Yale has awarded more than $1.5 million in Planetary Solutions Project Seed Grants to 23 projects across campus that are working to address climate change, biodiversity, and related health and justice issues.
The grants focus on an interdisciplinary, diverse group of projects such as measuring air pollution exposure at the neighborhood level, detecting the warning signs of animal disease from space, lowering atmospheric methane through bacteria respiration, and developing a membrane to capture carbon from surface water.
“Yale’s leadership in understanding and helping address environmental challenges goes back over 120 years to the founding of our School of the Environment [then known as the Yale Forest School],” said Yale Provost Scott Strobel. “Due in part to the school’s efficacy, people across the university now search for environmental solutions, from the health sciences to the arts and humanities, to social and natural sciences. And alumni are giving generously to amplify our efforts.”
The grants are supported by the Climate Impact Innovation Fund (launched in 2022 with a $15 million donation), the Gordon Data and Environmental Sciences Research Grants, the Science Catalyst Fund for Planetary Solutions, and the university.
This is the second round of seed grants announced since the creation of Yale’s Planetary Solutions Project, whose mission is to accelerate and support the university’s commitment to find practical, innovative ways to mitigate, adapt, and engage on the global climate and biodiversity crises. The Planetary Solutions Project will present a “Spring Showcase” featuring presentations from many of the 2022 seed grant awardees at 12:30 p.m. May 8 in the Humanities Quadrangle.
Like last year’s grant recipients, this year’s projects represent a range of departments and programs within Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences and its graduate and professional schools.
“These teams are finding partners across and beyond the university, and exploring surprising, creative solutions to our most challenging global environmental problems,” said Casey R. Pickett, director of the Planetary Solutions Project. “We are also grateful to the faculty who gave their time to review the remarkable proposals we received.”
An 18-member committee comprised of faculty and staff with related expertise read and responded to each of the proposals. All applications were reviewed by relevant subject matter experts, faculty members from related fields, and cross-disciplinary readers. In selecting the recipients, emphasis was also placed on supporting early career researchers and a diversity of perspectives.
Several of the awarded projects examine the relationship between climate change and human health. One project, for example, focuses on the connection between air pollution and cardiovascular health; another will offer an urban planning model for addressing excessive heat in city neighborhoods.
Other projects will explore drought resilience mechanisms in ancient Egyptian wheat; determine whether it is possible to detect the presence of animal diseases from space; and advance the study of electrocatalytic dehalogenation, a potential renewable energy-powered process for decontaminating water. There are also projects devoted to carbon capture, climate policy, and remote sensor technology.
Meanwhile, the projects receiving seed grants a year ago continue to make progress, Pickett said.
For example, an effort to develop a reform agenda for the World Trade Organization to bring global trade policy in line with the climate goals of the Paris Agreement has commissioned a first round of white papers and held a workshop series that brought together dozens of climate and trade experts.
For another project, investigators conducted some of the vital research needed to develop more effective catalysts for the conversion of carbon dioxide into useful industrial chemicals. A third project used seed grant funds to build an innovative accounting tool for greenhouse gas emissions in the health care sector.
“The climate is in crisis,” Strobel said. “We are losing species faster than at any period in human history. These are the challenges of our time. In partnership with people around the world, the Yale community is rising to meet them.”
