At a Salata Institute virtual press briefing ahead of COP30, Harvard and affiliated faculty traveling to the annual climate summit – this year in Belém, Brazil – discussed their reasons for attending and expectations.

Jeannine Cavender-Bares 
Climate Action Acceleration Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology
Director of the Harvard University Herbaria 
At COP30, Jeannine will launch Harvard’s new Biodiversity & Planetary Stewardship Initiative to explore how integrated ecosystem assessments can inform policy and advance climate-biodiversity solutions. 

Marcelo Medeiros 
Salata Climate Action Fellow 
Chair of the Nature-based Solutions Workgroup of the Sustainable Business COP30  
Marcelo is co-founder of re.green, a company committed to restoring 1 million hectares of tropical forest. At Harvard, Marcelo convenes scientists, policymakers, and business leaders to tackle the thorny question of how to measure, value, and scale carbon-dioxide removal.  

Mary Rice  
Director, Center for Climate Health and the Global Environment (C-CHANGE), Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health 
Mary, a pulmonary critical care physician and professor of medicine, is attending COP to present evidence on the near-term health benefits of climate actions that reduce exposure to air pollution, sharing research on the effectiveness of real-world energy and urban planning interventions.  

Robert Stavins (moderator) 
Director of the Harvard Environmental Economics Program 
Director of the Harvard Project on Climate Agreements 
Rob, who has attended 18 COPs, is presenting his work as principal investigator of the Harvard Initiative on Reducing Global Methane Emissions. 

Catherine Wolfram  
Professor of Applied Economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management 
Co-chair, Global Climate Policy Project at Harvard and MIT 
Catherine is advising Brazil on how to build a voluntary coalition of countries to coordinate carbon prices. Last month, a working group she chaired found that such a grouping could slash global emissions and raise billions for mitigation and adaptation, while avoiding a patchwork of unilateral border carbon measures.  

Click here for more information about Harvard’s COP30 delegation.