Grant: Alliance Grants

The Global Nitrogen Innovation Center for Clean Energy and the Environment (NICCEE) aims to enable and accelerate social and technological innovation for sustainable and climate-smart nitrogen management in agriculture-food-energy systems. While climate change and nitrogen (N) pollution have been recognized as two major threats facing humanity, current efforts in pursuit of climate mitigation and clean energy have typically emphasized decarbonizing the energy sector, while paying less attention to the opportunities and challenges in connection with nitrogen pollution. This knowledge gap is critical and urgent to address for two major reasons. First, many emerging decarbonization strategies (e.g., using ammonia as carbon-free fuel) may dramatically increase the production and use of reactive N, potentially accelerating N pollution while creating new economic and social challenges for food system actors. Second, improved management of N in agriculture and the food system presents a crucial opportunity for combating climate change, but its wide adoption has been slow due to ecological, social, economic, and technological barriers. The Global NICCEE center will have the following three core functions: 1) Information hub. The center will provide cyberinfrastructure as the foundation to inform the co-development of technology and social innovation ideas, including state-of-art information of N flow data in agriculture-food-energy systems and evaluation of technologies in addressing climate and N pollution threats. 2) Innovation platform. The center will create a collaborative space for stakeholders, scientists, and engineers to identify opportunities for technology and socio-economic innovations through a participatory process. 3) Education center. The center will offer a variety of transdisciplinary training programs for college and graduate students to work with stakeholders from various countries (e.g., US, Canada, UK). The center's legacy will extend beyond harnessing green ammonia for clean energy and food production, as it also offers a platform to train the workforce and foster a wide range of innovations in sustainable and climate-smart N management from both socioeconomic and technological perspectives.