ΔE⁺'s Dr. Taco Niet was featured on this year’s President’s Faculty Lecture organized by SFU Public Square. Niet gave a lecture on evidence-based modelling tools and their importance for for making urgent climate policy decisions grounded in justice and equity. 

Niet began the lecture by outlining the current situation, and the challenge we’re facing: We use 20% electricity and 80% fossil fuels to power our societies, which means we need to build 2-3 new low carbon electricity systems to hit net-zero emissions. Despite this big engineering and policy challenge, Dr. Niet is conditionally optimistic and believes that we can meet the challenge by actively working to make things better. 

In addition to the challenge we’re facing, Niet discussed the increasing evidence that focusing on only climate policies cannot create Just Climate Policies. To effectively address the challenges we must include considerations of climate justice in our climate policies. 

Finally, Niet gave a brief introduction of ΔE⁺ Research Group and the projects the group actively working on. This included a brief introduction to how modelling tools help us make effective engineering decisions and how we can include justice, equity, diversity and inclusion considerations in energy systems modelling. His research group is also actively working to bring in interdisciplinary perspectives into his research group and build models that are open-source and accessible. 

In the run up to the lecture, Niet was featured on several news media including Business in Vancouver, Energi Talks, CBC The Early Edition with Stephen Quinn, CBC The World this Weekend & GlobalTV.