The Nano4EARTH challenge, launched by the National Nanotechnology Initiative in the United States, has identified four strategic areas where nanotechnology can make the most impact in addressing the climate crisis.
When in January 2000, President Clinton announced that nanotechnology was going to become a national priority, the idea was to build the foundations for an initiative that would see the convergence of diverse funding agencies, academia, the private sector, and federal and local governments to establish the United States at the forefront of an emerging scientific discipline. The National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI) was created, and in December 2003, President Bush signed the 21st Century Nanotechnology Research and Development Act, allocating a starting budget of US$3.7 billion for the following four-year period1.
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Twenty years and $42 billion later, and nanotechnology has returned an estimate $1 trillion to the US economy2,3, a reminder for governments and corporations that, with time, scientific research pays dividends.
But the expertise academia and the private sector have built in this period now needs to be channeled into tackling an existential threat — the climate crisis — with more sense of urgency than it has been done so far. The nanotechnology community must become more ambitious in their goals, confident of the tools and mindset developed in the past twenty years.
For this purpose, two years ago the NNI launched a National Nanotechnology Challenge on climate change, called Nano4EARTH (https://www.nano.gov/nano4EARTHWorkshop). This is a call for action to the entire nanotechnology community. In this issue of Nature Nanotechnology, we host a Comment authored by many of the leaders of the Nano4EARTH challenge that highlights four research directions that should be prioritized, both in academia and in industry to maximize the impact of nanotechnology. These are: batteries and energy storage for electrification, nanocatalysts for decabonization, nanotechnology-enabled solutions for interfaces, and greenhouse gas capture and storage.
In all these areas, researchers have accrued vast fundamental expertise, as testified by the number of papers published every year. The goal of Nano4EARTH is to approach the climate crisis from a pragmatic point of view. These four areas have been identified because optimization of the existing technologies, through nanotechnology-enabled solutions, are bound to offer the most benefits. As time is running out, the thrust is not so much on developing novel fundamental concepts; rather, it is about end-user-based problem solving.
A recent report by the International Energy Agency says that the COP28 energy goals can still be achieved by “tripling renewable energy capacity, doubling the rate of energy efficiency progress and significantly reducing methane emissions from fossil fuels” by 20304. For developed countries, the report specifically mentions electrification of light-vehicles, carbon capture, use and storage technologies for hard-to-abate industrial sectors (such as cement production) and low-emission fuels as key benchmarks. These benchmarks are in line with the priority areas of Nano4EARTH.
But what can nanotechnology bring to the table?
Nanotechnology has formed and fostered a generation of scientists who have internalized the essential elements that are needed for this grand societal challenge. These speak of interdisciplinarity: bridging between disciplinary silos, developing a common jargon; and fundamental understanding: linking the atomic and molecular scale to macroscopic properties, developing tools that allow for engineering novel material properties and improve efficiency from the ground up. It is now time to take this expertise to a bigger and more ambitious arena; to include environmental scientists, economists, social scientists, policy makers, entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists into the conversation about ‘nano’; to make materials that are sustainable-by-design, develop technologies that are intrinsically scalable — not necessarily the most efficient ones; to work on drop-in solutions to retrofit existing industrial plants.
We have argued for some time that counting the number of citations might not be the most effective way to measure the impact of applied research5. Perhaps we should reward the potential for greenhouse gas emission reduction.
