Annual Report Year: 2024 Page 3 of 7

Researchers across the Pratt School of Engineering are exploring many strategies to combat climate change and build resilience through engineered adaptation and mitigation strategies. Some of the research on these topics in Pratt includes the following: 

• Carbon-Sequestering Cement: Assistant Professor Laura Dalton’s team is researching alternative cement mixtures that can capture and store carbon, a promising strategy for reducing emissions in construction.
• Urban Heat Modeling: Professors Mike Bergin and David Carlson, along with Ph.D. student Zach Calhoun, have refined urban heat models using citizen-reported data, and showed that underserved areas often experience more extreme heat than traditional models suggest.
• Direct-Air Carbon Capture: Assistant Professor Liang Feng, a Sloan Foundation Scialog Fellow in Negative Emission Science, focuses on enhancing materials for direct-air carbon capture, working to prevent degradation of these materials over time.
• Geothermal Storage for Duke’s Campus: Associate Professor Manolis Veveakis and Nicholas School Professor Emeritus Peter Malin are investigating geological materials under Duke’s Central Campus to store water for heating and cooling, potentially reducing campus energy use.
• Renewable Energy Materials: Researchers in Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science, in collaboration with Chemistry, are exploring perovskite crystals for their potential in efficient, scalable renewable energy applications.

Pratt’s innovations hold promise for both adapting to and mitigating climate change, using engineering solutions with practical and scalable impacts.

Duke Restore, a university-wide initiative based at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment, is dedicated to advancing ecosystem restoration as a science and practice that can enhance resilience in both natural habitats and the communities they support.

The initiative’s mission is to establish Duke as a global leader in ecosystem restoration, making conservation a practical recovery strategy for environments from terrestrial forests to coastal reefs. By combining research with on-the-ground restoration, Duke Restore seeks to build adaptive systems that protect biodiversity and provide sustainable, nature-based solutions to environmental challenges

Over the past year, Duke Restore has actively built a model for ecosystem restoration that integrates local habitats with broader community benefits. With support from state and federal partners, including the U.S. Marines and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the initiative has implemented projects across North Carolina’s diverse ecosystems. These efforts span upland streams to coastal barriers, rewilding riverine wetlands and oyster reefs to enhance natural defenses against erosion and storm impacts.

On campus, the Forest Restoration Team has worked with the Duke Forest Teaching and Research Laboratory to address invasive species and expand reforestation efforts. Their projects focus on promoting long-term ecological health and student engagement, with more than 40 students now involved in habitat connectivity mapping in the region, working in partnership with groups like The Nature Conservancy and the Durham Open Space program.

Through collaboration, research, and community engagement, the Forest team along with their other ecosystems focused teams — Living Shorelines, Seagrass Farming, Wetlands, Coral, Rewilding, and Eco-Cultural teams — Duke Restore is positioning itself as a model for restoration science, aspiring to make Duke a benchmark for research-driven, community-centered conservation practices. For further information on Duke Restore’s projects and goals, visit the Nicholas School magazine story.

Oceans@Duke, an interdisciplinary community of Duke scholars working at the intersections of science, governance, and business, explores and sustains our oceans by empowering, connecting, and amplifying Duke’s ocean scholars. Since its inception in 2020, the initiative has:

• Organized nine webinars (2020–2021) featuring faculty, students, and partners working on conservation challenges such as seabed mining and marine ecosystem restoration.
• Launched the Oceans@Duke graduate student club, which hosted two annual Blue Economy Summits with over 150 attendees.
• Held symposia on key ocean challenges, including an Ocean Innovation Showcase highlighting new technologies and business models for ocean sustainability.

In the 2023–2024 academic year, the initiative hosted a symposium on ocean innovations and coastal resilience and prepared a new five-year strategy (2025–2030) while recruiting a managing director to lead the effort.

Nicholas School of the Environment faculty expertise spans 40 disciplines, from biological and ecological sciences to social sciences, empowering the school to address complex environmental challenges. Sparked by a 2023 collaborative research symposium, the following interdisciplinary projects were funded in 2024 with Nicholas School Dean’s Research Venture Award funds:

• Development and validation of Climate Change Spaces (CLICS) to identify one health hotspots
  Principal Investigators:  William Pan, Drew Shindell, Shineng Hu, Mark Janko (DGHI)
• Tracking the ecological impacts of ocean industrialization: using technology innovation and new data frameworks to “green the ocean economy”
  Principal Investigators:  John Virdin, Pat Halpin, Nico Cassar
• Assessing equity in the emerging U.S. shellfish aquaculture industry
  participants:  Grant Murray, Lisa Campbell, Betsy Albright, Norbert Wilson (Divinity)
• Stable isotopes as a biomarker for heat stress
  Principal Investigators:  Michael Kipp and Nishad Jayasundara

In 2024, the Duke Forest Teaching & Research Laboratory hosted over 65 new and ongoing research activities, many of which are climate and sustainability-focused. One new example is the TransX research project, spearheaded by Loic D’Orangeville from the University of New Brunswick. The project has a network of tree plantations in Canada and the United States composed of carefully selected natural and improved genotypes of key northeastern tree species. TransX measures the response of trees to future warming, through leaf and growth phenology, health, and survival across species and populations.

In partnership with Earth and Climate Science professor Dan Richter’s soils lab, the Duke Campus Farm launched the Soil Fertility Fellowship in 2024 to analyze the impact of regenerative agriculture on soil health over the past 13 years. Since 2010, regenerative methods on one acre of previously compacted, nutrient-depleted land have addressed soil compaction, nutrient depletion, and microbial degradation.

Abby Saks, a Soil Fertility Fellow, presented her senior thesis on this research, analyzing soil from various farm plots and depths to assess changes over time. Her study showed that regenerative practices significantly increased soil organic matter and nitrate levels within eight years, contributing to improved crop yields and demonstrating substantial soil fertility gains.

Debt-for-nature swaps offer a promising pathway to address developing countries’ debt burdens while promoting environmental conservation and climate resilience. An initiative at Duke — guided by Sanford School of Public Policy’s Alex Pfaff, Elizabeth Losos from the Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment, & Sustainability and Stuart Pimm from the Nicholas School of the Environment—explored key reforms to enhance the impact of these swaps. Their analysis, published this year in Science, advocates for greater debt relief, streamlined costs, reliable performance metrics, and a stronger focus on both biodiversity and climate goals.

The James E. Rogers Energy Access Project (EAP) at Duke, founded in 2017 and led by Sanford’s Marc Jeuland and Jonathan Phillips of the Nicholas Institute, focuses on addressing global energy poverty through sustainable, modern energy solutions. To support its work on energy access, EAP was awarded a Duke Climate Research Innovation Seed Program (CRISP) grant in 2024 to explore climate-smart agriculture’s potential in East Africa.

This new project, titled “Monetizing Resilience to Mobilize Climate Capital,” brings together researchers across Duke — including experts from Public Policy, Engineering, Sociology, Divinity, and Environmental Policy. The project focuses on developing innovative financial instruments, such as resilience credits and resilience bonds, to attract private-sector investment for climate adaptation. This effort aims to bridge a significant funding gap for smallholder farmers, where investment needs far exceed international climate finance.