Harvard-China Project. To effectively decarbonize heavy industry, climate policy must move beyond broad national targets and address the complex economic realities of individual industrial plants. Overlooking vast plant-level heterogeneity leads to inefficient, costly transition strategies. This presentation introduces a powerful bottom-up modeling framework that overcomes this barrier by engineering least-cost, technologically feasible decarbonization pathways for thousands of facilities across the globe. By integrating granular plant-level data with dynamic techno-economic forecasts, our research constructs an actionable blueprint for a smarter industrial transition. This plant-specific approach allows policymakers to target interventions effectively, minimize economic costs, and demonstrate that achieving ambitious climate goals can be aligned with industrial competitiveness.

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A Harvard-China Project Research Seminar with Jing Meng, Professor, The Bartlett School of Sustainable Construction, University College London; Director, Centre for Sustainability Science and Technology, University College London

Speaker Bio: Prof. Jing Meng is a Professor at the Bartlett School of Sustainable Construction, University College London and a fellow of Cambridge Centre for Environment, Energy and Natural Resource Governance. Her research focuses on technology innovation, climate change policies, and co-mitigation of climate change and air pollution. Prof. Meng is a highly cited researcher awarded by Clarivate in cross-board in 2020 -2024, AGU23 Global Environmental Change Early Career awardee and one of the 35 Innovators under 35 awarded by MIT Technology Review. She has a proven track record of high-quality publications in international peer-reviewed journals, such as Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Nature Geoscience, Nature Communications, Nature Climate Change and Nature Sustainability. Her papers have been awarded the 2017 Best Early Career Articles in Environmental Research Letters and Top 50 Nature Communications Earth and planetary sciences articles published in 2018. Prof. Meng is serving as an Executive Editor of the Journal of Cleaner Production, associate editor of Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres and section editor in Energy and Buildings.