RESEARCH

POLICY

Managing the human impacts on the atmosphere is a substantial challenge for policy-makers at local, national, and international scales. In local areas, where concentrations of pollutants such as ozone and particulate matter exceed levels of concern for human health impacts, regulators set threshold levels and design policies to control emissions. However, these pollutants can interact and travel across borders, posing challenges for governance. Global atmospheric chemistry issues such as ozone depletion, climate change and toxic chemical transport are addressed by international treaties. Informing effective policies to address air pollution requires targeted science and engineering approaches.

At MIT, research related to atmospheric chemistry addresses these policy-relevant challenges. Related efforts at MIT include:

  • Integrated assessment modeling links atmospheric chemistry with economics to assess coupled, system-level interactions
  • Modeling policy scenarios to inform regulatory strategies
  • Contributing to local, regional and global scientific assessments for policy, such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

Research Spotlight

Joint Program
Research Spotlight The MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change The Greenhouse Gambleâ„¢ wheels were developed by the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change to better convey uncertainty in climate change prediction. The roulette-style spinning wheels depict the estimated probability, or likelihood, of potential temperature change (global average surface temperature) over the next 100 years. The face of each wheel is divided into colored slices, with …
Mercury in the Atmosphere
Research Spotlight Mercury in the Atmosphere Research in the Selin group addresses the challenge of atmospheric mercury, which is emitted from anthropogenic sources and travels globally to affect ecosystems as toxic methylmercury far from its release. Mercury is the subject of a global treaty, the Minamata Convention, which was finalized in 2013. We use a variety of tools, such as global chemical transport modeling, integrated assessment modeling, and policy analysis, to inform decision-making strategies. A …
Understanding Climate Variability and Linkages to Mitigation and Adaptation Policy
Research Spotlight Understanding Climate Variability and Linkages to Mitigation and Adaptation Policy Research in the Solomon group includes a focus on identifying the signals of anthropogenic climate change that are emerging or will soon emerge from the noise of local variability in some locations, and to understand linkages with mitigation and adaptation policies.  Our own recent work and that of others has shown how the signal of human influence on warming is emerging from the …