RCEI Newsletter

December 2024

Issue 3

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With 2024 on pace to be the hottest year on record according to the National Centers for Environmental Information, the urgency of our work here at the Rutgers Climate and Energy Institute has never been more apparent. Here in New Jersey, we have seen record low precipitation for October. Coupled with the third driest September on record, this lack of rainfall has resulted in the driest of any pairing of consecutive months on record according to RCEI affiliate and New Jersey State Climatologist, Dr. David Robinson. Many of us have been experiencing the smoke of the more than 500 wildfires that have burned throughout New Jersey between October 1st and mid-November. As we become more accustomed to these realities of living with climate change, I am at the same time heartened by the dedication and persistence of the RCEI faculty, staff, and students whose scholarship on climate change is inspiring. Together RCEI scholars are making real progress in unraveling the complexities of our climate system, accurately forecasting the social and ecological impacts of climate change, innovating solutions to prevent and mitigate its impacts, and providing actionable information to reduce the release of greenhouse gases into our atmosphere. I hope you, like me, will be inspired by their work, some of which has been highlighted here in our Fall 2024 newsletter.

There is so much more you can learn at our website: https://rcei.rutgers.edu/. Thank you for your continued support of the Rutgers Climate and Energy Institute, and we look forward to seeing or working with you soon.  

Julie Lockwood

RCEI Director

Signals – Climate Change for Understanding and Action was the theme of our 2024 Rutgers Climate Symposium held on November 13^th at Rutgers -New Brunswick campus. Rutgers has held a climate symposium since 2006. Researchers, faculty, and student scholars from academic and research institutions across the Mid-Atlantic came together to foster collaboration among the climate change and energy research community in our region.

Top Image from left to right: RCEI Director Julie Lockwood; Invited Speakers Katherine Blunt, Benjamin Santer, and William Hallman; RCEI’s Marjorie Kaplan and Oliver Stringham. Bottom Left Image: Presenters and attendees engage in conversation at the Symposium Poster Session. Bottom Right Image: Attendees listening to plenary talks during the Symposium

Denise Hien, Senior Vice Provost for Research, Rutgers University - New Brunswick welcomed the 200 attendees as well as those watching via livestream noting, “climate change affects all sectors of society” and at Rutgers, we are “bridging our research and education across subjects and sectors for addressing these wicked problems.” 

“This year’s theme is a way to explore the signs we can take from the climate system, from energy systems, from traditional knowledge, and from the ways in which we communicate about climate change to help us better tackle it,” explained RCEI Director Julie Lockwood.

Experts featured during the morning plenary who spoke to these signals included:  Katherine Blunt, Author and Journalist; William Hallman, Distinguished Professor of Human Ecology, Rutgers University; Benjamin Santer, Atmospheric Scientist, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute & University of California at Los Angeles; and Julia Watson, Landscape Designer, Julia Watson LLC & Lo-TEK Institute.

As one graduate student noted, “The RCEI Symposium provided me with the ability to meet potential collaborators across other disciplines who I wouldn’t have met otherwise.”

RCEI’s annual climate symposium is an event that is free to attendees and supported in part by the Frank Sposato Memorial Endowment. Recordings of the presentations as well the Poster Session abstracts, and PDFs of the posters can be found here.

Representatives from 18 nations gathered at Rutgers University-New Brunswick for a global conference on wind energy from October 30th to November 1st, which featured leading research on topics ranging from climate change to turbine design. During the North American Wind Energy Academy/WindTech 2024 Conference held at Rutgers-New Brunswick, researchers attended briefings on the latest in wind energy, as well as a host of hands-on workshops where, in some, they learned and interacted with the software tools used for research.



“You are here because you are the scientists, engineers, policymakers, industry leaders, students and scholars who are leading the future of wind energy,” said Rutgers-New Brunswick Chancellor Francine Conway, welcoming the more than 360 participants.  Conway highlighted state leadership in offshore wind development. Gov. Phil Murphy has set a goal for New Jersey to generate 11 gigawatts of electricity from offshore wind energy by 2040.

In her keynote address, Christine Guhl-Sadovy, the president of the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities, called offshore wind “a pillar of the Murphy administration’s economic and policy agenda.” Guhl-Sadovy outlined the investments made by the board and other state agencies to capitalize on what she described as “a once-in-a-generation opportunity for offshore wind.”

Tim Sullivan, the chief executive of the New Jersey Economic Development Authority, addressed the economic benefits of offshore wind, emphasizing there is “no bigger net new job creation opportunity.” Recognizing that “capitalizing on opportunities requires things that haven’t happened yet,” Sullivan said, “I’m counting on science, research and development to make sure we catch up.”

RCEI affiliate, Onur Bilgen, a Rutgers professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering who served as the general chair of the conference, said New Jersey state and Rutgers University support for the offshore wind field has helped drive its advance. The state’s potential as an important center for wind energy research has also drawn attention to the region from stakeholders in the U.S. and in other nations.

Bilgen specifically credited Murphy’s and Rutgers’ commitments to offshore wind as a key factor in the selection of Rutgers-New Brunswick and the New Jersey Academic Alliance for Offshore Wind to host the 2024 conference. Bilgen co-leads the Rutgers Wind Energy Test Center, a signature initiative of RCEI.

Summer School in Sustainability Governance students at Rutgers, August 2024.

Rutgers hosted the first ever Summer School in Sustainability Governance, led by RCEI Affiliates Pam McElwee and Rachael Shwom of Rutgers Department of Human Ecology as part of the RCEI signature initiative to build a Center for Sustainability and Governance in the Anthropocene (C-SAGA). Twenty-nine attendees from Rutgers plus 19 other institutions across the US, Canada, Brazil, the Netherlands, and the UK came together to learn about governance issues, strengthen research capacities across a range of skills, and build a cohort of like-minded scholars. The students represented a wide range of social science disciplines (anthropology, economics/finance, geography, sociology, education, health sciences, political science, public policy and administration, environmental management, and global affairs) and the natural sciences (ecology and evolution, plant biology, marine affairs and biology). About half were early Ph.D. students in their first years of graduate school and the rest were late Ph.D. or postdocs. 

Students heard from a range of Rutgers speakers, including RCEI Affiliates Atif Akin,  Marjorie Kaplan, Lucas Marxen, Janice McDonnell, Cymie Payne, and Tom Rudel, alongside a keynote from Yukyan Lam of the New School. The attendees also formed working groups on food systems, climate, biodiversity/socio-ecological systems, marine and coastal areas and energy systems to practice building conceptual models and thinking creatively about filling existing governance gaps.

As one student said afterwards, “I know I speak for everyone when I say the discussions, insightful guest speakers, and opportunities for relationship-building were truly invaluable. Personally, I went into the program feeling uncertain about how to leverage my diverse interests and skills in a way that could meaningfully impact environmental justice and governance. After hearing from so many interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary speakers, I’ve been able to reframe my research and career interests with much greater confidence, new ideas, and a renewed level of motivation.”

Funding for the summer school was generously provided by the National Science Foundation, RCEI, Rutgers Global, School of Environmental and Biological Sciences Global, and the Department of Human Ecology.

The RCEI Student Support Program enables graduate students to develop, conduct, and collaborate on climate and renewable energy scholarship and translate their research into real-world impacts. The support we provide from RCEI often is a ‘game changer’ for these students providing them a chance to showcase their scholarship and establish professional connections that will contribute to their success once they have completed their education at Rutgers University. Meet some of our most recent awardees and see the inspiring work these funds support.

Feng Ye, a Ph.D. Candidate in Industrial and Systems Engineering, traveled to Montreal, Canada to present his research on improving wind energy forecasting accuracy at the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers (IISE) annual conference.

Kristi Wiedemann, a Ph.D. Candidate at the Bloustein School of Planning & Public Policy, traveled to central New York to conduct interviews of farmers who practice ‘carbon farming’; a process that sequesters carbon through managed or rotational grazing that can help to mitigate climate change.

Mercer White, a Ph.D. Candidate in Chemistry and Chemical Biology, traveled to the Organometallic Chemistry Gordon Research Conference held in Newport, Rhode Island. Mercer presented his research on harnessing renewable energy to complete the chemical reduction of carbonyls into alcohols, a process that currently relies on hazardous or dangerous chemicals to complete.

Amara Qureshi, Ph.D. Candidate in Microbiology, studies how soil type and location affect Acidobacteriota, a key but poorly understood bacterial group in soils, to better understand their role in nutrient and carbon cycling and ecosystem stability. Amara presented her work at the American Society for Microbiology Conference held in Atlanta, Georgia.

You can read more about these and other students’ experiences here.