Colloquium: Prof. Noelle Eckley Selin
Tuesday, 13th November 2018, at 17.15 - 18.30
ETH Zurich, UNO B 11, Universitätstrasse 41
Linking Science and Policy Analysis to Address Climate Change and Air Pollution
Air pollution and climate change are two large-scale, global challenges. To better inform efforts to address them in the context of sustainable development, we need to understand how policies to address emissions translate into societal benefits. In this talk, I summarize work from my research group understanding the pathway from policies to their impacts and feedbacks. Examples include assessing the air pollution and related health impacts of proposed regulations to address climate change in the U.S. and China, and quantifying the domestic and international benefits of mercury reduction policies in China, India, and the U.S. Effectively informing decision-making, however, also requires engaging with decision-makers; I describe ways in which we have incorporated stakeholder perspectives in our research, and examine how these efforts have influenced the impact of this research on policy.
About Prof. Noelle Eckley Selin
Noelle Eckley Selin is Associate Professor in the Institute for Data, Systems and Society and the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is also Director of MIT's Technology and Policy Program. Her research uses atmospheric chemistry modeling to inform decision-making on air pollution, climate change and hazardous substances such as mercury and persistent organic pollutants (POPs). She received her PhD from Harvard University in Earth and Planetary Sciences as part of the Atmospheric Chemistry Modeling Group. Her M.A. (Earth and Planetary Sciences) and B.A. (Environmental Science and Public Policy) are also from Harvard University. Before joining the MIT faculty, she was a research scientist with the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change. She has published 70+ articles in the peer-reviewed literature, addressing atmospheric chemistry, air pollution, and interactions between science and policy in international environmental negotiations. Her articles were selected as the best environmental policy papers in 2015 and 2016 by the journal Environmental Science & Technology. She is the recipient of a U.S. National Science Foundation CAREER award (2011), a Leopold Leadership fellow (2013-2014), Kavli fellow (2015), a member of the Global Young Academy (2014-2018), an American Association for the Advancement of Science Leshner Leadership Institute Fellow (2016-2017), and a Hans Fischer Senior Fellow at the Technical University of Munich Institute for Advanced Study (2018-2021).
You can read a Summary of the talk on ISTP News.