Many who have taken up the challenge of repairing the planet and keeping it safe for the future are those who have lived their entire lives where climate change has always been part of the global conversation. Jen Schneider and Ben Kalina, co-directors and writers of NOVA’s Can We Cool the Planet?, said it was their goal during the film to reflect the youth and diversity of climate change researchers and entrepreneurs.
("Can We Cool The Planet" premieres tonight at 9pm on GBH 2. Watch a preview below.)
“It was really important to me that the film feature the work and the advancements that women are contributing to the field because that’s the reality,” Schneider said. The top priority was to look for the people who are innovators and who have an interesting story to share about what they do every day. “When you do that, you find women and scientists of color who are out there doing fantastic work,” she said. “We wanted to make sure we were capturing those folks.”
Kalina said he witnessed an eagerness among younger researchers to find a field they enjoy where they feel they are making a contribution to environmental sustainability. “It’s not an accident that the heads of a lot of the companies and a lot of the researchers who are doing this kind of work are people who have grown up in a world where economic progress has been coupled with a concern about the climate and our shared future,” he said. “With so many young people entering this field, it was important to show that.”
Here are a few of those innovators featured in the upcoming NOVA film, Can We Cool the Planet?
Lolo Fatoyinbo-Agueh is a research physical scientist in the Biospheric Sciences Laboratory at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Her work as a co-investigator on the GEDI Lidar produced the firrst 3-D map of coastal mangrove forest height and carbon storage for all of Africa from space-borne data.
Apoorv Sinha is founder and CEO of carbon utilization startup Carbon Upcycling Technologies and a clean-tech entrepreneur who is focused on developing novel solutions to environmental challenges. His company is competing in the finals of the CarbonX Prize to develop a technology that most efficiently transforms CO2 into a marketable product.
Sandra Snaebjornsdottir is the head of CO2 mineral storage at CarbFix, an initiative to capture CO2 from emission points or from the atmosphere and inject CO2-charged waters into geological formations. She is researching the use of sea water in place of fresh water, which would allow CarbFix to scale globally.
Thomas Crowther is a British scientist specializing in ecosystem ecology and the chief scientific adviser to the UN's Trillion Tree Campaign. At ETH Zürich, a public research university where he formed the Crowther Lab, his research aims to generate a holistic understanding of the global-scale ecological systems that regulate the Earth's climate.
PREVIEW: Can We Cool the Planet?
This article was originally published in Explore GBH, a monthly guide to all things GBH delivered to members of the Foundation. Become a member today.
