Making Sense of Complexity with Stephanie Arcusa

In 2024, global temperatures exceeded 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels for the first time, marking a critical moment in the fight against climate change. Despite efforts to reduce emissions, current policies have not been enough to keep global warming within the Paris Agreement target. To truly stabilize the climate, we need to actively manage the carbon cycle—removing carbon dioxide from the industrial and environmental sources and ensuring it stays out permanently. This talk will explore research on how to make carbon management a reliable and effective tool. It will focus on carbon sequestration, the process of capturing and storing carbon dioxide, and assess which technologies are ready to be used safely, permanently, and in a way that can be independently verified. The talk will also discuss the rules and systems needed to ensure carbon stays stored and to fix flaws in current carbon markets that allow manipulation and unfair outcomes for future generations. Beyond technology and policy, this discussion will examine economic strategies that could accelerate progress, such as requiring fossil carbon extractors to meet carbon storage obligations. The talk will provide a global perspective on the progress made so far.

Biography

Stephanie Arcusa is a climate and earth physical scientist focusing on climate mitigation. She studies socio-economic and technological frameworks that support negative carbon emission technologies and a circular carbon economy. She also explores the development of carbon accounting standards from the lens of scientific principles to support a global carbon management system. Dr. Arcusa has published on these topics in journals like Climate Policy, The Holocene, Geophysical Research Letters, Earth System Science Data, and Science. She holds a joint appointment as assistant professor for the School of Complex Adaptive Systems and the Thunderbird School of Global Management.