SUNY ESF
Pathways to a Net-Zero Carbon Future

This proposal addresses the globally critical challenge of the climate-energy-land use nexus by integrating ESF's strengths in resource stewardship, sustainable energy, and landscape architecture to establish the College as a 21st century leader in sustainability science. 

Achieving a sustainable balance between society's energy demands and the greenhouse gas (GHG) reductions needed to stabilize Earth's climate poses a complex and dynamic challenge for scientists, practitioners, and policy-makers. Using resource inventories, simulation models, life- cycle and techno-economic analyses, among other tools, we can assess how our current land use practices and energy systems contribute to net GHG balance, and to quantify potential pathways to achieving policy and regulatory targets for net GHG emissions.

Yet these approaches, while powerful, do not fundamentally enable us to design or create landscapes that can follow such pathways, be resilient to change, and achieve our goals. Creating a net-zero carbon future requires we employ landscape design to identify optimal configurations of natural and built environments for their multiple benefits and values over time and space. Also, because some climate change is assured over the next century, a truly sustainable landscape design must be adaptive to forthcoming but uncertain shifts in climate. For instance, the potential to reduce net GHG emissions via improved stewardship of forests, farms, and wetlands will be shaped by feedbacks between climate and ecosystem functions. Moreover, most supply and demand aspects of renewable energy systems, such as wind, solar, hydropower and biomass, are sensitive to shifts in weather patterns and disturbance regimes.

Our ESF Discovery opportunity addresses the globally critical challenge of the climate-energy- land use nexus by integrating ESF's strengths in resource stewardship, sustainable energy, and landscape architecture, to establish the College as a 21st century leader in sustainability science. The intersections of these strengths and our commitment to engaging with stakeholders will foster transdisciplinary scholarship and service that can identify and advance practical solutions needed by planners, landowners, communities and policy-makers, from local to global scales.