Envisioning ARPA-C: a transdisciplinary institution for radical climate research and intervention

Abstract

President Joe Biden's administration is poised to make a significant investment in climate research, including the creation of ARPA-C (Advanced Research Projects Agency-Climate). This commentary serves to promote discourse on ARPA-C and the future of government-led climate research. Here, we propose a revolutionary leap to the ARPA model that incorporates a focus on culture and equity in a unique institutional structure anchored by transdisciplinarity. With ARPA-C, we argue for a radical rethinking of climate interventions that reconciles and evolves the relationship between social, technical, and environmental systems, by finding integrated pathways to improvement via a high-risk, creative, and transformative climate action agenda. Without research that can address the network of causal relationships across multiple scales, systems, and nations, programmatic models for climate research and implementation are unlikely to succeed.