Nobelist: Cross-border science crucial for fixing climate crisis

A Nobel Prize-winning scientist has urged world leaders to recognise how international cooperation between geopolitical rivals will be crucial to solving humanity’s biggest challenges.

In a passionate defence of the unifying power of science, Omar Yaghi said efforts to extract millions of tonnes of carbon from the air, based on his Nobel-winning research, could only reach the required scale if G20 nations came together to invest in international science.

Scientists from Saudi Arabia, China, India, Russia and the US among other countries were working together on a project based on his research that allowed researchers to take water directly from the air, even in arid countries, to make this science commercially viable, explained Yaghi, a professor of chemistry at University of California, Berkeley who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2025.

“That work is being done by countries that sometimes do not get along but they get along in the lab,” said Yaghi to an audience of young scientists at the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting, which is taking place in southern Germany from 28 June to 4 July.

That work, explained Yaghi, had the potential to deliver water security for every person on the planet, potentially ending hundreds of years of suffering and conflict related to access to clean drinking water.

“Everyone can have their own water and we will no longer have a water scarcity problem. Water – that should be a human right – science and chemistry are making this happen,” he told the summit on 29 June.

Yaghi, who was born to a Palestinian refugee family in Jordan and moved to the US aged 15, also praised the meritocratic nature of science, saying scientific excellence would be recognised regardless of the researcher’s nationality, gender, seniority or social background.

His own scientific research on metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), which reengineer molecules to allow them to “take CO2 out of the air or pluck water from the air”, was highly influenced by the work of a female undergraduate who joined his crystallography lab, having been rejected by several universities, said Yaghi.

“That student was someone that no-one wanted in their group – she was doing experiments that no-one else dared to do,” he said, describing science as “the most magnificent equalising force in the universe.”

“Anyone can make a difference, provided you do the experiments,” he said.

At various stages of his career many senior scientists had also refused to believe his results, claiming they were overstated until a collaboration with a German laboratory confirmed the findings, and instigated further fruitful collaborations, said Yaghi whose team is now seeking to make carbon extraction more commercially viable.

To extract the excess 1,100 gigatons of extra CO2 in the air created by pollution, it would require every one of the 706 cities with a population of more than a million people to build a CO2 capture plant, which, at $100 per tonne removal, would cost $100 trillion worldwide (equivalent to the world’s GDP), Yaghi explained.

With climate change projected to cost $38 trillion a year by 2049, refusing to dedicate significant sums to this problem was short-sighted, said Yaghi who urged developed countries to pledge greater sums to achieving this goal.

Achieving net zero would cost $400 annually for every person living in G20 countries, said Yaghi, noting that “If you go into a Hermes shop, then you pay $400 for a tie, or $1,000 for a scarf.”

jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com