Cambridge Zero Research Symposia
Michaelmas Term 2021
During the Michaelmas Term of 2021, Cambridge Zero organised a second series of Virtual Research Symposia, to highlight all the exciting and ground-breaking research on climate change, net-zero and zero-carbon solutions happening across the University of Cambridge. The aim of these events was to help build and strengthen our internal Cambridge Zero research community, and to encourage new connections and collaborations. This term in particular, we also wanted to highlight important Cambridge research contributions in the run-up to the COP26 UN Climate Summit in November 2021.
The Symposia took place on Wednesday afternoons throughout the term, with each week focused on a different theme, as detailed in the programme below.
Each symposium featured a number of keynote presentations from senior Cambridge academics, and we invited submissions from Early Career Researchers to present their research in a series of 10 minute presentations followed by a short Q&A.
Cambridge Zero Research Symposia - Michaelmas 2021 Programme
Wednesday 6th October, 15.00 – 17.15: Climate Science - in collaboration with Cambridge Centre for Climate Science
Keynote Speakers:
- Prof Eric Wolff, "What can the past tell us about future ice sheet loss and sea level rise?"
- Dr Alex Archibald, "Climate models and their use in solutions to the climate crisis"
- Dr Alison Ming, "When the heart of the stratosphere skips a beat"
- Dr Emma Boland, "The impact of aerosol forcing strength on ocean heat uptake"
Early Career Researcher Presentations:
- Emma Xiaoqing Chen, "Time-lapse volumetric seismic imaging of water masses at a major oceanic front"
- Sam Lewin, "Improving models of ocean turbulence with data-driven methods"
- Arianna Cox, "Methane removal using photocatalysis"
Read the summary Blog Post of this symposium
Wednesday 13th October, 15.00 – 17.15: Adaptation & Resilience [Recording Available]
Keynote Speakers:
- Prof Shailaja Fennell, "Working with communities to understand and design place-specific principles of adaptation and resilience"
- Prof Richard Fenner, "The multiple benefits of climate adaptation (in the water sector)"
- Dr Kristen MacAskill, "Resilience Engineered: getting everyone on board with the key concepts"
- Prof Abir Al-Tabbaa, "Living Infrastructure"
Early Career Researcher Presentations:
- Dr Tim Summers, "Localised economic impacts from high temperature disruption days under climate change"
- Dr Sripriya Rengaraju, "Low carbon cements for sustainable infrastructure"
- Dr Lucrezia Nava, "The grasshopper and the ant: explaining the variation in organisational adaptive responses to climate change"
- Gabriele Milone, "Self-sensing skins for infrastructure"
Watch the recording of this symposium
Wednesday 20th October, 15.00 – 17.15: Law & Policy [Recording Available] - in collaboration with Cambridge Global Food Security
Keynote Speakers:
- Dr Cristina Peñasco, "About the outcomes and trade-offs of policy instruments for a net zero future"
- Dr Markus Gehring, "From Paris Agreement Implementation to Border Carbon Adjustments – New Approaches to Trade and Climate Change Law"
- Dr Surabhi Ranganathan, "A Law of the Sea for the Anthropocene: From Fixing to Unmaking?"
- Prof Cristiane Derani, "Plastic waste throughout the global food system: challenging law and policy"
Early Career Researcher Presentations:
- Dr Christopher Campbell-Duruflé, "The Canadian Net-Zero Emissions Accountability Act: Bringing the Paris Agreement Home?"
- Dr Natalie Jones, "Addressing Fossil Fuel Production in National Reporting Under the Paris Agreement"
- Nopparuj Chindasombatcharoen, "Operations, technology adoption and behavioural economics perspectives in industrial policy implementation and the role of technology transfer on adoption of sustainable agricultural technologies and practices"
Watch the recording of this symposium
Wednesday 3rd November, 15.00 – 17.15: Mitigation [Recording Available]
Keynote Speakers:
- Dr James Woodcock, “Moving to Zero Carbon Transport”
- Prof Ian Parry, "High resolution thermal infrared space telescopes for climate change mitigation"
- Dr Jonathan Cullen, "Demand reduction: the missing mitigation strategy"
Early Career Researcher Presentations:
- Dr Alan Bowman, "The maximum efficiency of the next generation of solar panels"
- Emily Bugden, "Benchmarking the Benchmarkers"
- Dr Christos Vlachakis, "Mitigating carbon emissions by 3D printing alternative cements"
Watch the recording of this symposium
Wednesday 10th November, 15.00 – 17.15: Nature & Biodiversity [Recording Available] - in collaboration with Conservation Research Institute
Keynote Speakers:
- Dr Adam Pellegrini, "Fire as a fundamental ecological process and mitigation pathway"
- Dr Emily Lines, "Predicting the future of forests"
Early Career Researcher Presentations:
- Dr Coline Jaworski, "Exploring the wider environmental benefits of regenerative agriculture"
- Dr Andrew Bladon, "Testing reserve-scale mitigation for invertebrates in a changing climate"
- Alejandro Guizar Coutiño, "REDD+ works where it matters most"
- Rogelio Luque Lora, "Nature-based solutions for climate, people and biodiversity: a briefing paper for COP26"
Watch the recording of this symposium
Wednesday 17th November, 15.00 – 17.15: AI & Sustainability [Recording Available]
Keynote Speakers:
- Prof Markus Kraft, "Intelligent Decarbonisation and The World Avatar Project"
- Prof Srinivasan Keshav, "Climate, Carbon, and Computer Science"
- Prof Jennifer Gabrys, "AI for Earth: Investigating the Social Consequences of Environmental Technologies"
Early Career Researcher Presentations:
- Yen-Fang Su, "AI-enabled sensing technology for sustainable infrastructures"
- Scott Jeen, "Reinforcement Learning for Energy Efficient Control"
- Joycelyn Longdon, "Monitoring Ghanaian Forests with Machine Learning, Bioacoustics and Indigenous Knowledge"
- Simon Thomas, "Defining Southern Ocean fronts using unsupervised classification"
Watch the recording of this symposium
Wednesday 24th November, 15.00 – 17.00: Hard-to-abate Sectors [Recording Available]
Keynote Speakers:
- Prof Simone Hochgreb, "How to burn towards net-zero"
- Prof Rob Miller, "Aviation Impact Accelerator: an academic-industry collaboration to accelerate aviation to climate neutrality"
- Dr Adrian Fisher, "Carbon Neutral Chemical Manufacturing"
Early Career Researcher Presentations:
- Stephen Lezak, "Does the World still need gold mining?"
- Soniya Gupta, "The Future is Remote: Social Impact of Telemedicine Business in Emerging Markets"
- George Hawkswell, "Using distributed propulsion to make future electric aircraft more efficient"
Watch the recording of this symposium
Wednesday 1st December, 10.00 – 12.30 GMT / 16.00 - 18.30 Dhaka Time: Working Globally [Recording Available]
Co-hosted with Cambridge Global Challenges (CGC), International Centre for Climate Change and Development (ICCCAD) and Least Developed Countries Universities Consortium on Climate Change (LUCCC)
Co-chairs:
- Prof Saleemul Huq (ICCCAD)
- Prof Alan Blackwell (CGC)
Keynote Speakers:
- Dr Ronita Bardhan (Cambridge), "Climate Adaptation & Urbanism"
- Prof Mizan Khan (ICCCAD), "Climate adaptation: background, current challenges and the role of University-generated knowledge"
- Dr David Mfitumukiza (LUCCC), "Climate Change Adaptation from Indigenous People and Local Communities (IPLCs) – preserving the knowledge and scaling up the global implementation of nature-based solutions"
Early Career Researcher Presentations:
- Maliha Masfiqua Malek (ICCCAD), "Trend and seasonal variations of sea level in the Bay of Bengal: An analysis of high-resolution coastal altimetry"
- Dr Rekha Bhangaonkar (Cambridge), "Irrigation management for building climate resilience: Lessons from dryland agriculture in India"
- Farah Anzum & Afsara Binte Mirza (ICCCAD), "Indigenous People and Local Communities (IPLCs) Nature-based Contributions in Ecosystem Conservation, Climate Change Adaptation, and Mitigation"
- Dr Ramit Debnath (Cambridge), "Contextualising climate and energy justice narratives: Evidence from computational social science"
- Savio Rousseau Rozario (ICCCAD), "Insights on land use, agriculture and food security in Bangladesh: Way forward with climate change and development"
- Qi Ruona (Cambridge), "Mongolian Traditional Ecological Knowledge and its Adaptation to Climate Change in China: A Cultural and Legal perspective"
Watch the recording of this symposium