Spring, 2025
Andrew MacDougall studies nature-based solutions to climate change.
“I’m leading a project with Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) and three other universities,” says MacDougall, associate professor at the department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at St. Francis Xavier University. “We're trying to represent nature-based solutions within climate models to identify any unexpected side effects.”
The nature-based solutions he’s studying are ways to modify either agricultural or natural ecosystems to absorb more carbon.
“The easiest example is growing more trees,” MacDougall says. “It’s the solution governments love the most, even though it's not terribly effective at cooling the Earth.”
One of the things his group is examining is a local warming effect.
“In the high and mid latitudes such as Canada, forests tend to warm the local environment, even if the overall net effect is cooling globally,” he says. “That's because coniferous trees absorb heat and hold it. Large scale afforestation — which is ineffective at global cooling — has positive side-effects on climate change, including a surprisingly big effect on sea ice extent – the total area of ocean surface covered by sea ice.”
For that project, the team has been developing models and then using ACENET to run them.
“One of the climate models we’ve been using is the University of Victoria Earth system climate model,” MacDougall says. “We’re also using the Canadian Earth system model, which was developed by Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC). Our collaborators at SFU have worked to turn that model into a community model so other researchers will be able to use ACENET infrastructure instead of the computing infrastructure that ECCC maintains.”
MacDougall’s mission with these models is to represent the various climate change solutions within the models to determine how many tons of carbon a given solution will take out of the air.
He also does a lot of work on zero-emissions commitments, which involves trying to figure out whether warming will stop if we do get to net zero. For example, he led a consortium to examine zero-emissions commitments with different climate models.
“It was called the Zero Emissions Commitment Model Intercomparison Project,” he says. “I did the simulations for the Universit of Victoria part of it on ACENET infrastructure. We do most model development on local computers and use ACENET resources for model spin-up and simulations of the future. We often run hundreds of slightly different versions of the model, in what are known as perturbed parameter experiments, to assess uncertainty. The model also needs to be spun-up for 5,000 to 10,000 years, which is 10 to 20 days of computer time. Completing such simulations on local machines is impractical.”
The conclusion from this project was that if we stop emitting carbon dioxide, 50 years later, the amount of warming should stabilize.
MacDougall says doing his work without ACENET’s technology would be very difficult.
