After COP27, we have an assortment of challenges to achieve carbon neutrality. This talk will describe the climate change challenges that we are facing around the globe and the costs for developing and developed countries. I will include the agreements achieved in Sharm El Sheikh and what we can expect for COP28. Finally, we will discuss what kind of research opportunities we will have from engineering to support mitigation and adaptation pathways by defining technologies on the hand, on the cusp, and frontier techs until new models applied to understand engineering complex systems.
Alex is the Director of the Sustainability Research Center & Strategic Resource Management at the School of Engineering at Universidad del Desarrollo. Further, he is Head of Waste to Energy Research & Technology - Chile at WTERT Council and a Research Associate at the Earth Engineering Center at Columbia University.
Throughout his career, he has been strongly involved in advisory boards in governmental institutions such as CONICYT, the National Commission in Innovation and Development (CNID), the Ministry of Finance, and the Ministry of Environment as a member of the Advisory Council in three administrations. In addition, he has been a member of the presidential commissions for innovation in water resources (CNID) and long-term electricity system planning (Ministry of Energy).
In 2015, He was a member of the Chilean delegation for COP21, supporting the Ministry of Finance. His contributions are summarized in more than 90 presentations to national and international conferences, on 40 publications indexed as author or co-author, one book, and 6 chapters, being also associate editor and reviewer in various journals indexed. In 2019, He was a member of the scientific committee on Climate Change in an advisory body of the Ministry of Science, Technology, Knowledge and Innovation organizing the COP25.
At the International level, he is very committed to Science Diplomacy. He is a Global Young Academy and Nexus KAN of Future Earth organization member. Between 2017 - 2019, He was a member of the High-Level Panel of Experts Steering Committee on Food Security and Nutrition (HLPE), the Committee on World Food Security (CFS), Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) coordinating two main global reports.
Since 2019, He has been the Review Editor for Working Group III of the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) and lead author of Global Environment Outlook (GEO) for Business at UNEP. Furthermore, he has served as an expert reviewer of the 2019 Global Sustainable Development Report (GSDR) and the "10 New Insights in Climate Science 2019" report for COP25. Also, he served as a Panel Member of the Water Quality Task Force (TF) for International Water Resources Association (IWRA), working on the Water Quality Project: "Developing a Global Compendium on Water Quality Guidelines".
In 2020, he was one of the authors of the report '10 New Insights in Climate Science by Future Earth. Finally, he has been a member of the ISO / TC 323 committee of the standard in preparation ISO / WD 59004 Circular economy and Leading Author for the next Nexus Assessment Report at IPBES. Furthermore, as an expert reviewer for Race to Resilience at UNFCCC, he connects engineering solutions to adaptation strategies to Climate Change.
Universidad del Desarrollo (Chile) / Visiting scholar at Harvard University (USA)