it will typically grow faster. But in reality plants exist in a balance that relies on many factors, and not every plant will respond to environmental changes in the same way. When plants are given abundant water and fertilizer, they may be able to take advantage of higher carbon dioxide levels by speeding photosynthesis and growing faster. But if they are limited in resources, they may not.

Holbrook also points out that a fastergrowing plant does not necessarily yield more or better food. Often the part of the plant we eat is not the leaves or stems but the reproductive parts—seeds, grains, and fruits—and higher temperatures and greenhouse gases may not necessarily encourage the growth of these parts. A better question,

F acult y P rofile

Paul Moorcroft

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rowing up about ten miles from Manchester, England, professor of organismic and evolutionary biology Paul Moor his back fence opening to fields which led to a national park. “My two favorite subjects when I was in high school were biology and mathematics, and certainly my research has ended up combining those fields.”

The introduction of mathematics into his ecological research began as a graduate student. Interested in animal movement, he worked with a group of wildlife biologists who were tracking the spatial behavior of coyotes in Yellowstone National Park. In an effort to better understand their behavior, Moorcroft began to develop formal scaling methods to link underlying models of their movement to their resulting pattern of space use—similar to a process long employed by statistical physicists. “Physicists have always developed equations describing the large scale function of something— say the movement of a fluid—that is ultimately derived from an underlying model of how particles of the fluid behave,” says Moorcroft. Applying these types of mathematical scaling methods allowed Moorcroft and his colleagues to take measurements of coyote movement behaviors in Yellow-

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stone, and from this, to correctly predict their larger spatial distribution on the landscape.

As he began to focus his research on climate change, he saw it as another opportunity to employ formal scaling methods the same way he did for coyotes in Yellowstone. “Biologists will measure a few plants and how they grow or they’ll do a small experiment where they subject parts of an ecosystem to drought, and then take the knowledge from that finer scale and formally scale it up,” he says. “And if we quantify how these individual plants respond at this smaller scale, we can then say how the ecosystem will respond.”

Moorcroft is currently working on a project funded by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to determine how climate change and deforestation will affect the Amazon forest. “What our mathematical approach allows us to do is build quantitative models of those ecosystems, drawing upon what we know from measurements and experiments at smaller scales,” says Moorcroft. “The question we are being asked is, ‘What are the forests of the Amazon going to look like in 40 years?’ And

that’s a question you can’t get at directly through experimentation. You can’t just replicate the Amazon.”

Moorcroft says the fate of the Amazon ecosystem also has important consequences for the region’s climate. “It’s estimated that between 30 or 40 percent of the rain in the Amazon is moisture that was put there by the trees of the Amazon,” he says. “That sets up the potential for strong feedback: If anything happens to forests of the Amazon writ large, either due to climate change or human deforestation—or more likely both—there are implications for the climate of the entire region.”

— Dan Morrell

she says, is: “How does the plant respond in terms of regulating the allocation of resources to the thing we’re going to harvest?”

The prospect of higher temperatures complicates the picture, because additional warmth can promote crop production by encouraging plants to sprout leaves faster early in the season, a critical time for growth of field crops. But high temperatures also lead to more water evaporation, and can drive plants to burn more energy through respiration at night. At some point, too much heat becomes harmful. In many regions, climate change will result in drier conditions, which puts constraints on another critical resource for plants.

“Drought is already a major limitation on crop production,” Holbrook says, “and the prediction with climate change is that extreme events like droughts will become more prevalent.”

In addition to identifying the consequences of climate change for plants, Holbrook is generating knowledge that can help create solutions. Most crops have been bred to allocate their resources toward whatever is going to be harvested, but they do so at the expense of other parts of the plant, like the roots. Balancing these tradeoffs is a challenge in crop breeding. By better understanding the mechanisms that underlie plants’ responses to their environment, plant scientists like Holbrook can look at generating new varieties of crops that are better adapted to conditions that might emerge under climate change. For instance, one project in her lab is examining the genotypes of different strains of soybeans to understand why some are more efficient in using water. “We can use that information to enhance breeding programs to make

2010 Undergraduate Summer Research Award Recipients

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ne of the Center’s most important programs is the annual sponsorship of summer research opportunities for Harvard undergraduates. This year, 18 students will conduct research on alternative energy sources, invasive species ecology, climate dynamics, and much more. For more information about the Undergraduate Summer Research Fund, including how to apply, visit http://environment.harvard.edu/student-resources/undergraduate-summer-research-fund. Summer research opportunities are made possible by the generous support of Bertram Cohn ’47, and Barbara “B.” Wu (Ph.D. ’81) and Eric Larson ’77.

• Riju Agrawal ’13, “Evaluating Wind Energy

Potentials in India” • Annissa Alusi ’12, “Cross-Boundary Water Resource Adaptation” • Max Brondfield ’11, “Urban Metabolism: Quantifying Methane Sources for the Boston Metropolitan Area” • Grace Charles ’11, “Interactive Effects of Large-Mammal Extinction and Climate Change: Experimental Approaches” • Andrew Chen ’11, “Invasive Species Ecology of M. laetum” • Hannah Horowitz ’11, “Atmospheric Mercury Data Analysis: Seasonal Cycle, Biosphere Interactions, and Model Evaluation” • Jennifer Levye ’11, “Water Usage in Arecaceae along a Successful Gradient” • Marianna K. Linz ’11, “Fluorescence of Model Organic Aerosol” • Lillian R. Margolin ’11, “Wind Turbine Siting Based on Ecological Principles” (thesis research)

problems, hope to develop a clear vision of the challenges ahead, and to help in efforts to chart a path forward. A complex web of factors is in play: the environmen-

“Through our consumption practices in the wealthy world, we are putting hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people in harm’s way. We shouldn’t be doing a global experiment on the world’s food sources.” soybeans that are a little more water efficient without taking too big a decrease in yield,” she says.

Across a broad range of inquiry, the work of identifying climate change impacts on human nutrition is just beginning. HUCE-affiliated researchers, uniting input and expertise from multiple fields to address a cross-disciplinary set of

tal conditions needed to transform seeds into harvests; the production of nutritious food from crops, and its subsequent distribution locally and throughout the world; the economic systems that allow people to grow their own food or purchase groceries at markets; the interaction between what people eat and their health; and the social and political systems and

• John Mussman ’12, “Predicting Occupant

Alertness Levels in Daylit Buildings” • Torin O’Brien ’12, to assist professor Paul

Hoffman with geological research in Namibia • Mark Piana ’11, “Eocene’s Warm Climate Research and Outreach” • Parijat Samant ’13, “The Reception and Portrayal of Cap-and-Trade” • Richard C. Stanley ’12, “Invasive Species Biology” • Molly M. Strauss ’11, “Participation and Non-Participation in Climate-Change Collective Action” • Paul VanMiddlesworth ’13, “Landscape Ecology” • Lauren Xie ’13, “Community Assessment of Freeway Exposure and Health” • Douwe Yntema ’11, to assist professor Joyce Chaplin in calculating the energy costs of historical and modern modes of transportation

policies that allow societies to adapt to situations of stress.

While wealthy nations are already beginning to contemplate steps they can take to adjust, the brunt of the impacts will be born by developing countries and the world’s poor. The work being done at Harvard will help clarify what those impacts will be and how best to respond. Myers believes there is a “moral imperative,” to mitigate the effects of climate change.

“The people who are going to suffer the worst consequences…are people in the developing world who have had little to do with generating these threats and have fewer resources to adapt to them,” he says.

“Through our consumption practices in the wealthy world, we are putting hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people in harm’s way. We shouldn’t be doing a global experiment on the world’s food sources.”

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Implications of a Nuclear Renaissance

By David L. Chandler

A

major expansion of nuclear power is essential as a measure against climate change, John Rowe told a Harvard audience in 2008. But the chairman and CEO of Exelon, the nation’s largest utility company, and owner and operator of the largest fleet of nuclear plants in the United States (who was delivering a Future of Energy lecture sponsored by the Harvard University Center for the Environment), also said that an investment in new plants simply doesn’t make financial sense for a company like his, even after the promise of federal loan guarantees—a position he reiterated earlier this year.

Surprising or seemingly paradoxical positions on nuclear power are not unusual these days. And the complexity of Rowe’s perspective on the subject illustrates the way, all across the spectrum of political opinion, analysts are now looking at the potential benefits and risks of nuclear power with fresh eyes, weighing anew a range of issues, including the need for regulatory and technological safeguards and the political, social, and economic questions surrounding the prospects for what many see as a need for a resurgence of the industry—a hoped-for major expansion that is often described as a “nuclear renaissance.”

The new impetus is driven overwhelmingly by one factor: the push for ways of meeting ever-growing needs for energy without using more fossil fuels, which add to the already risky levels of greenhouse gases going into the atmosphere and which are vulnerable to disruptions in foreign supplies.

The consequence is that after a quarter-century hiatus nationally in orders for new nuclear plants—a period during which globally the number of functioning reactors also leveled off—the first new licensing requests by American companies have been made this year, in the wake of President Obama’s call for loan guarantees for the new plants. But despite that slight bounce, essentially nobody thinks the road ahead for nuclear power will be an easy one.

For a nuclear resurgence to have any significant impact on those concerns, the global industry “really has to grow a lot,” says Matthew Bunn, associate professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) and co-principal investigator at the school’s Project on Managing the Atom. At present, about 4 new plants are being built per year around the world, but to make a significant dent in greenhouse gas emissions—at best, this would be something on the order of just a tenth of the new energy supplies that will be needed—“we would need about 25 new plants a year from now until 2050,” he says. And relying on that level of new construction as a key component of a strategy to avert dangerous climate change is fraught with its own risks, he adds: a major disaster at a nuclear plant anywhere in 20

Spring/Summer 2010

the world, whether by accident or terrorism, “would doom any realistic prospect for a major nuclear contribution to the climate problem.”

Bunn thinks a resurgence of nuclear power could indeed play a significant role in reducing anticipated emissions, mostly in the second half of this century, and is worth pursuing for that reason. But he and many others also point to a list of concerns that would need to be addressed to make that possible without creating undue new risks.

The Economic Picture When Rowe said it would be too risky for a utility to order a new nuclear power plant today, his conclusion was based on the present economic realities—even in light of the administration’s offer of loan guarantees. But why should it be so hard for a self-professed advocate of nuclear power, and for a company that has extensive experience in the area, to justify such an investment?

“Capital costs are huge, and have gone up by about a factor of two in the last few years,” says Bunn. “There are a variety of proposals that could ultimately lead to lowered costs—including a standardization of designs—but for the time being, the choices available tend to be large, nonstandardized, and expensive.”

Butler professor of environmental studies Michael McElroy explains: “The basic problem with nuclear [power] is that it’s a highrisk activity, economically. People remember what happened at Shoreham: It was a major nuclear plant, and it never produced a single

expensive.” And that investment is vulnerable in a way that investments in other sources are not, he adds: “it takes ten years to build, and you have to pay for it now, and if there’s an accident that changes public perception, you lose your money.

For a CEO [of a utility company], you risk going out in disgrace.” A combined-cycle natural gas plant or a new wind farm are seen as much financially safer and less expensive alternatives, both domestically and in many other parts of the world.

Professor of government Stephen Ansolabehere says that even to those working in the field of nuclear power, “it’s a little confusing as to what the price [of nuclear

“At present, about 4 new plants are being built per year around the world, but to make a significant dent in greenhouse gas emissions we would need about 25 new plants a year from now until 2050.” watt because of public opposition and public concerns about not being able to evacuate Long Island. A lot of money was spent, and the ratepayers had to pay.”

In light of that experience, he says, “imagine a utility making a decision to build a gigawatt plant, which costs about $4 billion. Once you have it, the fuel is cheap. But it’s the capital cost that’s a heavy factor. Given the risk, if you’re going to finance it, what interest rate are you going to demand? Twelve, thirteen, fourteen percent? That makes nuclear power very

generated electricity] really is. There are a lot of factors that come in,” and there is much heated disagreement as to the most accurate ways of estimating the true costs.

In general, actual prices based on operating experience are substantially higher than the numbers that are often quoted, even by experts in the field, he says.

“It’s often argued,” Ansolabehere continues, that it’s “because of regulation” that the costs of nuclear power often exceed those of most other sources, he says. But detailed analyses, such as a 2003 study from MIT,

Matthew Bunn, associate professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and co-principal investigator of the Belfer Center’s Project on Managing the Atom.

showed “the real driver of cost was the capital costs” of building the plants, because of the long lead times and high degree of perceived financial risk. Similar factors also drastically drive up the price of other large, complex installations, including proposed new combined-cycle coal plants with carbon capture systems, he adds.

For the present, at least, nuclear power remains the most politicized of all potential power sources, and the one with the highest negative public perceptions. In a recent survey, Ansolabehere found that 55 percent of Americans were strongly opposed to having a nuclear plant built within 25 miles of their homes, compared to 45 percent for a coal plant, 26 percent for a natural gas plant, and just 11 percent for a wind power facility.

On the other hand, people are generally much more likely to accept new nuclear plants at sites where they already operate, Ansolabehere found. “If you ask people about expanding at existing sites, the responses are much more positive,” he says.

Bearing that in mind, “companies should be much more attentive to the local communities, where there is usually a lot of support,” especially when they represent stable jobs in an uncertain economy. “But you’ve got to maintain that.”

During the short-term, the promised

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Federal loan guarantees should help, and have tipped some U.S. companies to file applications for new nuclear plants. But those guarantees will only apply to the first few plants ordered. The Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry’s trade association, estimates that without the guarantees, the lifetime cost of a new U.S. nuclear plant would be about $98 per megawatt-hour produced (compared to about $79 for a conventional coal plant), and with the loan guarantees that would drop to about $64 per megawatt-hour. “It’s not at all obvious that we will have nuclear power that’s competitive after loan guarantees end,” Bunn says.

But that depends partly on how things go for the first few new plants that get built—and on what new alternatives come along, in the United States and elsewhere.

For one thing, standardization of plant designs could go a long way toward lowering costs while increasing safety, many analysts believe.

Peter Galison, Pellegrino University Professor and the director of the University’s Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, points out that this is one of the keys to France’s success with nuclear power, which provides more than three-quarters of that nation’s electricity. “One thing they’ve done that I admire is they’ve standardized their design, which means you learn.” One reason that’s important, he explains, is for safety: “Imagine if every airplane was different—different engines and different instruments and so on— we’d have nothing like the safety record we have.” Yet in most of the world, that’s essentially the way nuclear plants have been built.

Standardization would make it possible to take advantage of the learning Graham Allison, Dillon professor of government and director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Allison is an expert on U.S. national security with respect to nuclear proliferation.

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“It’s crazy that we’ve come to a point 60 years after the start of commercial nuclear power with no plan for how nuclear waste will be disposed of.” curve offered by monitoring large numbers of identical plants.

Bunn is not entirely persuaded, however.

“I think standardization is important, but it’s difficult in a world with several competing vendors. There are seven different designs being built now in China, for example, even though China is talking openly about wanting to standardize. Similarly, in license applications in the U.S., there are quite a variety of different designs utilities are pursuing.”

For the next few decades, Bunn suggests, the vast majority of new reactors built are going to be fairly conventional light-water reactors (LWRs), the kind with which the world industry has the most experience.

There are a few advanced designs that promise to be more economical and safer to operate, such as pebble-bed reactors

that never need to be shut down for refueling and have no risk of meltdown. But because such approaches are unproven, “It’s going to be very hard to get these things designed, tested, and deployed,” Bunn says. But if such designs prove themselves, they could become major players in a nuclear revival in coming decades.

Among the new ideas, one that many find especially promising is the concept of much smaller, self-contained, and modular, factory-built reactors that could be shipped to a site fully fueled and ready to go. “Small modular reactors, at the moment, are not competitive,” Bunn says.

But that could change quickly if and when they start to be built and deployed in large numbers. Because of their smaller size, they could eliminate one of the biggest risks for utilities, the need to invest in huge plants all at once in order to make any use of nuclear electricity production. While traditional nuclear plants have significant economies of scale—they need to be at least a gigawatt in capacity to have any chance of being economically competitive—the idea is that the smaller plants could counteract the inefficiencies of smaller size with the greater efficiency of mass-production methods.

“They’re hoping you’ll get economies of production scale, but it’s a chicken and egg problem,” Bunn says. “You don’t get economies until you have large-scale production, and companies are unlikely to order large numbers until the economies are there.” So the real potential of such reactors lies in the longer term: “I’m a fan of the small modular reactors, but from now until 2050, they’ll only displace a smidgeon of carbon,” he says.

The Waste Issue Regardless of whether, and how fast, a nuclear renaissance takes hold, dealing with the nuclear waste already discarded by commercial nuclear power operators during the previous half century remains a problem. At the moment, there are few encouraging models. The United States has spent more than two decades, and perhaps $10 billion, developing plans for a single repository to hold all the nation’s high-level nuclear waste at a site called Yucca Mountain in Nevada, but after years of lawsuits by the state, that option has now been taken off the table once and for all—with no replacement in sight.

“It’s crazy,” says Galison, “that we’ve come to a point 60 years after the start of commercial nuclear power with no plan for how nuclear waste will be disposed of.”

But the issue may be more political than technological.

“There’s a lot of debate,” he says. “Should we put it into granite mines, which are stable, but have a risk of water infiltration? Or in salt mines, where there’s a prima facie case for no water infiltration” since any water would have dissolved the salt? There, the issue is “they close up, so it’s not recoverable,” if a future generation wanted to dig up the radioactive material for use in new plants or for some new purpose we haven’t thought of yet. And there are a variety of other feasible options for underground storage.

“This is a debate we really need to have as a country,” Galison says. “We have this waste already, it’s not theoretical. The waste we have is not well secured at the moment, so we have to figure out what to do with that stuff.” And the quantities of waste will be increasing: “There are so many plants already slated for production. It’s not just inevitable, it’s already happening.” Apart from new plants in the United States, China and India are gearing up for major increases, and many other nations are eager to use nuclear energy for the first time.

There are three main concerns about the waste, Galison says: water, theft, and

Peter Galison, Pellegrino University professor and director of the Harvard University Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments.

longevity. Water, he says, is the most significant worry. “The biggest issue, it seems to me, which is both incredibly simple and incredibly complex, is water. If water gets into a site,” he explains, this “will cause the waste to migrate; and if it gets into aquifers, that’s a real danger. To me, that is the number one issue.”

The second concern, he says, is the risk of people trying to dig into the repository to get hold of the waste for the purposes of making weapons: whether in the form of simple “dirty bombs,” or for reprocessing to provide the material for nuclear weapons; and the third is simply the need to keep highly radioactive material sequestered for the thousands of years that it takes for the radioactivity to decline to safe levels— “periods of time comparable to the history of civilization itself,” as Galison puts it.

All of those issues, however, might be moot if the material were stored underground in large salt formations. Because the salt would seal itself up around the buried waste, the radioactive material would be virtually impossible to recover —either intentionally or by accident.

And such formations are not subject to water infiltration.

Other kinds of geological storage may also offer similar levels of protection.

“It’s a problem, but it’s not a big safety issue,” says Bunn.

“You want to put it deep underground, where there are only moderate risks.” And it’s important to keep the risks in perspective, he says: “Compared to the tens of thousands of people who die every year from the emissions from coal plants, it’s minor.”

The big question is how to get a site chosen and accepted.

On this, the track record has not been encouraging. The U.S. is not the only country without a plan. France, often touted as a shining example of an effective nuclear power program, doesn’t have one either. There, most of the waste goes to a single reprocessing plant, which produces large quantities of plutonium.

Some of that is re-used in power plants, but the majority is just piling up at the reprocessing facility. No long-term storage facility has been identified.

But there is at least one encouraging exemplar out there, Bunn points out: in Finland, a final long-term repository for that country’s nuclear waste has been decided on, essentially without controversy.

In fact, when the decision was announced as to which of two possible sites would be chosen, there was an immediate lawsuit over the choice—by the community that didn’t get picked.

What did Finland do right? One tack that helped, Bunn explains, is that right at the outset the government made it clear that no community would be forced to accept a storage facility. That made it easy for communities to investigate the possibility, without fear that a permanent repository would be sited there against their will. In addition, planners decided early on to locate the site near an operating nuclear plant, where there is already an

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on-site spent fuel pool. So the choices facing that community were to keep the waste stored on the surface, or have it buried deep underground. “That’s a nobrainer,” Bunn says.

Galison says “the attempt to find a rational and well-engineered disposal site is essential.”

And those who oppose such a facility on environmental grounds need to be realistic about what the alternatives are. “It’s not robins in an untouched meadow versus a nuclear disposal site. It’s a current unregulated mess versus something protected against leaks.” Getting it right is mostly a matter of how it gets decided at this point, he says. “You have to have an open enough, clear enough process, not secretive decisions. I don’t think this is impossible. It’s complicated, but it’s necessary.”

James K. Hammitt, professor of economics and decision sciences at the Harvard School of Public Health. “We as a people express more fear about technologies that seem unfamiliar, exotic, or that we don’t understand,” Hammitt says in reference to public attitudes about nuclear power.

Gigawatts-electric

Accidents and attacks When it comes to thinking about the potential risks associated with nuclear power, most of the public’s attention—from the release of the movie “The China Syndrome” through the accidents at Three Mile Island in 1979 and Chernobyl in 1986—focused on the possibility of a major accident such as a meltdown of the reactor core.

Most people probably overestimate that risk, Bunn suggests. The risk was always low, and nuclear plants “are safer today than in the past,” he says. But what of the push for greatly increased numbers? “At the current risk rates, if we have three or four

times as many plants, that’s still a significant amount of risk,” he says. On the other hand, newer designs, including passive cooling systems and other advanced safety measures, may help to drive risks down.

“It seems to be true that we as a people express more fear about technologies that seem to be unfamiliar, exotic, or that we don’t understand,” says James Hammitt, professor of economics and decision sciences at the Harvard School of Public Health. This seems to be Capacity of Nuclear Plants Added per Year the case with nuclear power, he points out, even though it rep30 resents some 20 percent of the nation’s generating capacity and 25 has been around longer than the 20 lifetime of the average person.

15 10 5 0

1991-2006

Required 2008-2050

Source: Matthew Bunn/Harvard Kennedy School of Government

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Between 1991 and 2006, only four Gigawatts-electric of nuclear generating capacity was added anually.

Six times that amount would need to be added each year between now and 2050 to make a significant impact on greenhouse gas emissions.

People also react differently to a single large event than to a large number of smaller ones, as with the inverted impressions people tend to have about the risks of airplanes versus cars. “To the extent we’re fearful of low-probability serious outcomes,” Hammitt says, “if you compare nuclear with coal and other fossil fuels, I’m quite certain that burning coal is having serious health effects on people; but it’s very hard to estimate the low chance of some really catastrophic event at a nuclear plant.” So people are weighing “the certainty of lots of deaths and illnesses, against the uncertainty of a probably small, but probably very serious outcome.”

If the risk of accidents is overestimated, the opposite may be true for the risk of attack. Even in the post-9/11 era, it’s a possibility that gets relatively little serious attention. But Graham Allison, Dillon professor of government and Director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at HKS, has been studying the issue for years. He says the risk of terrorist exploitation of nuclear power and its byproducts, though real, also needs to be put into proper perspective. First, he explains, it’s important to realize that even an all-out attack on a nuclear plant poses no danger of a nuclear bomb-like explosion. Still, “if an aircraft were to crash into it, especially into the most vulnerable components, then that’s like a ‘dirty bomb’ on steroids. You’d have dispersal of a lot of radioactive material, including quite nasty materials. That would spook people for a long time, and have local health effects.” Because of that possibility it’s essential for all nuclear plants to have “reasonable precautions against any reasonable threats,” he says.

But as deadly as such an attack may sound, he says, “To put it in perspective, if I

“If I compare the threats of an attack on a spent-fuel pool with the threat to chlorine tankers that are on the rails, or the chemical facilities that are in many cities, the chemical risks are greater.

In an advanced industrial society we live with lots of very dangerous stuff.” compare the threat of an attack on a spentfuel pool with the threats to chlorine tankers that are on the rails, or the chemical facilities that are in many cities, the chemical risks are greater. In an advanced industrial society we live with lots of very dangerous stuff.”

A much more serious concern regarding nuclear material, Allison says, is proliferation. There are many risks associated with the production and disposal of nuclear fuel—in particular with the facilities that produce the fuel for the reactor, and the facilities that extract plutonium from nuclear waste. Nuclear weapons can be made from either enriched uranium, or plutonium. “Enriched uranium is made by putting it through an industrial process, including centrifuges, like vast washing machines that spin at the speed of sound to concentrate Uranium 235 (U-235),” he explains. For use in a nuclear power plant, the uranium is enriched to a level of 4 or 5 percent U-235. To make a bomb, U-235 is typically enriched to about 90 percent, but in both cases the enrichment takes place in a similar facility. “With a little re-piping, you can produce 90 percent. So if any state that decides to build nuclear plants also decides to build a fuel-production facility” explains Allison, “it’s a straight step to a nuclear bomb.” Likewise, reprocessing spent nuclear fuel to separate out plutonium, as France does, produces material that can be used to run nuclear power plants, but also to make bombs.

Allison notes that while a facility designed to produce reactor fuel could, in principle, be diverted to make weapons material, that’s not the likeliest scenario.

Instead, the expertise and technology developed for such production may be used to build a similar, hidden, much smaller facility for producing bomb-grade uranium or plutonium.

Bunn says that “every country that has launched a nuclear weapons program since nuclear power became available has acquired some crucial elements from commercial nuclear power, either as a fig leaf,

or as a way to build up infrastructure and expertise. So, for example, Pakistan sought to buy a big reprocessing plant from France. In later interviews, they said ‘we never intended to use the French plant to produce weapons material, but rather to use that knowledge and expertise to build a smaller facility’” to make the material for

bombs. In short, he says, “The proliferation concerns are broader and more complex than is often portrayed.”

Nuclear fuel security in nations that have not previously had nuclear power could also present inviting targets for nations or terrorist organizations bent on obtaining weapons material. “There, the issue is whether the required infrastructure will be in place” to assure control of the fuel and waste, Ansolabehere says.

But efforts are underway to address the range of proliferation scenarios, by bringing existing weapons-grade material under strict international control, and providing a system so that countries that want to build nuclear power plants can get their fuel, and

get rid of their waste, through internationally monitored supply chains.

In a Future of Energy lecture in 2008, Anne Lauvergeon, head of Areva, France’s largest nuclear power company, said that her company is already building completely self-contained reactors that companies or countries can order without having to get involved in fuel production or disposal. The reactors would remain sealed for their operating lifetimes and the fueling and disposal would be handled by the company. “The fact that we can deliver the whole plant, with the fuel cycle, without any possibility of proliferation, and take back the waste and recycle it, is absolutely key,” she said. “It’s a precondition for us to sell new reactors.”

Professor of government Stephen Ansolabehere says that of all energy sources, nuclear power has the one of the highest negative public perceptions.

Similarly, Abu Dhabi recently entered into an agreement to buy four nuclear plants from a South Korean company. But in the process, Allison says they signed a contract “saying that for the lifetime of those plants, they will buy their fuel from an outside supplier, and ship their spent fuel back to them.” That not only provides security, but it also just makes sense, he explains. “In terms of economics, the potential of enriching your own uranium makes no sense unless you’re operating

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50 reactors.” So the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is developing a system of guarantees for any country that wants nuclear power: to provide them with a fuel supplier, along with a backup

supplier, and as a further backup the IAEA itself, which plans to maintain its own supply of fuel.

That would address the biggest concerns, both of the U.S. and other industri-

alized nations and of the countries seeking nuclear power. “The Iranians have used [the lack of a reliable source of fuel] as an excuse,” for their centrifuge program, Allison notes. Under the planned system,

Environmental Fellows Prepare to Take (and Make) Their Mark T

he Center for the Environment warmly welcomes the incoming group of Environmental Fellows who will arrive at the center this fall. The new fellows will be joining a group of remarkable scholars starting the second year of their fellowships. Together, the Environmental Fellows at Harvard form a community of researchers with diverse backgrounds united by intellectual curiosity, topquality scholarship, and a drive to understand some of the most important environmental challenges facing society. The Center also congratulates the outgoing Fellows (class of 2008-10) as they prepare to embark on the next stage of their careers. For more information on the Environmental Fellows program, including how to apply, visit http://www.environment.harvard.edu/grants/fellows.

Incoming Fellows: Class of 2010-12

strategies, and was quickly subsumed into the global proliferation of mechanical heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems by the end of the decade. The project reveals empirical and conceptual relationships between architectural research, climate science, and the global emergence of political, economic, and cultural concern for environmental conditions.

Elizabeth Landis (Ph.D. University of Wisconsin) is a materials chemist who is interested in applying surface chemistry to solar energy collection and storage. At the University of Wisconsin, Beth developed methods for attaching molecules to vertically aligned carbon nanofibers and studied the electronic properties of the resulting interfaces. This work demonstrated the suitability of the nanofibers for use in fuel cells and for energy storage. As a Henson Environmental Fellow, Beth will work with Cynthia Friend in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology to study how surface layers of titanium dioxide can be doped to change and control the optical properties of the material. This work will focus on tuning this abundant metal oxide to harvest solar energy.

Alexander (Zan) Stine (Ph.D. University of California-Berkeley) is a climate scientist interested in how to separate natural signals of climate variability from human-induced changes in the observational record. As a Kernan Brothers Environmental Fellow, Zan will work with former Environmental Fellow (now assistant professor) Peter Huybers in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences to understand changes in the response of tree growth to temperature during the last century. Because tree-ring growth is correlated with temperature at many locations, early tree-ring records have been used to infer the temperature history of the Earth before the advent of the thermometer. However, in the late 20th century many of these tree rings ceased to track temperature, suggesting a large-scale change in the way the terrestrial biosphere responds to climate, and calling into question tree-ring based reconstructions of past climates.

Rich Wildman (Ph.D. California Institute of Daniel A. Barber (Ph.D. Columbia University) Technology) is an environmental engineer is an architectural historian analyzing affiniwhose interests also include chemistry and ties between the history of architecture and oceanography. As a French Environmental Felthe emergence of environmentalism in the low, Rich will work with James Shine in the Har20th century. As a Ziff Environmental Fellow, vard School of Public Health to study the transDaniel will work with Charles Waldheim at the Graduate School of Design to pursue a research project that complements his dissertation.

Tentatively titled “The Invention of Thermal Comfort: Climate HUCE congratulates Rafael Jaramillo, a Ziff Environmental Science and the Globalization Fellow (2009-11), on receiving the 2010 Rosalind Franklin of Modern Architecture, 1933Young Investigator Award. The award, given by the Advanced 1963,” the project explores the Photon Source (an office of science within the U.S. Department multifaceted proliferation of of Energy), recognizes Jaramillo for furthering understanding climatic architectural strategies of itinerant magnetism and for his contributions to the study at mid-century, and in particular of quantum matter at high pressure using synchrotron x-ray research on “thermal comfort”— diffraction. As an environmental fellow, Jaramillo works with the internal climatic conditions professor Shriram Ramanathan (School of Engineering and of the built environment. The Applied Sciences) on the problem of controlling electron concept developed as part of an transport across thin oxide barriers—a problem with broad interest in the formal aspects of relevance to future generations of solar cell technologies. passive ventilation and heating

Ziff Environmental Fellow Rafael Jaramillo Receives Young Investigator Award

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Spring/Summer 2010

which was kick-started with a $50 million donation from Warren Buffet and matched by pledges for another $100 million by from various national governments, the IAEA will provide the fuel of port, degradation, and toxicology of chemical contaminants during water reuse. Since reservoirs are the centerpiece of many water reuse strategies, Rich will focus his research on trace organic pollutants in reservoirs that receive highly treated wastewater intended for future consumptive use.

Outgoing Environmental Fellows: Class of 2008-10 Etienne Benson (Ziff Environmental Fellow) will join the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, where he will continue his work on the history of endangered species science. Etienne’s first book, Wired Wilderness: Technologies of Tracking and the Making of Modern Wildlife, will be published this fall by Johns Hopkins University Press.

William Boos (French Environmental Fellow) will join the Department of Geology and Geophysics at Yale University as an assistant professor, where he will continue his work on tropical climate dynamics.

Susan Cameron (Kernan Brothers Environmental Fellow) will join the University of Florida as an assistant professor in the Department of Wildlife Ecology and Conservation.

Mauricio Santillana (Henson Environmental Fellow) will begin a new postdoctoral fellowship in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, where he will continue his research in atmospheric chemistry. Mauricio will also teach a graduate course in applied mathematics in the fall.

Alex Wissner-Gross (Ziff Environmental Fellow) will serve as chief scientist of Enernetics, Inc., a research and development company he co-founded in 2007 that is leading the convergence of physical and digital worlds.

Shengwei Zhu (Ziff Environmental Fellow) will return to China where he plans to join the faculty of the Architecture and Urban Planning School of Huazhong University of Science and Technology—one of the top ten schools in the country.

last resort, as a way to “make sure it’s nuts for a nation, that it economically makes no sense,” he says, to make or reprocess their own nuclear fuel.

Will this plan work, and make possible a major worldwide expansion of commercial nuclear power without adding to the risk of nuclear terrorism? “There are optimists and pessimists,” Allison says. “The optimists say we will revitalize the nuclear order.

Pessimists say the trend lines are negative, and the amount of energy required to bend them is too large.” In other words, political forces may, or may not, make it possible to implement international controls over the way nations initiate or expand their use of nuclear power.

The outcome is far from guaranteed,

and it will take serious effort on the part of the United States and the international community to make the proposed system work, Allison says. Still, “I would say most days I get up as an optimist.”

But the need for international agreement is growing fast, as the pressures for a rapid expansion of nuclear power continue to mount. Faced with the twin threats of climate change and the risk of shortages of the most readily available fossil fuels, most energy experts agree that foreclosing any option for energy production would not be prudent for the United States or the world as a whole. As Michael McElroy puts it, “I think we should be pursuing every reasonable, practical, economically feasible option.”

Environment w Harvard A sampling of the spring semester’s events Conferences and Workshops Promises and Challenges of Development and Conservation in the Amazon March 10, 2010

Co-sponsored with the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, this event featured presentations and commentary by Arnóbio “Binho” Marques, Governor of the State of Acre, Brazil; Jorge Viana, Former Governor of the State of Acre, Brazil; Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Pound professor of law (HLS), and former Minister of Strategic Affairs for the Brazilian government; and HUCE faculty associate John Briscoe, (SEAS, HSPH) and former World Bank Country Director for Brazil.

The Environmental Turn in Literary and Cultural Studies April 8, 2010

Co-sponsored with the Humanities Center at Harvard, this colloquium on the field of “ecocriticism” featured HUCE faculty associates Lawrence Buell (Dept. of English and American Literature and Language) and Karen Thornber (Dept. of Comparative Literature), along with Ursula Heise of Stanford University.

Among other questions, participants in the dialogue considered the value of interdisciplinary collaboration between the arts and humanities and the social and natural sciences.

Ongoing Series

The Future of Energy

The Future of Energy is an ongoing lecture series focused on finding secure, safe, and reliable sources of energy to power world economic growth. The spring series opened with Aubrey McClendon, chairman and CEO of Chesapeake Energy.

McClendon championed the potential of natural gas as a major source of clean energy for the U.S., arguing that the combination of abundant reserves and improved extraction techniques puts the domestic supply of natural gas on par with Saudi Arabian oil reserves. The Center also hosted David MacKay, chief scientific advisor to the Department of Energy and Climate Change in the UK. MacKay addressed the limitations of solar and wind power, and suggested that renewable energy sources alone cannot adequately replace conventional fossil fuels in meeting the world’s energy demands. Returning the focus to domestic energy consumption, Kristina Johnson, U.S. Under Secretary of Energy, detailed the steps needed to accomplish the ambitious goal of reducing fossil fuel use from 80 percent to 20 percent of U.S. energy use by the year 2050. The final lecture was delivered by Marvin Odum, President of Shell Oil. Odum echoed MacKay’s view that it will take a mix of sources to meet future energy demands, emphasizing that renewable sources will

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supplement—but not supplant—fossil fuels. The Future of Energy lecture series is made possible with generous support from Bank of America. Lectures can be viewed online anytime at http://www. environment.harvard.edu/events/video.

Pu b l i c a t i o n N o t e s p r i n g / s u m m e r

2 0 1 0

The Harvard University Center for the Environment (HUCE) encourages research and education about the environment and its many interactions with human society. By connecting scholars and practitioners from different disciplines, the Center seeks to raise the quality of environmental research at Harvard and beyond.

Environment @ Harvard is a publication of the Center for the Environment Daniel P. Schrag, Director James I. Clem, Managing Director Jenn Goodman, Communications Coordinator Jennifer Carling, Designer All portraits by Claudio Cambon unless otherwise noted.

Harvard University Center for the Environment 24 Oxford Street Cambridge, MA 02138 www.environment.harvard.edu

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Spring/Summer 2010

Biodiversity, Ecology, and Global Change

Each semester, the Biodiversity lecture series brings top scholars in the fields of biology and ecology to Harvard. In addition to giving their main presentations, speakers join students in the Harvard Ecology Journal Club for an informal lunch. This spring, the Center hosted visits from Stephen Long, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Bryan Grenfell, Princeton University; Mercedes Pascual, University of Michigan; and Mary Power, University of California-Berkeley. Video of their presentations, as well as past lectures from this series, is available for viewing online at http://www.environment.harvard.edu/ events/video. Biodiversity, Ecology and Global Change is generously supported by Bank of America.

Science & Democracy Lecture Series

On April 1, Arundhati Roy delivered her lecture, “Can We Leave the Bauxite in the Mountain? Field Notes on Democracy,” to a packed house at the Graduate School of Design.

The Center co-sponsors this popular lecture series with the Program on Science, Technology, and Society.

Upcoming Events Quantum Effects in Biological Systems June 17-20, 2010

Organized by Alán AspuruGuzik (Dept. of Chemistry

Co m m e n t s Do you have a comment you’d like to share? Send your thoughts to the Center for the Environment at huce@environment.harvard.edu, and let us know if you’d like to continue receiving this newsletter.

and Chemical Biology) and co-sponsored

by HUCE, this three-day workshop will focus on the discussion of non-trivial quantum phenomena in biological systems. The interdisciplinary nature of the program will bring together experts in chemical physics, biology, physics, and quantum information. For more information, visit http://quebs2010.wordpress. com.

Frontiers of Renewable Energy Sciences and Technologies (F.O.R.E.S.T) September 30–October 1, 2010

Organized by Shriram Ramanathan (SEAS) with lead sponsorship by HUCE, the workshop seeks to explore scientific frontiers in pure and applied sciences and device engineering in areas potentially connected to energy technologies. A poster session for students and post-docs will follow the presentations on September 30. Early registration is recommended; for more information, visit http://www.energy.harvard. edu/events/forest.