Tom Schuler

Tom Schuler is affiliated with Duke University, where his work centers on sustainable building materials and climate solutions. He presented at Countdown 2020, a global climate initiative, where he explored groundbreaking approaches to transforming one of the world's most carbon-intensive industries.

Schuler's work addresses a critical challenge in the fight against climate change: concrete production accounts for approximately 8% of global CO2 emissions, yet remains essential to modern construction. His research and speaking focus on innovative methods to not only reduce concrete's carbon footprint, but to actually make it carbon-negative - meaning the material would remove more CO2 from the atmosphere than it produces.

This represents a paradigm shift in sustainable construction, offering the potential to turn buildings and infrastructure into carbon sinks rather than sources of emissions. By reimagining fundamental materials through this lens, his work contributes to scalable solutions that could significantly impact global decarbonization efforts.