The Climate Project at MIT

As an institution with a history of rising to meet serious challenges, MIT is mounting a bold, tenacious new response to the global threat posed by climate change. Introducing the Climate Project at MIT, a whole-Institute mobilization through which MIT will become one of the world’s most prolific and collaborative sources of technological, behavioral, and policy solutions for the global climate challenge within the next decade. The Climate Project is a nimble organizational approach that represents a new model of university-led innovation to achieve fast, practical impact at scale. Three interconnected, discipline-spanning components– Climate Missions, Climate Frontier Projects, and the Climate HQ–will make it possible for the people of MIT to identify critical gaps in the global climate response and experiment with novel ways to deploy our intellectual resources and engage external partners to tackle them. The initiative will be guided and shaped by the vice president for climate at MIT, a newly created role.

The Climate Project at MIT is designed so the MIT community and our local and international partners can rapidly develop solutions to some of the toughest problems standing in the way of an effective global climate response.

MIT-based problem-solving communities will be organized around critical Climate Missions. Each will address a broad domain for which solutions are required for effective climate response and where excellent research capabilities exist at MIT. Led by a faculty director and an executive director, the Climate Missions will assess national and global progress; identify critical gaps and bottlenecks as well as promising new pathways for action; and select, launch, and support projects to accelerate progress.

MIT faculty members who have agreed to lead the six Climate Missions at the heart of the Climate Project at MIT will be:

• Decarbonizing Energy and Industry (Elsa Olivetti, Materials Science and Engineering)
This mission supports advances in the electric power grid as well as the transition across all industry — including transportation, computing, heavy production, and manufacturing — to low-emissions pathways.

• Restoring the Atmosphere, Protecting the Land and Oceans
(Andrew Babbin, Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences and Jesse Kroll, Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Chemical Engineering)
This mission is centered on removing or storing greenhouse gases that have already been emitted into the atmosphere, such as carbon dioxide and methane, and on protecting ocean and land ecosystems, including food and water systems.

• Empowering Frontline Communities (Miho Mazereeuw, Architecture)
This mission focuses on the development of new climate solutions in support of the world’s most vulnerable populations, in areas ranging from health effects to food security, emergency planning, and risk forecasting.

• Building and Adapting Healthy, Resilient Cities (Christoph Reinhart, Architecture)
A majority of the world’s population lives in cities, so urban design and planning is a crucial part of climate work, involving transportation, infrastructure, finance, government, and more.

• Inventing New Policy Approaches (Christopher Knittel, MIT Sloan)
Climate change is a unique crisis. With that in mind, this mission aims to develop new institutional structures and incentives — in carbon markets, finance, trade policy, and more — along with decision support tools and systems for scaling up climate efforts.

• Wild Cards (Benedetto Marelli, Civil and Environmental Engineering)
This mission consists of what the Climate Project at MIT calls “unconventional solutions outside the scope of the other missions,” and will have a broad portfolio for innovation.

Launched by and funded through the Climate Missions, Climate Frontier Projects will take on hard problems that are either roadblocks to climate progress or whose resolution will create important new pathways for climate action. These projects will have clear milestones, deliverables, and accountability. In all cases, the focus will be on accelerating impact, whether by developing and testing prototypes, collecting data, testing and evaluating the impact of new policy implementations, and supporting large-scale deployment of industrial technologies and systems.

The Climate HQ will support fundamental research in the core scientific and humanistic disciplines related to climate and promote engagement between researchers in these disciplines and the Climate Missions. It will allocate Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program students, graduate and postdoc fellowships, junior faculty seed funds, and senior climate innovation fellowships and will ensure MIT’s departments, laboratories, centers, and initiatives (DLCIs) are equipped to engage in climate-related research and education. Leadership of the Climate HQ will work with the DLCIs on climate-related faculty recruiting and hiring.