National Aeronautics and Space Administration

How Will Next Generation Technology Affect Climate Talks?

About the Talk Heading out of COP27 in Egypt and into COP28 in UAE, climate talks have been underway for a generation. There have been breakthroughs along the way that are mostly diplomatic. As we take stock and look ahead, there are potential positive technological disruptions on the horizon. Inventories, models, and mitigation are being enhanced using machine learning and artificial intelligence. And new satellites are poised to provide unprecedented detection and attribution of super emitters and other sources of greenhouse gases. Emerging initiatives and partnerships through groups like Climate TRACE, Carbon Mapper, Watt Time, and RMI offer growing opportunities to make emissions data actionable and accessible - opportunities that NASA CMS' community of carbon scientists and stakeholders can partake in. Together, collaborating on future breakthroughs can provide new climate intelligence and actionable insights in this decisive decade.

About the Speakers Deborah Gordon is a senior principal in RMI's Climate Intelligence Program, where she co-leads the Oil and Gas Solutions Initiative. She serves as a senior fellow at the Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs at Brown University and is an affiliate at the Brown Climate Solutions Lab. Her research spearheaded the development of the Oil Climate Index plus Gas (OCI+), a first-of- its-kind analytic tool that compares the life-cycle climate impact of global oil and gas resources. The OCI+ is the topic of Gordon's new book, No Standard Oil (Oxford University Press, 2022). Gordon is trained as a chemical engineer and policy analyst. She has spent her career working on energy and climate change in all sectors-private, public, non-profit, and academic. Gordon is a stakeholder in NASA's Carbon Monitoring System. Mackenzie Huffman is Director for Strategy and Partnerships for Carbon Mapper, responsible for advancing opportunities that maximize impact and build meaningful partnerships. Prior to joining Carbon Mapper, she was Vice President for Sustainability at JPMorgan Chase, where she worked to develop and advance the firm's climate and sustainability strategy. There she led the firm's climate and resilience grantmaking and reporting, monitored industry and policy trends, and led stakeholder engagement on climate policy, risk and opportunities. Mackenzie also previously served as Deputy Chief of Staff at the White House Council on Environmental Quality and in several roles at the Department of Energy where she focused on policies related to climate, energy, finance, environment, and climate resilience. Lekha Sridhar is a Senior Policy Analyst at WattTime, a clean energy non-profit based in Oakland, CA, and manages partnerships and collaborations for the Climate TRACE coalition. Prior to WattTime, she was a policy advisor to the UN Environment Programme and the Government of India on strategies for incentivizing sustainable cooling and was an environmental litigation attorney in India. She has a Master of Public Policy from the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford.

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