The MIT atmospheric chemist, named Monday as the 2026 laureate of Taiwan's Tang Prize in Sustainable Development, says the carbon dioxide driving modern warming will stay locked into the climate system for more than a thousand years, a longer shadow than the one her 1980s work…
In the 1980s, atmospheric chemist Susan Solomon walked out onto the Antarctic plateau and helped prove that a class of industrial chemicals called chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) was tearing a hole in the ozone layer above the continent. That work helped forge the 1987 Montreal Protocol, the United Nations treaty that phased out ozone-depleting chemicals and is widely treated as the rare global environmental agreement that actually worked. On June 15, 2026, the Tang Prize Foundation named Solomon the laureate in Sustainable Development, a biennial award established in 2012 by Taiwanese businessman and philanthropist Samuel Yin, citing her "groundbreaking advances and leadership in atmospheric and climate sciences that shaped global policy for Sustainable Development," according to the Foundation's announcement distributed by PRNewswire.
The prize comes with NT$50 million, roughly US$1.6 million at recent exchange rates, of which NT$10 million is earmarked as a research or education grant. Solomon, the Lee and Geraldine Martin Professor of Environmental Studies at MIT, is the first of four laureates the Foundation will name this week across its categories of Sustainable Development, Biopharmaceutical Science, Sinology, and Rule of Law.
The honor lands on Solomon for two distinct bodies of work, and the contrast between them is the reason her current warning carries unusual weight. The first chapter is the one the Montreal Protocol closed. Solomon joined the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in 1982 and, over the following decade, led the field expeditions and laboratory studies that linked CFCs to the annual thinning of stratospheric ozone over Antarctica. Her group showed not only that CFCs were the culprit, but also how: chlorine released from CFC breakdown was being amplified by reactions on the surface of polar stratospheric clouds, a heterogeneous chemistry mechanism that became the standard explanation for why the hole formed at all. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN body that synthesizes climate science for policymakers, later co-led by Solomon for its Fourth Assessment Report on the physical science of climate change in 2007, has called the Montreal Protocol the most successful international environmental agreement in history. The Antarctic ozone hole has been slowly healing ever since.
The second chapter is the one Solomon now spends most of her time on, and it is the reason the Tang Prize citation reaches beyond the ozone story. Beginning in the late 2000s, Solomon and collaborators published a series of papers arguing that carbon dioxide is a different category of pollutant from the CFCs she helped remove. Where CFCs had atmospheric lifetimes of decades to a century, the CO₂ that human activity has added to the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution will continue to affect the climate for more than a thousand years, because the ocean and the biosphere only absorb a fraction of any given pulse on shorter timescales. The framing, which Solomon has reiterated in talks and interviews over the past decade, is not that climate change is unsolvable. It is that the recovery curve is geologic rather than generational, and that the policy choices made in the next two or three decades will determine the climate future for civilizations that will not be born for many centuries.
Solomon's own trajectory tracks that shift. She spent roughly thirty years at NOAA before joining MIT in 2012, and her publication record spans the CFC era, the IPCC AR4 cycle, and the long-tail CO₂ irreversibility work that followed. The Foundation's release notes she has received nearly 70 international awards and honors over her career, including the U.S. National Medal of Science, the National Academy of Sciences Award for Chemistry in Service to Society, and the Blue Planet Prize. The 2026 Tang Prize lands exactly 40 years after her first Antarctic expeditions, a coincidence the Foundation highlighted and one that fits her own habit of framing the climate problem in millennial rather than electoral terms.
The open question, and the one Solomon has been most willing to put on the record, is whether the political machinery that closed the ozone chapter can be redirected toward the longer one. The Montreal Protocol succeeded in part because the chemical industry had already developed cheap substitutes for CFCs by the time the treaty was negotiated, and because the damage was visible, dramatic, and concentrated over a single continent. Carbon dioxide has no such drop-in replacement on a comparable scale, and the emissions come from the basic structure of the global energy system rather than from a narrow set of manufacturers. Solomon has argued in her public writing that the Montreal Protocol still offers a useful template, not as a literal playbook, but as proof that coordinated international action can bend an environmental curve on a human-relevant timescale when the science is clear and the substitutes exist. What remains unsettled, and what the next decade of climate diplomacy will be judged on, is whether the same coordination is possible when the target is the foundation of the energy economy itself.