Carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are warming Virginia’s climate, bringing more extreme weather and accelerating sea-level rise along its coastline. Virginia’s legislature responded with the Virginia Clean Economy Act in 2019, setting a goal of net-zero greenhouse gas emissions statewide by 2050. Yet cutting emissions alone won’t get Virginia there. Carbon will remain in the atmosphere, and it must be actively removed. Each removal strategy has different downsides and benefits, for the state and for local communities. How can Virginia put the pieces together to form a comprehensive carbon dioxide removal plan that can be enacted statewide?
Join UVA Environmental Institute Associate Directors Andres Clarens and Leon Szeptycki as they share their research on this important topic. Clarens and Szeptycki co-lead the Virginia Climate Restoration Initiative, which released interactive tools assessing carbon dioxide removal strategies on a county-by-county basis.
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Andres Clarens
Associate Director, UVA Environmental Institute
Andres is a Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and the Director of the Virginia Environmentally Sustainable Technologies Laboratory. His research is focused broadly on how carbon is manipulated, reused, and sequestered in engineered systems. The results of his work have been important for developing efficient strategies for mitigating the emissions that are driving climate change. At the largest scales, his system-level modeling work has explored the life cycle of systems in the manufacturing, transportation, and energy sectors.
Leon Szeptycki
Associate Director, UVA Environmental Institute
Leon joined the UVA law faculty in 2019 after serving as a professor of the practice and executive director of Water in the West at the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University, where he oversaw an interdisciplinary research program focused on water management in the American West. Prior to joining the Woods Institute, he served as the director of the Law School’s Environmental Law and Conservation Clinic, and as general counsel of Trout Unlimited, a national conservation organization. He is an expert in water law and policy and has worked extensively on large-scale watershed restoration projects.
