The atmospheric chemist who helped the 1987 Montreal Protocol succeed has been awarded the 2026 Tang Prize in Sustainable Development, a Taiwan based biennial award carrying about US$1.6 million, for a career that mapped both the rare atmospheric recovery and the longer climate…
In August 1986, a 30-year-old atmospheric chemist named Susan Solomon stepped off a research plane on the Antarctic plateau and set in motion the chain of evidence that would force the world to ban the chemicals then leaking out of every refrigerator and aerosol can on Earth. Forty years later, the Tang Prize Foundation has named her the 2026 laureate in Sustainable Development, the first of four category winners the foundation will announce this week.
The Taipei-based Tang Prize, established in 2012 by Taiwanese businessman Samuel Yin, is awarded every two years across Sustainable Development, Biopharmaceutical Science, Sinology, and Rule of Law. Each laureate receives NT$50 million (about US$1.6 million), of which NT$10 million is earmarked for research or educational outreach. Selection is handled by independent committees that include Nobel laureates and other internationally recognized experts, according to the Tang Prize Foundation announcement distributed via PR Newswire.
Solomon's citation honors "groundbreaking advances and leadership in atmospheric and climate sciences that shaped global policy for Sustainable Development," the foundation's wording, and credits her with four contributions. The first is the one that put her on the map. Flying into the Antarctic polar vortex with a NOAA team in 1986 and again in 1987, she and her colleagues measured a telltale spike in chlorine monoxide, a chemical fingerprint of chlorine compounds called chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, breaking down in the high-altitude cold. That fingerprint, plus the heterogeneous chemistry she proposed to explain it, established that man-made CFCs were the cause of the Antarctic ozone hole rather than some quirk of polar meteorology.
That finding, in turn, gave the 1987 Montreal Protocol its scientific spine. The treaty phased out CFCs globally, and the ozone layer has been on a multi-decade recovery track ever since. It is the rare environmental treaty widely regarded as having actually worked. The Tang Prize Foundation announcement frames Solomon's 2026 honor as a 40-year arc from those Antarctic expeditions to the present, and the foundation's case is straightforward: the data she helped produce is why the world had something to ratify.
The second half of the citation is the more uncomfortable one. Solomon, now the Lee and Geraldine Martin Professor of Environmental Studies at MIT's Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, did not stop at ozone. Beginning in the late 2000s, her work on atmospheric lifetimes made explicit what many climate scientists had been circling for years: the carbon dioxide already emitted will continue to warm the planet for more than a thousand years, on a timescale that no policy and no technology currently on the drawing board can meaningfully shorten. The foundation's announcement quotes her finding that human influence on climate is "largely irreversible for more than 1,000 years."
That second finding is the constructive tension inside the same career. The Montreal Protocol proved that coordinated, science-driven action can close an atmospheric problem, but it worked in part because the offending molecules had short atmospheric lifetimes, the substitute chemicals already existed, and the industry that made CFCs had a financial interest in switching. Carbon dioxide, by Solomon's own measurements, has no equivalent off-ramp. The atmosphere she helped heal is not the atmosphere her later research is asking the world to manage.
Solomon has the standing to make that argument. She spent roughly 30 years at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the U.S. agency that runs weather and climate research, before joining MIT in 2012. She co-led Working Group I, the physical-science chapter, of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Fourth Assessment Report in 2007, the report that put a formal probability range on human-driven warming and made "likely" the operative word in international climate negotiations. Her honors include the U.S. National Medal of Science, the National Academy of Sciences Award for Chemistry in Service to Society, the Blue Planet Prize, and roughly 70 international awards in total, according to the Tang Prize announcement.
What to watch next is the unfinished business her citation points to. The Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol, agreed in 2016, is phasing down hydrofluorocarbons, the CFC substitutes that turned out to be powerful greenhouse gases in their own right, and Solomon's earlier work on the science of atmospheric phase-downs has been cited as a structural model for subsequent international agreements on other atmospheric pollutants. Her 1,000-year irreversibility framing, which she helped put into the IPCC's scientific vocabulary, is the working assumption behind every carbon-budget calculation in current climate policy. The prize is being awarded not for a closed chapter but for the diagnostic work the next forty years will be built on.