Cities have faced traditional challenges like congestion, pollution, and safety for decades, and most have a plan to combat them. Meanwhile, cyberattacks, climate change, and natural disasters are new threats currently mounting, which require new approaches and an expanded range of technologies to create true strategy shifts. Digital twins & urban modeling, resilient cities, circular cities, micro-mobility, and smart spaces have been identified as those shifts poised to make smart cities even smarter.
During the winter of 2018-2019, one million tons of salt were applied to icy roads in the state of Pennsylvania alone. The salt from industrial uses like this often ends up in freshwater rivers, making their water undrinkable and contributing to a growing global crisis. How can we better protect these precious natural resources? Physical organic chemist Tina Arrowood shares a three-step plan to keep salt out of rivers – and create a circular salt economy that turns industrial byproducts into valuable resources.
This lab is planning to test the world’s first solar geoengineering experiment in the field. Here’s why that’s so controversial.
Solar geoengineering, an idea that picked up steam over a decade ago when a Nobel Prize winning scientist called for more research on this climate engineering intervention, is back in the news. The idea made it into the 2019 UN Environment Assembly agenda and was used to kickstart a global conversation surrounding the contentious response to the climate crisis.
With growing urgency and scientific interest, a team at Harvard University took up the charge to investigate solar geoengineering in a fully fledged research program.
Solar geoengineering involves a plan that would disperse particles into the stratosphere and could ultimately reduce global temperatures by bouncing the Sun’s rays back into space.
However, this type of geoengineering intervention would not fix the root cause, which is the rising funnel of greenhouse gas emissions that are getting trapped in our atmosphere.
