Round 2
Meera Subramanian
Nationality
American
Career-level
Established
Residency project
In 2023, the world’s annual renewable capacity increased by almost 50% to over 500 gigawatts. Current climate goals have that figure tripling by 2030. As a science journalist who has covered environmental issues for twenty years, I recognize both the need to quickly scale up renewables to meet the climate crisis and the risk of treating the clean energy transition as a technological problem alone.
For my FRONTIERS fellowship, I’ll be based at the Basque Center for Climate Change (BC3) in Bilbao, Spain, in the winter/spring of 2025, researching how renewable energy projects might work better for biodiversity, people and place.
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I hope to learn more about BC3’s research work and gain a greater understanding of frontier science, which aims to push the bounds of knowledge and what is possible. But it also needs to be rooted in the realities of a public that may be resistant to change or lack scientific literacy to understand concepts of what that change may mean for their lives.
I hope my role as a science journalist can be to help serve as a translator of science, making it more accessible and meaningful to ordinary people and instructive to policymakers so that they can engage with it. And, at the same time, to offer the researchers at BC3 a window into the process of science journalism, serving as a bridge between worlds of understanding.