{"id":55616,"date":"2015-03-23T12:00:57","date_gmt":"2015-03-23T12:00:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=55616"},"modified":"2015-05-05T21:25:55","modified_gmt":"2015-05-05T20:25:55","slug":"universities-and-the-challenge-of-climate-change","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2015\/03\/universities-and-the-challenge-of-climate-change\/","title":{"rendered":"Universities and the Challenge of Climate Change"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>March 17, 2015 &#8211; Tsinghua University Global Vision Lecture Series, Beijing, China <\/em><\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_55617\" style=\"width: 410px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/Harvard-President-Drew-Faust.jpg\" ><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-55617\" class=\"wp-image-55617\" src=\"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/Harvard-President-Drew-Faust.jpg\" alt=\"Harvard President Drew Faust delivers the Tsinghua Global Vision Lecture, &quot;Universities and the Challenge of Climate Change&quot; at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China.\" width=\"400\" height=\"267\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-55617\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Harvard President Drew Faust delivers the Tsinghua Global Vision Lecture, &#8220;Universities and the Challenge of Climate Change&#8221; at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China. Kris Snibbe\/Harvard Staff Photographer<\/p><\/div>\n<p>Party Secretary Chen Xu, Assistant President Shi Yigong, distinguished faculty, students and friends.\u00a0 It is a privilege to be back at Tsinghua, with an opportunity to exchange ideas on the most pressing challenges of our time.\u00a0 One challenge that will shape this century more than any other is our changing climate, and the effort to secure a sustainable and habitable world\u2014as rising sea levels threaten coastlines, increasing drought alters ecosystems and global carbon emissions continue to rise.<\/p>\n<p>There is a proverb that the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago\u2014and the second best time is now.\u00a0 When I first visited Tsinghua seven years ago, I planted a tree with President Gu in the Friendship Garden.\u00a0 Today, I am glad to return to this beautiful campus, founded on the site of one of Beijing\u2019s historic gardens.\u00a0 I am glad the Tsinghua-Harvard tree stands as a symbol of the many relationships across our two universities, which continue to grow and thrive.\u00a0 More than ever, it is a testament to the possibilities that, by working together, we offer the world.\u00a0 That is why I want to spend a few minutes today talking about the special role universities like ours play in addressing climate change.<\/p>\n<p>Last November here in Beijing, President Xi and President Obama made a joint announcement on climate change, pledging to limit the greenhouse gas emissions of China and the United States over the next two decades.\u00a0 It is a landmark accord, setting ambitious goals for the world\u2019s two largest carbon emitting countries and establishing a marker that Presidents Xi and Obama hope will inspire other countries to do the same.\u00a0 We could not have predicted such a shared commitment seven, or even one year ago, between these two leaders\u2014both, in fact, our alumni\u2014one a Tsinghua graduate in chemical engineering and the humanities and the other a graduate of Harvard Law School.\u00a0 And yet our two institutions had already sown its seeds decades ago\u2014by educating leaders who can turn months of discussion into an international milestone, and by collaborating for more than 20 years on the climate analyses that made it possible.\u00a0 In other words, by doing the things universities are uniquely designed to do.<\/p>\n<p>The U.S.-China joint announcement on climate change represents a defining moment between our two countries and for the world, a moment worthy of celebration.\u00a0 China deserves great credit for all it has done and is doing to address a complex set of economic and environmental issues. While lifting 600 million people out of poverty, you have built the world\u2019s largest capacity in wind power and second largest in solar power.\u00a0 As one Harvard climate expert put it, China\u2019s \u201cinvestments to decarbonize its energy system have dwarfed those of any other nation.\u201d \u00a0And last year, China\u2019s emission indeed did drop two percent.<\/p>\n<p>Yet, even as we make real progress, the scale and complexity of climate change require humility and long-term thinking.\u00a0 We have made a beginning.\u00a0 But it is only a beginning. The recent video\u00a0<em>Under the Dome<\/em>\u00a0reminds us how much work is left to be done. \u00a0The commitments of governments can be carried out only if every sector of society contributes.\u00a0 Industry, education, agriculture, business, finance, individual citizens\u2014<em>all <\/em>are necessary participants in what must become an energy and environmental revolution, a new paradigm that will improve public health, care for the planet, and put both of our nations on the path toward a prosperous, low-carbon economy.<\/p>\n<p>No one understands this better than the students and faculty of Tsinghua, where these subjects are research priorities and your outgoing president Chen Jining, a graduate of Tsinghua\u2019s department of environmental science and engineering, has just been appointed Minister of Environmental Protection.\u00a0 He has been called a bridge-builder, a man of vision and fresh ideas, and an inspiring leader.<\/p>\n<p>The promise of the 2014 joint climate pledge will require those qualities of all of us.\u00a0 It will call on each of us to do our part to transform the energy systems on which we rely and mitigate the harm they cause, to \u201cThink Different,\u201d as Apple\u2019s Steve Jobs used to say\u2014to imagine new ways of seeing old problems and, as he put it, to \u201chonor the people who \u2026 can change the world for the better.\u201d\u00a0 Universities are especially good at \u201cthinking different.\u201d\u00a0 That is the point I want to emphasize today. To every generation falls a daunting task.\u00a0 This is our task: to \u201cthink different\u201d about how we inhabit the Earth.\u00a0 Where better to meet this challenge than in Boston and Beijing?\u00a0 How better to meet it than by unlocking and harnessing new knowledge, building political and cultural understanding, promoting dialogue and sharing solutions?\u00a0 Who better to meet it than you, the most extraordinary students, imaginative, curious, daring.\u00a0 The challenge we face demands three great necessities.<\/p>\n<p>The first necessity is partnership.\u00a0 Global problems require global partners. Climate change is a perfect example.\u00a0 We breathe the same air.\u00a0 We drink the same water.\u00a0 We share the planet.\u00a0 We cannot live in a cocoon.\u00a0 The stakes are too high.<\/p>\n<p>In an essay widely reprinted in Chinese middle school textbooks called \u201cThe Geese Return,\u201d naturalist Aldo Leopold describes an educated woman, an outstanding college student, who, and I quote, \u201c\u2026had never heard or seen the geese that twice a year [fly above] her well-insulated roof.\u201d\u00a0 Could this woman\u2019s vaunted \u201ceducation,\u201d he asks, be no more than, in his words, \u201ctrading awareness for things of lesser worth?\u201d\u2014adding that the goose who \u201ctrades his [awareness] is soon a pile of feathers.\u201d\u00a0 We all risk becoming a proverbial \u201cpile of feathers\u201d unless we cultivate awareness of each other and our common environmental crisis, and then work together to solve it.<\/p>\n<p>We have seen the power of partnerships.\u00a0 For more than a century, Harvard and China in particular have benefitted from partnerships with histories that inspire us:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>John King Fairbank in 1933, who caught the silver and blue bus to Tsinghua before dawn to teach his first students the perspectives of Chinese scholarship he had absorbed from Professor Jiang Tingfu, one of China\u2019s most eminent historians and the Chair of Tsinghua\u2019s History Department.\u00a0 Those experiences changed Fairbank\u2019s life.\u00a0 And they changed Harvard, where the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies transformed the field, and where the study of East Asia now encompasses more than 370 courses from history and literature to government and plant biology.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Ernest Henry Wilson in 1908, who navigated the Yangtze River with a team of Chinese plant collectors, documenting cultures with photographs and collecting thousands of plant specimens for Harvard\u2019s Arnold Arboretum. Wilson\u2019s long-term collaboration\u2014the subject of a forthcoming CCTV special (and exhibit at the Harvard Center Shanghai)\u2014established one of our deepest connections, celebrating the extraordinary beauty and diversity of China\u2019s natural world.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Zhu Kezhen in 1918, who received his Ph.D. from Harvard after passing a scholarship exam at the school that would become Tsinghua. He became\u00a0the father of Chinese meteorology, pioneering 5,000 years of Chinese climate data, and as a university president and Vice President of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, shaped Chinese education by \u201ccultivating scientists,\u201d as he put it, and I quote, in \u201cthe \u2018scientific spirit\u2019 \u2026 the pursuit for the truth.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>That spirit defines the Harvard China Project, founded in 1993 as an interdisciplinary program to study China\u2019s atmospheric environment, energy system and economy, and the role of environment in U.S.-China relations.\u00a0 Based at Harvard\u2019s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, its collaborators have spanned more than half of Harvard\u2019s Schools and more than a dozen Chinese institutions, including some seven different departments at Tsinghua. \u00a0When the program began, before climate change made daily headlines, even its founders\u2014Professor Michael McElroy and project director Chris Nielsen, soon joined by Tsinghua professor collaborators\u2014could not fully imagine its impact.\u00a0 It has been a model partnership and an engine of broad environmental knowledge that has influenced policy in both countries, and improved the lives of our citizens.<\/p>\n<p>Let me give you one example: the case of two young women at the start of their professional training, Cao Jing studying economics and public policy at Harvard\u2019s Kennedy School and Wang Yuxuan, a Tsinghua graduate getting her Harvard Ph.D. in atmospheric chemistry.\u00a0 Both are now Tsinghua faculty members. \u00a0Driven by common questions, they came together as members of a team studying Chinese carbon emissions. Over several years they worked across disciplines, in both countries, with environmental engineers and health scientists to assess costs and benefits of emission control policy options and their effect on human health.\u00a0 The team\u2019s findings were groundbreaking, demonstrating for policy makers that they could in fact achieve enormous environmental benefits at little cost to economic growth. Such collaborations with Tsinghua continue to shape China\u2019s clean energy future with new ideas, from linking wind farms with electrified space heating to\u00a0evaluating the effects of a changing climate on\u00a0renewable energy sources.<\/p>\n<p>Our collaborations in the field of design are powerful as well, shaping the responses to urbanization and environmental change in both countries.<strong>\u00a0 <\/strong>What might an ecologically conceived city look like?\u00a0 How can a village grow into one?\u00a0 Harvard\u2019s new Center for Green Buildings and Cities is working with Tsinghua\u2019s Evergrande Research Institute to measure energy use for different building types in China, a key to creating more efficient buildings and cities.\u00a0 A new collaboration with Peking University advances more socially and ecologically inclusive urban design. \u00a0Partnerships like these, between Harvard\u2019s Graduate School of Design and Chinese institutions, are generating innovations in urban planning, green building and sustainable development that will change how we live.\u00a0 For example, walk along the reed-lined riverbank park in Shanghai, as I have, where a constructed wetland cleans polluted water from the Huangpu River and a promenade now connects the old city with the new.\u00a0 Its designer, Yu Kongjian, a farmer\u2019s son trained at Harvard\u2019s School of Design and founded China\u2019s first graduate school of landscape architecture, a field he describes as, and I quote, \u201ca tool for social justice and environmental stewardship.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Today, Harvard partnerships with Tsinghua and other Chinese institutions span nearly every department across all of Harvard\u2019s 13 Schools, involving some 200 faculty members and hundreds of students, and now including the Harvard Center Shanghai, online courses through EdX, and three new research centers on campus.\u00a0 These partnerships are bearing fruit: from last year\u2019s Harvard-Tsinghua conference on market mechanisms for a low-carbon future, to open access education reaching millions worldwide, to advances in human health and health-care policy that will improve and extend lives.<\/p>\n<p>Tsinghua is building upon a similar array of partnerships, in China and around the world. Your new Collaborative Innovation Center on Urbanization convenes every field around the problem of integrating urban and rural areas, and the Tsinghua-Berkeley Shenzhen Institute supports among other things the search for new and low-carbon energy technologies.<\/p>\n<p>I have said before that there is no one model for a university\u2019s success, no abstract \u201cglobal research university\u201d to which we all should aspire.\u00a0 Partnership benefits from different contributions and varied perspectives.\u00a0 Our variety supports our strength.\u00a0 United, there is little we cannot accomplish.<\/p>\n<p>The second necessity is research.\u00a0 A Chinese aphorism tells us that, \u201cLearning has no boundaries.\u201d\u00a0 Through research, universities transcend the boundaries of what anyone thought was possible.<\/p>\n<p>Research without boundaries means exploring across disciplines.\u00a0 Consider the goal of creating sustainable cities. \u00a0This is not just an engineering problem.\u00a0 It is a problem of ethics and design; law and policy; business and economics; medicine and public health; religion and anthropology and my own field of history, which can tell us how humans and nature have interacted over time.\u00a0 For example, think of the new field of\u00a0 \u201cecological urbanism\u201d that explores this goal as a design problem for how best to live.\u00a0 Or Harvard\u2019s Center for the Environment that brings together 250 faculty members from every discipline.<strong>\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Research without boundaries means taking an open stance, where every question is legitimate and any path might yield an answer.\u00a0 Knowledge emerges from debate, from disagreement, from questions, from doubt\u2014from recognizing that every path must be open because any path might yield an answer.\u00a0 Universities must be places where any and every topic can be broached, where any and every question can be asked. \u00a0Universities must nurture such debate because discovery comes from the intellectual freedom to explore that rests at the heart of how we define our fundamental identity and values.<\/p>\n<p>You might find a treatment for malaria in a 2000-year-old silk scroll from a Han dynasty tomb, as Chinese researchers discovered in the 1970s.\u00a0 Or follow your sense of smell, as Caltech chemist Arie Haagen-Smit did in the 1950s, to discover that a container of car exhaust exposed to sunlight produces the bleach-like odor of smog.\u00a0 Almost everyone told Haagen-Smit he was wrong, but he identified oxidized hydrocarbons from automobiles, refineries and power plants as the source of the mysterious air pollution that was choking Los Angeles, and launched a revolution in American air quality.\u00a0 Some forty years later, showing the same ingenuity, Harvard\u2019s own study of six cities conclusively linked fine particle pollution to\u00a0premature death.\u00a0 The researchers\u00a0invented field instruments\u00a0as they went along\u2014designing air monitors for people to wear at school and work and air quality sensors for their homes\u2014laying a foundation for air pollution legislation that has saved billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives a year.<\/p>\n<p>And research without boundaries means taking the long view.\u00a0 Seeing beyond the horizon has always been higher learning\u2019s special concern. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States, founded in the ninth year of the reign of Emperor Chongzhen of the Ming dynasty.\u00a0 Cambridge University recently celebrated its 800th birthday.\u00a0 China has a deep tradition of learning going back thousands of years.\u00a0 We are not in this for one year, or ten, or even 100.\u00a0 We are in it for millennia.\u00a0 Universities thrive because of an insatiable yearning to understand ourselves and the world.\u00a0 We are compelled\u2014to search the universe, to map the brain, to step into another\u2019s experience.\u00a0 And I want to emphasize that the humanities have a special role to play in fostering this ability to think and imagine beyond ourselves and our own lives\u2014in enabling us through the study of literature, culture, history, and language to draw from other times, other places, other peoples as we seek to understand the present and chart a course for the future.\u00a0 We mold minds capable of innovation because we are able to imagine a world different from the one we live in\u2014a world with \u201cgreen\u201d cities and adaptive buildings with skin-like membranes; a bionic leaf that can generate liquid fuel and a metal-free organic battery, all long-range areas of research.<\/p>\n<p>A third necessity is training students who will ask and answer the big questions. Perhaps the most important mission of universities is the education of the world\u2019s young people.\u00a0 Today\u2019s students will lead the world in a perilous time.\u00a0 How do we prepare them for the disruption of climate change?\u00a0 As one of Harvard\u2019s leading climate scientists likes to say, \u201cKnowing what to do is not easy.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>That is why universities play a critical role.<\/p>\n<p>We attract and train the best students.\u00a0 Each year I tell the incoming Harvard College class that they have ability not always measured by high test scores and top grades\u2014that they are chosen not for the magnitude of their achievements but for their capacity to invent, not for what they know but for what they can imagine.<\/p>\n<p>We expose students to diverse points of view.\u00a0 This January, Jahred Liddie studied sustainable cities on a Harvard undergraduate program in Brazil, where he met students, as he put it, from \u201caround the world as invested in these problems as I am.\u201d\u00a0 He saw how diverse backgrounds and perspectives are, in his words, \u201ckey [to] formulating \u2026 sustainable [urban] development,\u201d and how effective solutions and innovations might differ for different cultures.\u00a0 We hope to establish a similar exchange program with Tsinghua.<\/p>\n<p>Finally, we train students across many disciplines, and allow the youngest to work with senior faculty.\u00a0 Each learns from the other: the deepest knowledge joins with the freshest point of view.\u00a0 Harvard created an Environmental Science and Public Policy field for undergraduates to train students capable of refined judgment, who understand the scientific and technical side of complex environmental problems as well as their economic, political, legal, historical and ethical dimensions.<\/p>\n<p>Ethan Addicott, a recent graduate pursuing a career in science policy, says the program gave him a broad education of the natural world, and, in his words, \u201ca deep understanding of how to analyze and solve problems surrounding our complex interactions with it.\u201d\u00a0 Ethan did not need to wait until graduate school to have access to senior faculty.\u00a0 He studied the Chinese energy economy with Professor Michael McElroy, head of Harvard\u2019s China Project.\u00a0 Why this opportunity?\u00a0 Because the world needs Ethan.\u00a0 It needs the students in Tsinghua\u2019s Science and Technology Studies program, where engineering and pre-professional students work alongside future sociologists and historians, philosophers and anthropologists, who can put research and policy decisions into a broad social and historical context.<\/p>\n<p>I should add, too, that Harvard student interest in China, and in all of Asia, has never been higher.\u00a0 I ask you to look around this room and imagine an audience almost double this size.\u00a0 That is the size of our undergraduate course in Classical Chinese Ethical and Political Theory\u2014more than 700 Harvard College students packed into our largest lecture hall. Only two courses\u2014one in economics and one in computer science\u2014routinely draw a larger enrollment.\u00a0 The professor, a senior member of his department, Michael Puett, asks simple questions, but fundamental ones:\u00a0 What is the best way to live a fuller and more ethical life?\u2014and poses answers from the <em>Analects <\/em>of Confucius, the <em>Mencius<\/em> and the <em>Daodejing<\/em> by thinkers who are among the most powerful in human history. These are the courses that change students\u2019 lives.\u00a0 These are the students that change the world.<\/p>\n<p>I began by talking about possibilities, for our universities and for our planet. We are in a struggle, not with nature but with ourselves.\u00a0 A great human struggle we can only resolve together.\u00a0 As someone put it recently, what we do this year shapes the next twenty, and the next twenty shape the century.\u00a0 Next December, 195 countries will meet in Paris at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.\u00a0 Like Presidents Xi and Obama, their leaders will test humanity\u2019s commitment to a sustainable and habitable future for our children and our children\u2019s children.<\/p>\n<p>Last month, the venerated father of modern Chinese architecture and urban planning Wu Liangyong, now 92, looked out his window at a haze-shrouded sky.\u00a0 An exemplar of \u201cthinking different,\u201d a founding spirit at Tsinghua, he has described our collective aspiration this way: \u201cMy dream about the future is that we could live\u2026 in harmony with nature.\u00a0 We could live like in the poems and paintings.\u201d\u00a0 Universities have the unique capacity and a special responsibility to fulfill the promise of that dream.\u00a0 Let us not waste a moment.\u00a0 It is already the second best time to plant a tree.<\/p>\n<p>Thank you.<\/p>\n<p><a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.harvard.edu\/president\/speech\/2015\/universities-and-challenge-climate-change\" >Go to Original \u2013 harvard.edu<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There is a proverb that the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago\u2014and the second best time is now.  When I first visited Tsinghua seven years ago, I planted a tree with President Gu in the Friendship Garden\u2026 Universities have the unique capacity and a special responsibility to fulfill the promise of that dream.  Let us not waste a moment.  It is already the second best time to plant a tree.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[200],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-55616","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia-knowledge-scholarship"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55616","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55616"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55616\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55616"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55616"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55616"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}