Accelerating the transition to zero pollution via a systems engineering approach to carbon-agriculture-health nexus.
Climate change will have crippling human health and socioeconomic outcomes, which will be magnified by biodiversity loss and chemical pollution. Addressing this global grand challenge requires a concerted multi-disciplinary effort that can yield technological solutions for a sustainable future; this is well aligned with the goals of the Sustainability School of Convergence Science, an integral part of Imperial’s Science for Humanity strategy. To achieve this goal, the Faculties of Engineering, and Natural Sciences have launched project CATALYSE-TZP featuring multidisciplinary research to find holistic solutions to our society’s most pressing environmental challenges. A Sustainability Futures Lab will be created in our South Kensington Campus to amplify cross-College Net Zero research, with an enterprise pipeline linking it to the Imperial WestTech Corridor. A state-of-the-art facility, the GroDome, will be set up at Silwood Park to catalyse new and ongoing environmental research collaborations highlighting Silwood’s role as a world-renowned ecological centre and its unique lab-to-field capabilities. CATALYSE-TZP will involve collaborations with partners in academia, industry and healthcare, across the globe with cross-sector support for this initiative given the need to overcome global grand challenges that represent barriers to a sustainable society: shocks to the energy and food systems, the pervasive impacts of pollution, and the human costs of climate change and biodiversity loss. The Project will build upon Imperial’s leadership in innovation and successful entrepreneurship, translating fundamental sustainability science to its practical application.
CATALYSE-TZP is led by Prof. Omar Matar (Head of Department of Chemical Engineering), Prof. Dan Davis (Head of Department of Life Sciences).