Dartmouth Engineering Professor Appointed as a Lead Author on UN Climate Change Assessment Report

Dartmouth Engineering Professor Erin Mayfield, lead author for the IPCC Seventh Assessment Report. (Photo by Rob Strong '04)

An expert in sustainable systems engineering and public policy, Mayfield will serve on Working Group III, which deals with the mitigation of climate change through limiting or preventing greenhouse gas emissions and enhancing activities that remove them from the atmosphere. The Group will address all aspects of mitigation including technical feasibility, cost, policy instruments, governance options, and social acceptability. The three IPCC Working Group reports are expected in mid-2028, with the Synthesis Report to be approved by late 2029. 

The IPCC, which publishes its assessment every five to seven years, kicked off the convening for the Seventh Assessment Report in Paris in early December. Before heading to Paris for the group's first meeting, Mayfield spoke with us about how she came to be selected and what she expects from the process.

How did you come to be nominated?

Mayfield: Observer organizations and governments nominate experts, with the IPCC Bureau ultimately selecting authors. I was nominated by the US Academic Alliance for the IPCC, a network of academic institutions registered with the IPCC as an observer organization. The Alliance emerged in March 2025, after the dissolution of much of the climate diplomacy capacity in the State Department, the agency that historically has overseen nominations of US experts.

What do you expect your work as a lead author to look like? 

Mayfield: I'll be leading a rigorous, inclusive, and deliberative scientific process. I expect to help guide the assessment of evidence on the barriers and enablers of climate change mitigation, ensuring that findings are both analytically-sound and policy-relevant. This involves weaving together diverse forms of knowledge, while maintaining traceability and neutrality. I see the role as not only about synthesis, but also stewardship, fostering a transparent process that strengthens the scientific basis for climate action and supports equitable, informed decision-making.

What is the most important or unique thing you bring to the table?

Mayfield: My training and experience is highly interdisciplinary between engineering and public policy, which are usually distinct areas of expertise. While people often lament that interdisciplinary work is difficult, I find disciplinary work hard and constraining. In the context of climate change mitigation, and many other complex challenges, both the technological details and the economic and governance systems that shape technology deployment are critical.

I've been involved in policy for many years, including as a strategic advisor in the Office of Policy at the US Department of Energy, and as an assistant director in the White House—both under the Biden-Harris administration. I've also participated in several large-scale collaborative studies on climate mitigation. These experiences, combined with my work integrating dimensions often overlooked in earlier analyses—such as equity, labor, and air-quality across multiple scales and contexts—led to my nomination.

Do you expect to learn new things from the process?

Mayfield: Absolutely! The lead authors I'll be working with most closely are an extraordinary group—political scientists, engineers, economists, policy scholars, behavioral scientists—representing a truly interdisciplinary range of perspectives. I know I'm going to learn a tremendous amount from them, something that I'm genuinely excited about.

Even last year, at the scoping meeting where we helped shaped the report's structure and defined its chapters, I felt my own thinking shift. I spend so much time working within a US context that I sometimes lose sight of how fundamentally different the landscape looks elsewhere. Climate mitigation priorities in Europe diverge from those in Asia or Africa—not just in goals, but in what is technically, economically, and politically feasible. Listening to colleagues from across the world challenged my assumptions and forced me to reframe the problem entirely. That kind of reframing—the deepening of perspective through dialogue—is one of the most exciting parts of this work.

This time they made an effort to include more women. Why do you think that's important?

Mayfield: Integral to the conduct of science is the reflection of diverse perspectives. For decades in my field of modeling energy systems and climate change mitigation, there was a homogenous group of people working in this space. This often led to a narrow, reductive framing, where the only objectives that mattered were cost minimization and profit maximization. That lens, however, neither captures the full spectrum of what people value nor reflects the complex ways individuals and systems actually behave. As the field begins to diversify, including more representation from developing countries and women, we are witnessing a broadening and deepening of the dimensions considered.

The central aim of my research is to integrate multiple objectives—climate, equity, security, air quality, land use, and other priorities that drive decisions. This multidimensional perspective must inform the assessment report if it is to reflect the realities of decision-making. At that same scoping meeting, a suggestion was to integrate the non-cost drivers and barriers that previous assessment reports did not emphasize.

How will the different groups communicate together? 

Mayfield: I anticipate the process will be highly iterative, meeting virtually with chapter co-authors, and coordinating across Working Group III. Over the four-year assessment cycle, lead authors will also convene annually in-person to foster collaboration and ensure coherence across chapters and working groups. The first of these meetings is in Paris in December as an opportunity to build shared understanding and craft a robust outline that will guide the chapter's development.

What do you hope the main benefit of this work will be?

Mayfield: Since the last assessment, the landscape of climate change mitigation has evolved from ambition to action, offering a new understanding—not only of what could work in theory, but also of what has, and has not, succeeded in practice.

This assessment is an opportunity to gather evidence, to learn from both progress and setbacks, to discern patterns across regions and sectors, and to illuminate the gaps in our understanding. Such synthesis can aid policymakers and decision-makers to act with greater insight and confidence. I also hope this report resonates with researchers, students, and all those seeking to make sense of solutions to climate change.

How confident are you in the overall process developed by the UN?

Mayfield: I'm inspired by the depth and breadth of knowledge and experience of the leadership and author team, which gives me confidence in the process. Many have studied the process, and those critiques have been used to improve it—not only for author selection, but also for how to do the assessment.

An emergent question is how or whether to use AI tools in the synthesis phase. We're going to get some training on it, but as the use of AI in research evolves, our use of it for this report will evolve as well. 

My research group at Dartmouth is initiating some parallel research about the barriers and enablers to decarbonization in specific sectors. We want to identify use standard qualitative and review approaches, and then use generative AI. Then we'll compare the results to see how AI performs and how much it can be trusted in this context.

When did you start to combine engineering and public policy?

Mayfield: I've always been motivated to do something useful, especially in relation to the environment. Growing up, I was good at math, loved creative processes, and was intrigued by politics, though I didn’t yet know how those interests fit together. This led me to pursue an undergraduate degree in science, with a minor in policy, still trying to figure out how those fields connected.

I began to see public policies as levers for systemic change, while working as an environmental engineer. In that role, I found myself navigating regulations, and inevitably seeing the flaws. I recall thinking, "I don't want to solve that particular problem for that one contaminated site. I want to solve that problem for the entire system." Internships at the US Congress and the Environmental Protection Agency further revealed how decisions are made, not just through evidence and analysis, but through politics, negotiation, and competing priorities. That realization pushed me further into systems thinking. My master's degree deepened my focus on environmental engineering and systems modeling, and then I found my intellectual home during my PhD in engineering and public policy.

Since then my work has centered on research, often in conversation with policymakers and decision-makers. I've found that engaging deeply with real-world problems is not only socially meaningful, but also it forces innovation in how we model and understand complex systems. 

In recent years, my research and communication efforts helped inform coalitions and shape the design of major US climate legislation. That work eventually led me to be recruited by the federal government—first to the White House, where the focus was communicating policy, and then to the US Department of Energy's Office of Policy, where the focus was designing policy. It was striking to see how frameworks and language developed in research were later echoed in White House communication strategies—a testament to the power of bridging research and action.

How does that experience inform your research?

Mayfield: I think about this often. We can model systems, decisions, and tradeoffs in a vacuum and untethered from how the real-world works, and while that may be a recipe for generating journal articles, it does not necessarily translate into social impact. Integrating yourself into real-world decision processes expands and sharpens research questions and provides perspective on what actually matters. 

Time and again, these experiences have reminded me that a multiobjective lens is essential—and what may at first glance seem irrational or illogical often turns out, upon closer examination, to be the very heart of the problem.