Addressing Climate Change, Boosting Environmental Resilience, and Advancing Clean Energy

How can applied mathematics and computational science boost environmental resilience, drive clean energy innovation, and advance society’s understanding of climate change and its impact on humans? These questions were at the heart of a series of meetings of the SIAM Climate Task Force, which was established by SIAM's Committee on Science Policy (CSP). The goal of the task force was to create a report with guidelines for Congress and U.S. federal agencies that details the ways in which applied mathematics and computational science can positively impact climate science and mitigate the effects of climate change. The final report, which the task force submitted to the CSP in August 2021, contains findings and recommendations in the following four broad categories.

Climate and Earth System Prediction 

This topic includes the following subsets:

• Modeling, simulation, and optimization techniques
• Improved computational capabilities 
• Innovation that is rooted in basic research, such as the development of statistical methods and computational algorithms for monumental volumes of diverse environmental data 
• Support for research in areas like dynamical systems, optimization, and stochastic modeling to comprehend levels of possible prediction, characterize uncertainty, and improve forecasting capabilities. 

The objective is to create robust models that help scientists understand climate change’s impact on all forms of human activity, including agriculture and cities (see Figure 1). This research is inherently multidisciplinary and calls for interdisciplinary collaborations between the fields of mathematics, computational science, atmospheric and oceanic sciences, geosciences, social sciences, biology, and agricultural sciences.

Resilient Communities and Environmental Justice

Applied mathematics and computational science provide researchers with the tools to explore and evaluate scenarios to ultimately protect communities and critical infrastructure from extreme events, such as sustained periods of drought, shifting precipitation patterns, and rising ocean levels. Equally important is the use of these tools to implement and inform more equitable decision-making techniques that address existing economic and racial disparities and ensure that the impacts of climate change do not disproportionately affect communities that are already marginalized.

Algorithm and model development, data analysis, and computational simulation enable evidence-based choices despite the future’s uncertainty. Applied mathematics and computational science can help society better understand the many consequences of climate change, including various community-level impacts, socio-economic effects, and regional and global conflicts and migration patterns. To fully appreciate these complex interactions, one must establish collaborative research connections among mathematicians and social scientists, reach out to community stakeholders, and build networks with agencies that have not traditionally supported mathematical research, like the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Environmental Protection Agency.

Clean Energy Innovation

Efforts to accelerate energy innovation to reduce emissions—which are of tremendous interest across the federal government—must incorporate contributions from applied mathematics and computational science. Intersections with energy production and use fall in two different contexts. The first is the reliable, resilient, and economic planning and operation of the future grid, including the integration of renewables. This effort will decarbonize our power delivery system and make it stronger, more flexible, and more secure. The second intersection pertains to the key role of applied mathematics and computational science in the development of new technologies, such as the optimization of materials for batteries and hydrogen storage, the design and placement of offshore wind, and the transformation of transportation. We can leverage the Exascale Computing Project and build new partnerships through the Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing program to drive the innovation of clean energy.

Workforce Development

A prerequisite of the previous three recommendations is the existence of a mathematically-trained, multidisciplinary workforce. In order to address the complex challenges of climate change, instructors need to prepare applied mathematics and computational science students to work effectively on diverse, multidisciplinary, and convergent teams that include social scientists. The climate workforce of the future must possess skills in robust mathematics; computational science; statistics; and other science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) areas to innovate and address climate issues. It is therefore important for society to continue and grow federal investments that support mathematics, computational science, and interdisciplinary STEM education.

The SIAM Climate Task Force’s report contains recommendations for the current administration, Congress, and federal research agencies like the National Science Foundation, Department of Energy, Department of Agriculture, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Department of Transportation, National Institutes of Health, Department of Defense, and other institutions that address climate and energy research. A recurring recommendation in the report is the establishment of cross-agency coordination to address the numerous challenges that are associated with climate change.

This report comes at a critical time, as it coincides with increased coverage of climate change in the press and the release of the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) [1]. Many of the task force’s recommendations align with the IPCC report.

Acknowledgments: The SIAM Climate Task Force was assisted by Eliana Perlmutter of Lewis-Burke Associates LLC, SIAM’s liaison in Washington, D.C.

References

[1] Masson-Delmotte, V., Zhai, P., Pirani, A., Connors, S.L., Péan, C., Berger, S., …, Zhou, B. (Eds.). (2021). Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press. In press.