Six members of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) have been appointed to the US Climate Security Roundtable, a panel of experts convened by the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine at the direction of Congress.
The Climate Security Roundtable will provide support to the Climate Security Advisory Council (CSAC), a joint partnership between the US intelligence community and the federal science community to better understand and anticipate the ways climate change affects US national security interests.
The panel will support CSAC’s goal of anticipating, preparing and ultimately preventing climate security crises from escalating into national security challenges and threats.
Susan Lozier, AGU president, will be joined by fellow AGU members Ana P Barros, Scott C Doney, Kristie L Ebi, Vernon R Morris, and Karen C Seto. Barros and Doney are AGU Fellows while Morris serves on AGU’s Diversity and Inclusion Committee. These members will serve a three-year term on the roundtable.
Lozier said, “I am honored to aid our nation’s preparedness for the impact of climate change on national security and look forward to working with colleagues from across the country in this capacity.”
Lozier has been serving as AGU president since January 2021 and is the dean of the College of Sciences at Georgia Institute of Technology and the Betsy Middleton and John Clark Sutherland chair. Her research in physical oceanography has furthered our understanding of climate-driven processes. Lozier is the international lead for the Overturning in the Subpolar North Atlantic Program (OSNAP) observing system. OSNAP uses data from moored instruments, satellites, ocean gliders and floats to provide estimates of the ocean’s velocity, temperature and salinity fields.
Three years ago, Lozier and her team surfaced a major unexpected driver of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC): overturning of the warm, salty, shallow waters between Greenland and Scotland. Those findings will improve global climate models that are used in assessments by the International Panel on Climate Change.
Among her many accolades, she was named an AGU Fellow in 2014 and received the AGU Ambassador Award in 2016 for leadership in the ocean sciences. Earlier this year, Lozier was awarded the Henry Stommel Research Medal, the highest honor given by the American Meteorological Society to an oceanographer.
“We are proud to see our AGU community rising to the challenges we will all be facing due to our changing climate,” said Randy Fiser, executive director and CEO of AGU. “Our science is critical to the understanding of issues from individual health to national security. AGU’s leaders in the global scientific community will make sure that evidence-based solutions are brought to today’s most pressing challenges.”