Örjan GustafssonProfessor

I am coordinating and teaching two courses:

MI2006 CCS-BtC: Climate Change Solutions – Bending the Curve

- a course that caters to university students from all faculties (co-teachers from depts and institutes across natural science, social science, humanites, law and economics) 

MI7016 ABCC: Atmosphere - Biogeochemistry - Climate Change (ABCC)

- a central course of our M.Sc. Program in Environmental Science Atmosphere-Bigeochemistry-Climate (ES-ABC). 

I like teaching - interacting with and learning together with the students!

I enjoy supporting and working with the many Master and PhD students that have joined our research group over the years. 

We investigate two grand challenges in climate change science. The first addresses Arctic carbon-climate linkages with a focus on thawing land+subsea permafrost and collapsing methane hydrates, which may add greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. We have for two decades pursued field campaigns in the key yet remote and vast region of the Siberian-Arctic shelf seas and unearthed extensive methane releases from thawing subsea permafrost and the dynamics of land permafrost remobilization around the entire circum-Arctic in both the present system and during earlier periods of abrupt climate change.

The second research challenge concerns the interactions of severe air pollution and climate change, with focus on the key regions: South Asia, the Sub-Saharan Africa, the Himalaya-Tibetan Plateau and East Asia.

We have established atmospheric-climate observatories strategically located to intercept the outflow from e.g. India and China. These are continuously operated with decadal perspectives at locations such as in rural S. Bangladesh and on islands in the N. Indian Ocean and in SE Yellow Sea. Within a comprehensive framework of satellite- and observatory data, we are characterizing the climate- and isotopically fingerprinting the sources and ageing effects of climate- and health-affecting aerosols such  as Black Carbon (BC) and sulphate as well as gases such as methane and carbon monoxide to provide measurement constraints of their properties and the relative importance of different sources, to support air quality and climate modelling and to guide society’s efforts to mitigate emissions.  

The methane added from Arctic permafrost/hydrates and the aerosol demasking in Asia may both cause climate overshoot – that we miss the climate targets and risk passing dangerous thresholds in the earth system. I take a large interest in cross-disciplinary initiatives both in education and in interactions with society and policy makers to contribute towards finding solutions for us to bend the curve of climate change. We need to find ways to survive and thrive in the Anthropocene as we help our world to develop sustainably.

I have author >260 papers in international peer-reviewed journals, including lead roles in papers for Science (2), Science Advances (5), Nature (1), PNAS (7), Nature Geoscience (3), Nature Communications (7), Nature Sustainability (1), 20 in Global Biogeochemical Cycles and 40 in Environ. Science & Technology.  Google Scholar H-index 93 (87 papers cited > 100 times, > 29,000 citations).

There is an example list of papers in the CV (bottom right).