Distinguished Lecture Series | Dr. Nathan Hultman | Raising Climate Ambition in 2022 to Keep 1.5°C Within Reach

Tue, February 8, 2022 2:00 PM at Virtual

Join us for the next session of the Michigan State University Environmental Science and Policy Program Distinguished Lecture Series on Tuesday, February 8, 2022, at 2:00 PM as we welcome Dr. Nathan Hultman for a presentation entitled "Raising climate ambition in 2022 to keep 1.5ºC within reach."

Abstract

The science is clear: climate change presents an immediate and alarming planetary threat, and we are called across all of society to respond. To do so will require policy and societal structures to accelerate and manage a rapid, large scale, and equitable economic transition at a scale never before seen. Success will require integrating political vision and action with analytically informed strategies to achieve rapid reductions in emissions while also delivering on broader economic, equity, and sustainability goals. To this end, the Paris Agreement of 2015 set in motion a process in which countries regularly evaluate and set goals for climate action. Such targets can catalyze a national assessment of potential policy actions at national and subnational levels, supported by actions across all of society. Yet the most recent set of targets, while improved, do not reflect full ambition across all major economies, and moreover in aggregate fall well short of the required emissions reductions needed to keep safer levels of global warming of 1.5°C within reach. The Glasgow climate negotiations recently agreed that countries and other actors should revisit these targets in 2022, and full engagement by our governments, universities, and stakeholders will be critical to reset national targets to sufficiently high levels.  

Bio

Nate Hultman is the Founder and Director of the University of Maryland Center for Global Sustainability, and Professor in the School of Public Policy. Prof. Hultman’s work focuses on assessing and developing ambitious national climate strategies. This includes U.S. emissions mitigation policy, rapid coal phaseout strategies in diverse national contexts, and economy-wide strategies in other major economies, with a focus on China and others. He was lead author of several recent assessments of U.S. national climate strategies in advance of the announcement of the U.S. 2030 climate target (NDC). From 2021 to early 2022 he was Senior Advisor in the Office of the Special Presidential Envoy for Climate at the U.S. Department of State, where he contributed as the lead author of the 2021 U.S. Long Term Strategy and was a member of the negotiating team for the U.S.-China Joint Glasgow Declaration at COP26. From 2014-2016, Hultman worked at the White House on the Obama Administration’s climate and energy policy team. During this time, he helped develop the U.S. 2025 NDC, worked on bilateral engagements with China, India, Brazil and others, and participated in the international climate negotiations in Paris. He has participated in the UN climate process for nearly 25 years. Hultman is also a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and associate director of the Joint Global Change Research Institute, a collaboration between the University of Maryland and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. He was formerly a visiting fellow at the University of Oxford and a Fulbright fellow. He holds an M.S. and Ph.D. in Energy & Resources from the University of California, Berkeley, and a B.A. in Physics from Carleton College.

Please register in advance for this session at https://tinyurl.com/ESPP-HULTMAN