CONSTRUCTING COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY'S CLIMATE TASK FORCE.

• Author: Halliday, Alex

Journal of International Affairs (JIA): You are a scientist with over 400 published research papers. But you are also involved in a lot of different efforts that are not necessarily explicitly tied to science. How do you simplify your technical knowledge to reach the layperson, especially when it comes to climate change?

Alex Halliday (AH): My background is very broad scientifically; even though I'm a geoscientist, I have ended up working on things as different as mineral deposits, the origin of the earth, planets, and the moon, research on the oceans and air circulation, and studies of volcanoes. Most recently, we have been involved in work on cancer, on pollution and on human nutrition. Much of this is because my work builds upon technical innovations in isotope geochemistry, specifically mass spectrometry. The applications of those techniques can be diverse.

That variety is actually very helpful. When you develop new laboratory techniques and apply them in different ways, you start thinking about opportunities they afford where their usage might benefit society. For example, this has allowed me most recently to use new isotopic techniques for measuring tungsten to study the formation of Earth's core, but also the modern oceans. Similarly, we have been studying zinc isotopes on the Moon, but also in pancreatic and breast cancer.

When I was the dean of science and engineering at Oxford, my focus had to be even broader. I realized was that we needed to work together across the university in order to more effectively engage on the issues of climate change and energy. We also needed to work on things like biodiversity, water, and so on. So I proposed that we establish the Oxford Networks for the Environment or ONE, (i) which got the university working across these issues. We realized how powerful this was when we discovered that we had 200 research groups across Oxford University working on energy; something we had not appreciated before. So there was far greater strength within the university to do things than had been jointly harnessed.

When I worked with the Royal Society, I also held discussions about energy related issues and climate. We provided advice to government on certain policies, including negative emissions and carbon capture and use. I found that this breadth of my past work has meant I can engage with many different communities here at Columbia.

To make progress on issues like climate it is necessary to also engage with the public, politicians, businesses, and local stakeholders. Much of my focus has been on asking how to get the broader public engaged in what we are interested in and what we think is important. In reality of course it is a two way thing where as academics we ourselves can learn so much from engaging and listening.

There are both complications and tricks associated with this. One is that to make discoveries, scientists...