Grand challenges present great opportunities in environmental catalysis

We are living in a time full of grand challenges that stifle us from achieving Sustainable Development Goals: climate change, resource depletion, water shortage, food crisis, and pandemic diseases, just to name a few. The ever-growing productivity of our society brings wealth and quality of life, but also induces pollution and other environmental issues that have often been major causes of the grand challenges we face today (Lou et al., 2022). These impact people unequally, depending on their wealth and living environments, thus further exacerbating the disparities among populations. Addressing these challenges calls for a holistic approach integrating more efficient pollution control, cleaner production, and greener processes. Environmental catalysis, by developing catalysts having environmental significance, emerges to play a key role in meeting these challenges (Rodríguez-Padrón et al., 2019). Catalytic processes are used to transform contaminants in water, soil, and air for pollution prevention and remediation, produce green energy, reduce CO2, recycle and reuse waste, and rapidly detect pathogens in the environment. All these can be achieved via catalysis, the process that increases the rate of a reaction through the action of a catalyst, with greater efficiency and selectivity at the expense of less material and energy input. Identified below are some examples that may illustrate the opportunities in environmental catalysis and the great potential it holds to help building a sustainable future for all.