The United Nations climate talks underway Dec. 1 through 14 in Lima, Peru, are the world's last chance to get issues on the table before an international climate agreement is signed in Paris in 2015. Virtually every country in the world will be represented at the negotiations, along with stakeholders from businesses, organizations and the private sector worldwide.

Kevin Gurney, a senior sustainability scientist at ASU and associate professor at ASU's School of Life Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, works at the intersection of science and the negotiation progress. An atmospheric scientist and ecologist, Gurney is an expert in the carbon cycle (forests, soils, fossil fuels) and the relationship between climate change and the carbon cycle.

Gurney has attended these negotiations for nearly 20 years as an independent scientific representative. He will participate in the COP 20 conference, presenting with colleagues from NASA and NIST on cutting-edge tools to help cities and countries quantify and reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. He is available to answer media questions.

Some of his talking points are:

  • Climate mitigation – How can we empower cities to be agents of change, and why should cities take the lead?
  • Carbon monitoring – Recent research findings resulting from NIST- and NASA-funded efforts.
  • Cutting-edge tools that use mapping and computer visualization – rather than tables and graphs – to help decision-makers understand where their city's emissions are coming from.
  • Greenhouse gas credits – What are they and how can they be quantified and banked?

Read about Gurney's product, Hestia, a tool that helps cities see their carbon emissions on a street-by-street, building-by-building level (with video). See this article about Gurney's new FFDAS system to map global emissions.

Please let me know if you'd like to speak with Dr. Gurney and I'd be happy to coordinate.

Thank you.