Carnegie Council Podcasts

In this episode of the Artificial Intelligence & Equality Initiative podcast, Senior Fellow Anja Kaspersen and Carnegie Council President Joel Rosenthal sit down with the Stavros Niarchos Foundation's Stelios Vassilakis for an engaging conversation about how to preserve and empower public space ethics. What we can we learn from the Athenian agora to guide the means and methods of governing AI?

For more, including a full transcript, please go to carnegiecouncil.org.

Current international responses to climate change continue to place the world on a trajectory beyond 1.5°C global warming, with impacts posing severe risks to natural and human systems. Discussions on carbon dioxide removal (CDR) globally has grown since the publication of the IPCC special report on global warming of 1.5°C, which reaffirms that large-scale CDR is required in all of its pathways to limit global warming to 1.5°C, with limited or no overshoot to achieve net-zero mid-century and global net negative emissions thereafter, until the end of the century. By removing between 100 to 1000 billion tonnes of CO2 depending on the speed of emissions reduction in respective pathways.

CDR methods vary and include the use of nature-based approaches, such as afforestation and enhancing wetlands, or engineering-based approaches to directly capture carbon dioxide. At scale, they all present potential benefits and risks of negative side-effects and pose significant governance challenges as many governance gaps exist. Most CDR approaches are currently theoretical and far from being ready to deploy at the speed or scale necessary to prevent overshooting the Paris Agreement temperature goal of 1.5–2°C.

Discussions around CDR governance, in particular on and around nature-based approaches to CDR as well as direct air carbon capture and storage, have more recently gained growing interest in light of the wave of net-zero commitments or pledges by governments, companies and other actors over the last two years.

However, important knowledge gaps persist around the role CDR could play in achieving net negative emissions after net-zero to deliver the Paris Agreement's goal. This C2GDiscuss features three global experts sharing their views on the role that CDR could play to achieve net negative after net zero. Some of the topics explored in this discussion are: what needs to be done now to have CDR functioning by the time we need it; how can CDR's full potential be realized as a climate response while making sure that the co-benefits are maximized, and trade-offs minimized in relation to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs); what role could the public and private sector play to scale up the required CDR and is there a role for other non-state actors.

Understanding these issues is crucial and urgent for meaningful societal deliberations and decisions today.

Jan Minx is head of the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change working group Applied Sustainability Science.

James Mwangi is the executive director of the Dalberg Group, and a partner with Dalberg Advisors.

Shuchi Talati is chief of staff for the Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management (FECM) at the U.S. Department of Energy.

Janos Pasztor (moderator) is executive director of C2G and a senior fellow at Carnegie Council.

This discussion was recorded on September 8, 2021, and is available with interpretation into 中文, Español, and Français.

For more, please go to C2G's website.

A decade after hacktivists like the Anonymous collective gained notoriety for cyberattacks on U.S. government agencies and multinationals and were later tamped down by arrests, a second wave of hacktivists is rising. Joseph Marks, cybersecurity reporter at The Washington Post, speaks with Doorstep co-host Tatiana Serafin about the differences and overlap between hacktivism, cyberwarfare, and ransomware and how these tools are being deployed in the Russia/Ukraine conflict and beyond.

For more, go to carnegiecouncil.org.

The oceans and climate change are inextricably connected. On the one hand, the oceans are faced with significant threats posed by climate change through acidification, loss of oxygen, and warming; on the other hand, the oceans play a critical role in regulating the climate system, acting as a major heat and carbon sink, and have been increasingly regarded as a source of solutions to climate change.

A range of additional ocean-based climate-altering approaches are being explored to limit climate impacts. For example, introducing additional nutrients to enhance photosynthesis of plankton to remove CO2 from the ocean surface and transport it to the deep ocean; cultivating large-scale seaweed to capture carbon through photosynthesis for sequestration; and brightening marine clouds through spraying sea water to deliver cooling locally.

However, all these approaches may present potential benefits and risks. What do the ocean protection community and the climate protection community say about these approaches? Is there a panacea for addressing the major environmental and socio-political challenges that these approaches pose? How can their risks and benefits be weighed up against the expected impacts of climate change?

In this C2GDiscuss, three experts share their views on these approaches.

Stefanos Fotiou is director in the Office of Sustainable Development Goals in the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations. At the time of this recording, he was the director of the Environment and Development Division in the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UN ESCAP).

Kristina M. Gjerde is is senior high seas advisor to IUCN’s Global Marine and Polar Programme (GMPP) and adjunct professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, California, where she teaches international marine law.

Joyashree Roy is the inaugural Bangabandhu Chair Professor at Asian Institute of Technology (AIT).

Janos Pasztor (moderator) is executive director of the Carnegie Climate Governance Initiative (C2G).

This interview was recorded on June 1, 2021, and is also available with interpretation into 中文, Español, and Français.

For more, please go to C2G's website.

Dr. Francesca Rossi, the AI Ethics Global Leader for IBM, joins Senior Fellow Anja Kaspersen for a riveting Artificial Intelligence & Equality podcast. Rossi speaks about her ethics-focused role at a multinational company and the importance of lateral expertise and multidisciplinarity in addressing ethical considerations and tensions in AI research. How can we insert human values into AI systems? Can AI transform and strengthen human decision-making?

For more, please go to carnegiecouncil.org.