With images still fresh of seawater lapping at Lower Manhattan and a destroyed Jersey Shore, the timing seems imperative for the launch last month of an $11.9 million, international research effort on climate change, centered at Penn State.
Klaus Keller, a Penn State professor who heads the new Sustainable Climate Risk Management initiative (SCRiM) says the funding from the National Science Foundation will support a five-year project to study the science, economics and ethics of various approaches to managing climate change.
Proposed strategies all have profound implications, he says. For example, adaptation could involve making New York City more resilient with massive infrastructure investments, mitigation could involve slowing carbon dioxide emissions with worldwide restrictions on fossil fuels, and geoengineering could involve massive interventions such as removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere or causing the Earth to absorb less solar radiation.
Each is subject to unintended consequences and considerable trade-offs. “Proposed approaches to the management of climate-related risks through adaptation, mitigation, and geoengineering differ in their distributions of costs and benefits, and their vulnerability to deep uncertainties,” Keller says.
In recognition of the complex nature of its task, SCRiM is a collaboration of 19 universities and five research institutions in six nations, transcending traditional boundaries among academic disciplines as well as among academia, industry, government and non-governmental organizations. “This is not just ivory tower research,” says Keller.
To support the work at Penn State, SCRiM has five or more highly skilled positions to fill, including postdoctoral researchers, graduate research assistantships and a scientific programmer.
Source: Klaus Keller, Sustainable Climate Risk Management, Penn State
Writer: Elise Vider