Aurelia Butler

“To do really important research in environmental policy,” said Francesca Dominici, “the first thing we need is data.”

Dominici, a professor of biostatistics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and co-director of the Harvard Data Science Initiative, recently presented the Henry W. Kendall Memorial Lecture at MIT. She described how, by leveraging massive amounts of data, Dominici and a consortium of her colleagues across the nation are revealing, on a grand scale, the effects air pollution levels have on human health in the United States. Their efforts are critical for providing a data-driven foundation on which to build environmental regulations and human health policy. “When we use data and evidence to inform policy, we can get very excellent results,”  Dominici said.

Overall, air pollution has dropped dramatically nationwide in the past 20 years, thanks to regulations dating back to the Clean Air Act of 1970. “On average, we are all breathing cleaner air,” said Dominici. But the research efforts of Dominici and her colleagues show that even relatively low air pollution levels, like those currently present in much of the country, can fall well within national regulations and still be harmful to health. Moreover, recent patterns of decreasing air pollution have left certain geographic areas worse off than others, and exacerbated environmental injustice in the process. “We are not cleaning the air equally for all of the racial groups,” Dominici said.

Speaking over Zoom to audience members tuning in from around the world, Dominici shared these findings and discussed the underlying methodologies at the 18th Henry W. Kendall Memorial Lecture on April 21. This annual lecture series, which is co-sponsored by the MIT Center for Global Change Science (CGCS) and MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS), honors the memory of the late MIT professor of physics Henry W. Kendall. Kendall was instrumental in bringing awareness of global environmental threats to the world stage through the World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity in 1992 and the Call for Action at the Kyoto Climate Summit in 1997. The Kendall Lecture spotlights leading global change science by outstanding researchers, according to Ron Prinn, TEPCO Professor of Atmospheric Science in EAPS and director of CGCS.

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How Much Evidence Do You Need? 18th Henry W. Kendall Lecture

In the various studies Dominici discussed, she and her colleagues honed in on a specific kind of harmful air pollution called fine particulate matter, or PM2.5. These tiny particles, less than 2.5 microns in width, come from a variety of sources including vehicle emissions and industrial facilities that burn fossil fuel. “Particulate matter can penetrate very deep into the lungs [and] it can get into our blood,” said Dominici, noting that this can lead to systemic inflammation, cardiovascular disease, and a compromised immune system. 

To analyze how much of a risk PM2.5 poses to human health, Dominici and her colleagues turned to the data — specifically, to large datasets about people and the environment they experience. One dataset provided fine-grained information on the more than 60 million Americans enrolled in Medicare, including not only their health history, but also factors like socioeconomic status and Zip code. Meanwhile, a team led by Joel Schwartz, a professor of environmental epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, amassed satellite data on air pollution, weather, land use, and other variables, combined it with air quality data from the EPA’s national network, and created a model that provides daily levels of PM2.5 for every square kilometer in the continental United States over the last 20 years. “In this way we could assign, to every single person enrolled in the Medicare system, their daily exposure to PM2.5,” said Dominici. 

Combining and analyzing these datasets provided a holistic look at how PM2.5 affects the population enrolled in Medicare, and yielded several important findings. Based on the current national ambient air quality standards (NAAQS) for PM2.5, levels below 12 micrograms per cubic meter are considered “safe.” However, Dominici’s team pointed out that even levels below that standard are associated with a higher risk of death. They further showed that making air quality regulations more stringent by lowering the standard to 10 micrograms per cubic meter would save an estimated 140,000 lives over the course of a decade.

The scope of the datasets enabled Dominici and her colleagues to use not only traditional statistical approaches, but also a method called matching. They compared pairs of individuals who had the same occupations, health conditions, and racial and socioeconomic profiles, but who differed in terms of PM2.5 exposure. In this way, the researchers could eliminate potential confounding factors and lend further support to their findings. 

Their research also illuminated issues of environmental injustice. “We started to see some drastic environmental differences in risk across socioeconomic and racial groups,” said Dominici. Black Americans have a risk of death from exposure to PM2.5 that is three times higher than the national average. Asian and Hispanic populations, as well as people with low socioeconomic status, are also more at risk than the national population as a whole. 

One factor behind these discrepancies is that air pollution has been decreasing at different rates in different parts of the country over the past 20 years. In 2000, nearly the entire eastern half of the United States had relatively high levels of PM2.5 at 8 micrograms per cubic meter or higher. In 2016, those pollution levels had dropped dramatically across much of the map, but remained high in areas with the highest proportions of Black residents. “Racial inequalities in air pollution exposure are actually increasing over time,” said Dominici. She noted that one thing to consider is whether future regulations can tackle such inequities while also lowering air pollution for the entire nation on average.

Issues of both air pollution and environmental injustice have been thrown into stark relief during the Covid-19 pandemic. An early study on Covid-19 and air pollution led by Dominici showed that long-term exposure to higher levels of air pollution increased the risk of dying from Covid-19, and that areas with more Black Americans are even more at risk. Additional research showed that during last year’s wildfire season in California, up to 50 percent of Covid-19 deaths in some areas were attributable to the spikes in PM2.5 that result from wildfires.

Due to a lack of data on individual Covid-19 patients, some of these analyses were based on county-level data, which Dominici noted was a major limitation. “Fortunately, in some geographical areas, we’ve started getting access to individual-level records,” said Dominici. Access to more and better data has sparked additional research around the world on the link between air pollution and Covid-19. Dominici was also part of an international collaboration that estimated, for example, that 13 percent of Covid-19 deaths in Europe were attributable to fossil-fuel related emissions. 

For Dominici, “a data scientist at heart,” findings like these highlight the role of data science in influencing critical environmental policy decisions. “Our all being devastated by this pandemic could provide an additional source of evidence of the importance of controlling fossil-fuel related emission.” More

The year 2020 was undoubtedly a challenge for everyone. The pandemic generated vast negative impacts on the world on a physical, psychological, and emotional level: mobility was restricted; socialization was limited; economic and industrial progress were put on hold. Many industries and small independent business have suffered, and academia and research have also experienced many difficulties. The education of future generations may have transitioned online, but it limited in-person learning experiences and social growth.

On the collegiate level, first-year students were barred from anticipated campus learning and research, while seniors faced tremendous anxiety over the lack of face-to-face consultations and the uncertainty of their graduation. To meet the increasing desire to reconnect, the MIT Hong Kong Innovation Node took on a new role: to expand the MIT Global Classroom initiative and breach the boundaries of learning via the collaboration of colleagues, students, and alumni across the globe.

Since its founding in 2016, the MIT Hong Kong Innovation Node has focused on cultivating the innovative and entrepreneurial capabilities of MIT students and Hong Kong university students. The collaboration with MIT alumni and students has contributed to the establishment of numerous landing programs around the globe. This accomplishment is best demonstrated by the success of the MIT Entrepreneurship and Maker Skills Integrator (MEMSI) and the MIT Entrepreneurship and FinTech Integrator (MEFTI).

In 2020, the node executed the Kowloon East Inclusive Innovation and Growth Project, which carried out smart city activities that would boost inclusion, innovation, and growth for the Hong Kong communities. The exchange of ideas between MIT students, faculty, researchers, and alumni, in collaboration with the rest of the Hong Kong community, revealed opportunities beyond Kowloon East in the neighboring cities in Pearl River Delta region. Some of these opportunities involved the production of internships and public engagement opportunities.

“Hacking” Kowloon East: activating technology for urban life

The MIT Hong Kong Innovation Node welcomed 2021 with an Independent Activities Period virtual site visit to Hong Kong in collaboration with the Department of Urban Studies and Planning. The two-week “hacking” series offered by Associate Professor Brent Ryan, head of the City Design and Development Group, altered the concept of smart cities by exploring how the current initiative in Kowloon East can be better leveraged by emerging digital technologies to connect residents to each other and enhance economic opportunities.

As a paradigm of high-density urbanism and the center of a wide variety of global and local challenges, Hong Kong provides an opportunity to rethink how physical spaces can be integrated with digital technologies for better synergy. “Hacking” series participants took advantage of this fact. Equal numbers of undergraduate student ambassadors were recruited from local universities, and paired with MIT students and Hong Kong-MIT graduate students who were based in Boston. Some of the project ideas focused on how to retail revitalization, how to promote health care and environment, and how to establish an overall human-centered urban design.

“Although I couldn’t travel physically, special lectures from the domain experts and the student pairing system with HK student ambassadors helped me discover a specific problem I wanted to tackle,” says Younjae Oh, a second-year student of the master of science in architecture studies (design) program at MIT. She went on to state that the series “inspired creativity within the team and led us to make more insightful, considered decisions upon cultural awareness. What I have found valuable in this workshop is the extremity of engagement with the cross-cultural team.”

This blend of “Hacking” contributors collaborated in an open-ended structure where they proposed and developed reality-based projects to promote “smart, equitable urbanism” in the Kowloon East (Kwun Tong) neighborhood of Hong Kong. Queenie Kwan Li, a first-year master’s student in the science in architecture studies (design) program at MIT, describes aspects of the program, mentioning, “Direct consultations with local and international domain experts lined up by the MIT Innovation Node immensely deepened my understanding of my home city’s development.” She adds, “It also gifted me a unique opportunity to relate my ongoing training at MIT for a potential impact in Hong Kong.”

Global classroom-in-action

Despite its progress in innovation, entrepreneurship, and smart city restructuring in this collaboration with the node, the pandemic highlighted an ongoing challenge of how the School of Architecture and Planning can offer a hybrid learning experience for a professional audience with mentorships and apprenticeships.

Architecture and urban design training emphasize the design studio culture of collective learning, which is vastly different from solo learning at home. This learning usually begins with a physical site visit: surveys, interviews, meeting and interacting with locals to obtain firsthand engagement experience. Under the experimentation of a hybrid format, the teaching team has to curate and piece fragments together to imitate refreshing local perspectives through tailored exercises using online interactions and team collaborations.

Although traveling experiences are always the best and most-direct ways to understand the benefits and deficits of an area, to appreciate the culture and customs, and to pinpoint challenges the locals face, it is easy to forget that people are the core, the identity of a place, when learning solely online. To make up for that deficit, the “Hacking” series invited the physical attendance of local and international members of the MIT alumni community with relevant domain expertise.

Sean Kwok ’01 says, “MIT graduates spanning five decades volunteered to teach and guide current students. In return, this workshop gave us, former MIT students, the rare opportunity to participate in the MIT academic life again, learn from our colleagues, and give back to the school at the same time.”

Some of the domain expertise included those with backgrounds in architecture, urban design and planning, real estate, mobility and transportation, public housing, workforce development, city science and urban analytics, art administration, and engineering. In fact, a total of 23 domain experts, local stakeholders, and eight mentors from various disciplines were physically involved in the program at the node’s headquarters in Hong Kong.

Throughout the series, they shared their knowledge and experiences in a hybridized format so that non-Hong Kong-based members could also participate. Joel Austin Cunningham, a first-year master’s student in the science in architecture studies (design) program at MIT, commends the “Hacking” series, stressing that it “addressed the unprecedented constraints of the coronavirus with an innovative educational solution … As architecture and urban planning students, we rely heavily upon active engagements with a project’s site, something which has been significantly constrained this academic year. The IAP workshop responded to this issue, through a multi-institutional collaboration which compensated for our inability to travel through active engagements with an array of local stakeholders and collaborators based in the city.”

Learning is a feedback loop — part of it is learned from the reconstruction of a previous experience, and part of it is constructed by us as we develop the learning experience together and assimilate new information, insights, and ideas from one another. As part of such interconnectedness, a human-centric approach, communication skills, cultural and moral values involve the inclusive diversity and empathy of everyone.  More

Susan Solomon, an atmospheric chemist whose work explaining the Antarctic ozone hole informed international policy, has received the 2020-2021 James R. Killian, Jr. Faculty Achievement Award. The highest such honor at the Institute, the award was established in 1971 to honor Killian, who served as MIT’s 10th president from 1948 to 1959, and chair of the MIT Corporation from 1959 to 1971.

As this year’s recipient, Solomon on April 14 delivered a one-hour lecture in which she touched on her path to MIT, her time in Antarctica, her work on ozone depletion, and her insights on the state of climate policy.

Solomon is the Lee and Geraldine Martin Professor of Environmental Studies in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences. She arrived at MIT in 2012, following 30 years at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Though both an Antarctic glacier and a snow saddle bear her name, at the lecture, Solomon described the Killian award as “the most wonderful honor that anyone could get.”

Solomon “is the embodiment of MIT’s motto ‘mens et manus’ or ‘mind and hand,’ and of our mission to generate, disseminate, and preserve knowledge, and to work with others to bring this knowledge to bear on the world’s great challenges,” said Rick Danheiser, the Arthur C. Cope Professor of Chemistry and current chair of the faculty, who introduced Solomon.

Solomon had an affinity for science and the beauty of the natural world long before she was exploring the Antarctic alongside penguins. Growing up, Solomon would travel every year with her family from their home in Chicago to Indiana Dunes National Park. Around age 10, she was inspired by the wonderful adventures of French explorer and scientist Jacques Cousteau on TV. Solomon decided to pursue a career in science, and soon discovered an interest in chemistry.

“At some point, I found out that there was really such a thing as chemistry in a planet’s atmosphere — not in a test tube,” she said. “And I was absolutely fascinated by that.”

In 1974, scientists at the University of California at Irvine identified that chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) — compounds which were becoming increasingly popular for use in canned hairsprays, deodorants, and cleaning supplies, as well as refrigeration and cooling systems — had devastating effects on Earth’s ozone. Even worse, once the compounds were released, they couldn’t be destroyed. Rather, they were destined to remain in the atmosphere for 40 to 150 years.

Ozone is a gas made of three oxygen atoms, and much of it can be found in the stratosphere. The stratosphere is the second layer of Earth’s atmosphere, located between 9 and 50 miles above the Earth. CFCs were depleting the layer of ozone located there, which helps to filter out ultraviolet radiation that can be toxic to living beings. Without ozone, life wouldn’t exist on Earth. And with reduced levels of ozone, there could be increases in skin cancer and cataracts.

In 1985, scientists discovered a large, shocking “hole” in the Antarctic ozone layer.

“I was very, very fortunate to be working with Rolando Garcia at [National Center for Atmospheric Research] at the time that the ozone hole was discovered,” Solomon said. “We began to think about what might be causing it, and what we came up with, basically, was this chemical process which turned out to be the right answer.”

Between 1985 and 1987, scientists from around the world independently studied ozone levels to verify the scope of the problem. In 1986, Solomon first set foot in Antarctica as part of the National Ozone Expedition.

What followed these scientific investigations was a triumph of international climate policy: the Montreal Protocol, a 1987 document signed by all members of the United Nations. The document was designed to limit CFC emissions and to restore the ozone layer. “It’s the only treaty that has that level of participation,” Solomon said.

Solomon said that swift action on the issue came down to the three “p’s”: The ozone issue was personal, perceptible, and practical. Risks posed by CFCs were personal because they could spike cancer and cataract risk; perceptible because many nations were monitoring ozone levels and noticed the change; and practical because replacements were discovered.

“I think when we think about almost any environmental problem, we can apply that rubric, and it will help us to understand what’s going on,” Solomon said, identifying smog and lead as examples. She is currently working on a book about the three p’s.

Solomon went on to receive the United States National Medal of Science in 1999, the nation’s highest scientific honor. In 2007, she and her colleagues on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change shared the Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice President Al Gore. This January, she was awarded the National Academy of Sciences Award for Chemistry in service to society.

AT MIT, Solomon is not only faculty in two departments, but also the founding director of the Environmental Solutions Initiative, an Institute-wide coalition of experts working to address the serious challenges posed by climate change.

“It’s amazing at MIT how everyone you meet is very, very good at what they do,” Solomon said. “It’s an astonishing place. I want to thank the EAPS and chemistry faculties for making me feel so welcome. I can’t imagine a better place to live, do research, and teach.” More

MIT scientists have found that ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, stay in the atmosphere for a shorter amount of time than previously estimated. Their study suggests that CFCs, which were globally phased out in 2010, should be circulating at much lower concentrations than what has recently been measured.

The new results, published today in Nature Communications, imply that new, illegal production of CFCs has likely occurred in recent years. Specifically, the analysis points to new emissions of CFC-11, CFC-12, and CFC-113. These emissions would be in violation of the Montreal Protocol, the international treaty designed to phase out the production and consumption of CFCs and other ozone-damaging chemicals.

The current study’s estimates of new global CFC-11 emissions is higher than what previous studies report. This is also the first study to quantify new global emissions of CFC-12 and CFC-113.

“We find total emissions coming from new production is on the order of 20 gigagrams a year for each of these molecules,” says lead author Megan Lickley, a postdoc in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences. “This is higher than what previous scientists suggested for CFC-11, and also identifies likely new emissions of CFC-12 and 113, which previously had been overlooked. Because CFCs are such potent greenhouse gases and destroy the ozone layer, this work has important implications for the health of our planet.”

The study’s co-authors include Sarah Fletcher at Stanford University, Matt Rigby at the University of Bristol, and Susan Solomon, the Lee and Geraldine Martin Professor of Environmental Studies in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences.

Banking on lifetimes

Prior to their global phaseout, CFCs were widely used in the manufacturing of refrigerants, aerosol sprays, chemical solvents, and building insulation. When they are emitted into the atmosphere, the chemicals can loft to the stratosphere, where they interact with ultraviolet light to release chlorine atoms, the potent agents that erode the Earth’s protective ozone.

Today, CFCs are mostly emitted by “banks” — old refrigerators, air conditioners, and insulation that were manufactured before the chemical ban and have since been slowly leaking CFCs into the atmosphere. In a study published last year, Lickley and her colleagues calculated the amount of CFCs still remaining in banks today.

They did so by developing a model that analyzes industry production of CFCs over time, and how quickly various equipment types release CFCs over time, to estimate the amount of CFCs stored in banks. They then incorporated current recommended values for the chemicals’ lifetimes to calculate the concentrations of bank-derived CFCs that should be in the atmosphere over time. Subtracting these bank emissions from total global emissions should yield any unexpected, illegal CFC production. In their new paper, the researchers looked to improve the estimates of CFC lifetimes.

“Current best estimates of atmospheric lifetimes have large uncertainties,” Lickley says. “This implies that global emissions also have large uncertainties. To refine our estimates of global emissions, we need a better estimate of atmospheric lifetimes.”

Updated spike

Rather than consider the lifetimes and emissions of each gas separately, as most models do, the team looked at CFC-11, 12, and 113 together, in order to account for similar atmospheric processes that influence their lifetimes (such as winds). These processes have been modeled by seven different chemistry-climate models, each of which provides an estimate of the gas’ atmospheric lifetime over time.

“We begin by assuming the models are all equally likely,” Lickley says. “Then we update how likely each of these models are, based on how well they match observations of CFC concentrations taken from 1979 to 2016.”

After including these chemistry-climate modeled lifetimes into a Bayesian simulation model of production and emissions, the team was able to reduce the uncertainty in their lifetime estimates. They calculated the lifetimes for CFC-11, 12, and 113 to be 49 years, 85 years, and 80 years, respectively, compared with current best values of 52, 100, and 85 years.

“Because our estimates are shorter than current best-recommended values, this implies emissions are likely higher than what best estimates have been,” Lickley says.

To test this idea, the team looked at how the shorter CFC lifetimes would affect estimates of unexpected emissions, particularly between 2014 and 2016. During this period, researchers previously identified a spike in CFC-11 emissions and subsequently traced half of these emissions to eastern China. Scientists have since observed an emissions decrease from this region, indicating that any illegal production there has stopped, though the source of the remaining unexpected emissions is still unknown.

When Lickley and her colleagues updated their estimates of CFC bank emissions and compared them with total global emissions for this three-year period, they found evidence for new, unexpected emissions on the order of 20 gigagrams, or 20 billion grams, for each chemical.

The results suggest that during this period, there was new, illegal production of CFC-11 that was higher than previous estimates, in addition to new production of CFC-12 and 113, which had not been seen before. Together, Lickley estimates that these new CFC emissions are equivalent to the total yearly greenhouse gas emissions emitted by the United Kingdom.

It’s not entirely surprising to find unexpected emissions of CFC-12, as the chemical is often co-produced in manufacturing processes that emit CFC-11. For CFC-113, the chemical’s use is permitted under the Montreal Protocol as a feedstock to make other chemicals. But the team calculates that unexpected emissions of CFC-113 are about 10 times higher than what the treaty currently allows.

“With all three gases, emissions are much lower than what they were at their peak,” Lickley says. “But they’re very potent greenhouse gases. Pound for pound, they’re five to 10,000 times more of a global warming chemical than carbon dioxide. And we’re currently facing a climate crisis where every source of emission that we can reduce will have a lasting impact on the climate system. By targeting these CFCs, we would essentially be reducing some contribution to climate change.”

This research was supported in part by VoLo Foundation. More

It was over 27 years in the making. When the White House removed Sudan from the “State Sponsors of Terrorism” list in December 2020, ZAHARA for Education was ready.

ZAHARA was founded by MIT technology and policy master’s student Ilham Ali and Harvard University alumna Sahar Omer to expand educational opportunities between Sudan and the United States. Earlier this year, the organization partnered with MIT-Africa, an MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives (MISTI) program, to launch the first-ever Global Teaching Labs (GTL) workshop for young leaders in Sudan. GTL is a long-running MISTI program that places over 300 students per year as teachers in high schools around the world.

“ZAHARA approached the MIT-Africa Program as a passionate and well-organized group,” says MIT-Africa Program Managing Director Ari Jacobovits. “It was clear that now was the time to engage with Sudan in a new and exciting way.”

Sudan-U.S. relations have recently entered a new chapter of cooperation. For decades, the two nations were frequently at odds over Middle East policy and Sudan’s civil unrest. A significant development occurred in July 2011, when South Sudan voted to break away from Sudan and establish a new country with a capital in Juba. During 2018 and 2019, Sudan’s youth-led peaceful revolution set an example for change in the country and has motivated its citizens to work toward a new era of peace and prosperity, long term.

Guided by Sudan’s changing geopolitical landscape, ZAHARA focused the lab on “being agents of change in a changing world” and led sessions on topics ranging from change-making strategies to the climate crisis to democracy and governance. 

“We chose to broadly focus on the idea of ‘making change as Sudanese youth’ to help empower our students and fellow generation to be thoughtful leaders in their communities,” Ali says. “Our main goal was to have a diverse class of students in terms of age, backgrounds, and disciplines, and to equip them with the tools to break down problems they see around them, as well as piece together innovative solutions. In picking our class topics, we relied on the strengths of the teaching team, who all have a wealth of knowledge and expertise in the various subjects presented.”

Joining Ali as lead instructors were Abdalla Osman, a senior studying mechanical engineering, and Shakes Dlamini, an SM candidate in the Technology and Policy program. The program received hundreds of applications from high school and college students eager to take part. Ali, Osman, Dlamini, and other members of the ZAHARA team then made the difficult decision of selecting their first cohort of 50 students.

“We were incredibly surprised by the amount of traction the initiative gathered on social media,” Osman says. “The application was live for only a couple of weeks, and in that time, we received over 400 applicants. We realized students all over Sudan were sharing the application with each other and encouraging each other to apply, and we were inspired by the excitement that each applicant showed. It was definitely a challenge to trim down the list of applicants to 50 students.”

Hailing from Eswatini (formerly Swaziland), Dlamini saw an opportunity to be involved with GTL in Sudan as a chance to hone his educational efforts back home.

“It was an honor to be part of the ZAHARA team. I care deeply about expanding opportunities to young people in Africa; hence joining the team was a no-brainer for me,” Dlamini says. “This is the kind of work I have been involved in with The Knowledge Institute since its founding in 2013. Working with the students and learning about their ideas and accomplishments was also inspiring for me, as it demonstrated to me the value of such programs to youth. I am looking forward to taking part in more MIT-Africa programs and working with groups like ZAHARA.”

After two intensive weeks of lectures from the lead instructors and guests, the program culminated with a poster session where student teams tackled some of the country’s biggest issues. Student groups proposed innovative solutions such as bioswales to lower pollution in the Nile River, solar energy to ease transport woes in the capital, and interactive teaching methods to improve secondary school experiences around the country.

Another group pitched a nationwide flood alert system in the wake of the devastating regional flooding throughout 2020, the team’s driving motivation for pursuing the project. “Flooding in Sudan is a huge concern that threatens our welfare. In knowing that every minute counts when lives are on the line, our flood warning system was the perfect choice,” shares the team of five. “Working virtually as a team was a challenge, but we felt rewarded by the value our project has in potentially saving many lives and possessions.” Though based in different states in Sudan, members of the organization collaborated effectively to produce a robust project vision.

Awab Rhamtalla, a student at the University of Khartoum from Jabal Awlia, was excited to participate in the inaugural program. “The reason I joined the GTL program was because I knew some things can’t be found on Google. Rich experience, tailored advice, wonderful colleagues, and awesome instructors are the reasons people go to places like MIT, and the ZAHARA team brought these things to our doorstep,” shares Rhamtalla. “To say that I am grateful for every day of the program would be an understatement. I can only hope to pay tribute to these two weeks by passing their message forward.”

Professor Elfatih Eltahir, a faculty member in MIT’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, had an opportunity to observe the poster session. “The ZAHARA team did an excellent job in planning and execution of their online course. I was impressed by the quality of the presentations by young Sudanese participants,” says Eltahir. “In particular, the presentation of the project reimagining how high school students can be taught differently in Sudan was very good, and offered a concrete example for the success and impact of this GTL-Sudan activity.”

MIT-Africa Faculty Director Evan Lieberman also joined for one session of the class. “I was impressed by the level of engagement on the part of the Sudanese students. Despite the challenges of remote teaching and learning, it was clear that this was a productive educational opportunity.”

Jacobovits and the ZAHARA team hope to build on the success of the remote GTL to launch an in-person program in the future post-Covid.

“Our main mission is to expand educational opportunities between the United States and Sudan,” Ali says. “We hope to host GTL in Sudan annually and have students from MIT visit the country once travel resumes. ZAHARA is also continuing to work on several innovative ways to bring students from the U.S. and Sudan together and to provide educational opportunities for youth, in particular.” More

America has over 4 million miles of roads and, as one might expect, monitoring them can be a monumental task.  

To collect high-quality data on the conditions of their roads, departments of transportation (DOTs) can expect to spend $200 per mile for state-of-the-art laser profilers. For cities and states, these costs are prohibitive and often force them to resort to rudimentary approaches, like visual inspection.

Over the past three years, a collaboration between the MIT Concrete Sustainability Hub (CSHub), the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, Birzeit University, and the American University of Beirut has sought to give DOTs a cheaper, but equally accurate, alternative.

Their solution, “Carbin,” is an app that allows users to crowdsource road-quality data with their smartphones. An algorithm built into the software can then estimate how that road quality affects a user’s fuel consumption.

Unlike prior road-quality crowdsourcing tools, the Carbin framework is the most sophisticated of its kind. Using the accelerometers found in smartphones, Carbin converts vehicle acceleration signals into standard measurements of road roughness used by most DOTs. It then collates these measurements onto fixmyroad.us, a publicly available global map.

Since its release in 2019, Carbin has gathered almost 600,000 miles of road-quality data in more than three dozen countries. During 2020, its developers continued to advance the app. Not only have they validated their approach in two papers — one in Data-Centric Engineering and another in The Proceedings of the Royal Society — they have also collected more than 300,000 miles of data with the help of Concrete Supply Co., a ready-mix concrete manufacturer in the Carolinas. In addition, they are initiating collaborations with automotive manufacturers and vehicle telematics companies to gather data on even greater scale.

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Roughly speaking

Carbin is not the first phone accelerometer-based approach for crowdsourcing road quality. Several other apps, including the City of Boston’s “Street Bump,” have sought to assess road quality based on one of the most recognizable signs of poor roads: potholes.

Though potholes have been the focus of prior apps, they are, however, not the main metric used by DOTs for measuring road quality and planning maintenance. Instead, DOTs rely on what is called road roughness.

“The shortcoming of previous crowdsourcing approaches is that they would record the acceleration signal and look for outliers, which would indicate potholes,” explains Botshekan. “However, they could not infer the road roughness, since that is defined over longer length scales — typically from tens of centimeters to tens of meters.”

Though roughness can seem almost imperceptible, it can have outsized effects. Rough roads not only lead to higher maintenance costs but can also increase vehicle fuel consumption — by as much as 15 percent in cities. To measure roughness, DOTs use the International Roughness Index (IRI).

“IRI is the accumulated motion of the suspension system over a specific distance,” says Arghavan Louhghalam, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth. “Higher IRI indicates lower road quality and higher fuel consumption.”

To derive IRI, DOTs don’t actually measure suspension travel explicitly. Instead, they first capture the profile of the road — essentially, the undulations of its surface — and then simulate how a car’s suspension system would respond to it using what’s called a “quarter car model.”

From quarter car to complete picture

A quarter car model is essentially what it sounds like: a model of a quarter of a car. Specifically, it refers to a model of the tires, vehicle mass, and suspension system based on one wheel of a vehicle. By developing their own car dynamics model in a probabilistic setting, Botshekan and his colleagues were able to map the acceleration signals collected by Carbin users onto the behavior of a virtual vehicle and its interaction with the road. From there, they could estimate suspension properties and road roughness in terms of IRI. Using an algorithm developed based on past CSHub research, Carbin then estimates how IRI values can impact vehicle fuel consumption.

“At the end of the day, the vehicle is like a filter,” explains Mazdak Tootkaboni, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at UMass Dartmouth. “The excitation of the road goes through the vehicle and is then sensed by the cellphone. So, what we do is understand this filter and take it out of the equation.”

After developing their model, the Carbin team then sought to test it against more costly, conventional methods. They did this through two different validations. 

In the first, they measured road quality on two test tracks in the Greater Boston area — a major thoroughfare and then a highway — using a conventional laser profiler and several phones equipped with Carbin. When they compared the data afterward, they found that Carbin could predict laser-based roughness measurements with 90 percent accuracy.

The second validation probed Carbin’s crowdsourcing capabilities. In it, they analyzed over 22,000 kilometers of Federal Highway Administration road data from California beside 27,000 kilometers of data gathered by 84 Carbin users from the same state. The results of their analysis revealed a remarkable resemblance between the crowdsourced and official data — a sign that Carbin could augment or even entirely replace conventional methods.

21st century infrastructure, 21st century tools

Now that they’ve thoroughly validated their model, Carbin’s developers want to expand the app to provide users, governments, and companies with unparalleled insights into both vehicles and infrastructure.

The most apparent use for Carbin, says Jake Roxon, a CSHub postdoc and Carbin’s creator, would be as a tool for DOTs to improve America’s roads — which recently received a grade of D from the American Society of Civil Engineers.

“On average, America’s roads are terrible,” he explains. “But the problem isn’t always in the funding of DOTs themselves, but rather how they allocate that funding. By knowing the quality of an entire road network, which is impossible with current technologies, they could fix roads more efficiently.”

The issue, then, is how Carbin can transition from gathering data to also recommending resource allocation. To make this possible, the Carbin team is beginning to incorporate prior CSHub research on network asset management — the process through which DOTs monitor pavement performance and plan maintenance to meet performance targets.

Besides serving the needs of DOTs, Carbin could also help private companies. “There are private firms, fleet companies especially, that would benefit from this technology,” says Roxon. “Eventually, they could use Carbin for ‘eco-routing,’ which is when you identify the route that is most fuel-efficient.”

Such a routing option could help companies both reduce their environmental impact and running costs — for those with thousands of vehicles, the aggregate savings could be substantial.

While further development is needed to incorporate eco-routing and asset management into Carbin, its developers see it as a promising tool. Franz-Josef Ulm, professor at the MIT Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and faculty director of CSHub, believes that Carbin represents a necessary step forward.

“To develop the infrastructure of the 21st century, we need 21st-century means of assessing the state of that infrastructure to ensure that any dollar spent today is well spent for the future,” he says. “That’s precisely where Carbin enters the picture.” More

In this ongoing series, MIT faculty, students, and alumni in the humanistic fields share perspectives that are significant for solving climate change and mitigating its myriad social and ecological impacts. Nadia Christidi is a PhD student in MIT HASTS, a program that combines research in history, anthropology, science, technology, and society. Her dissertation examines how three cities that face water supply challenges are imagining, planning, and preparing for the future of water. Christidi has a particular interest in the roles that art, design, and architecture are playing in that future imagining and future planning process. MIT SHASS Communications spoke with her on the ways that her field and visual cultures contribute to solving issues of climate change.   

Q: There are many sensible approaches to addressing the climate crisis. Increasingly, it looks as if we’ll need all of them. What perspectives from the HASTS fields are significant for addressing climate change and its ecological and social impacts?

A: My research focuses on how three cities that face water supply challenges are imagining, planning, and preparing for the future of water. The three cities I focus on are Los Angeles, Dubai, and Cape Town. Water is one of the key issues when it comes to adapting to climate change and my work tries to understand how climate change impacts are understood and adaptation policies developed.

My approach to climate change and adaptation brings together various disciplines — history, anthropology, science and technology studies, and visual cultures; each of these helps me see and elucidates very particular aspects of climate change.

I think history reminds us that our ways of being and systems are historically constructed rather than given, inevitable, or natural, and that there is an alternative. Anthropology elucidates that while we may all talk about “climate change,” what is meant by it, how it is understood and experienced, and how it is dealt with as a problem will differ from place to place; climate change is as much a social and cultural phenomenon and experience as it is a scientific or environmental one, as much a global issue as it is a local one. The social, cultural, and local, anthropology reminds us, have to be factored into meaningful policy.

Science and technology studies sheds light on the various communities involved in developing climate change knowledge; the role that their investments, stakes, and interests play; and the translation between science and policy that needs to happen for scientifically-informed policy to emerge. The STS perspective also points out that science is one of many systems for understanding climate change and that there may be other valid, useful worldviews from which we can learn.

And finally, visual cultures underscore how pop cultural and visual references, symbols, and imagery shape imaginaries and expectations of climate change, including scientific ones, and sometimes open up or foreclose pathways to action.

Q: What pathways of thought and action do you personally think might be most fruitful for alleviating climate change and its impacts — and for forging a more sustainable future?

A: I think we are going to need a lot of imagination going forward. As climate change gets underway, we’re seeing a lot more emphasis on adaptation, and imagination is key to adapting to a set of totally different circumstances.

This belief has led me to explore the “imaginative capacities” of planning institutions, the impact of popular culture imaginaries, from the utopian to the dystopian, on our preparations for the future, and the role that creative practitioners — including artists, architects, and designers — can play in expanding our imaginative possibilities.

One of my interlocutors aptly uses the phrase “crisis of imagination” to describe the present. In order for the necessary imagination work to take place, we must take seriously different actors as sources of knowledge, expertise, and perspectives, and make the process of imagining and planning more inclusive.

Partly, my work considers how creative practitioners are imagining climate change and the future of water and the alternative knowledge or perspectives they can offer. Most of the works that I look at involve collaborations between artists/architects, scientists, engineers, and/or policymakers. They see artists contributing to science or transforming urban space or impacting policy.

For instance, the UAE pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale, Wetland, will unveil a locally-produced salt-based building material as an alternative to cement. Developed by Dubai-based architects Wael Al Awar and Kenichi Teramoto, the pavilion tackles the issues of brine — a salty byproduct of desalination, which is the country’s main source of potable water — and the carbon footprint of cement use in Dubai’s robust construction industry.

Inspired by historical examples of salt architecture and by the natural architectures of local salt flat ecosystems, the architects worked with scientists from NYU Abu Dhabi to develop the material. Such work shows how interdisciplinary collaborations with creative practitioners can not only advance the sciences, but also reimagine established industries and practices, and develop innovative approaches to the carbon emissions problem.

Peggy Weil, an artist based in Los Angeles, rethinks landscape as a genre in our climate-changed present. Holding that the traditional horizontal format of the landscape is no longer representative, she develops “underscapes,” where she films the length of ice cores or aquifers, and “overscapes,” which involve studies of the air, as portraits of the Earth. These ‘scapes’ argue for a need to re-perceive our surroundings in order to more fully understand how we have chemically, hydrogeologically, and climatically transformed them.

Peggy and I have talked extensively about how important “re-perceiving” will be for encouraging behavior changes and generating economic and political support for the work of water managers and policymakers as well as the role of the arts in driving this “re-perception.”

Q: What dimensions of the emerging climate crisis affect you most deeply — causing uncertainty, and/or altering the ways you think about the present and the future? When you confront an issue as formidable as climate change, what gives you hope?    

A: I think one dimension of the climate crisis I find especially disturbing is its configuration at times and in certain places as an economic opportunity, where new devastating environmental conditions are taken to be opportunities for innovation and technological development that will enable economic growth.

This becomes especially compelling in times of economic deceleration or as the specter of the end of oil grows stronger. But we need to ask: economic growth for whom, at what costs, and with what effects? And is growth what we really need?

I don’t think that the economy should be pitted against the environment; I am a total believer in sustainability as an issue that must encompass the economic, social, and environmental. But the real problems are with economic distribution rather than growth, and the promise of unlimited growth — as further stoked by renewables — which is a fallacy or fantasy.

I tend to agree with journalist Naomi Klein that the market, green or not, isn’t going to solve climate change challenges because we need more than just a technofix; we need policy and behavioral changes and new investment directions, many of which go against established economic arrangements and priorities. Locally produced salt-based building materials are a good start, but not enough.

Some of the most challenging and consequential imaginative work we will have to do will be on the social front; this will entail reconsidering some things we take for granted. I love theorist Frederic Jameson’s suggestion that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism,” as well as Mike Fisher’s concept of “capitalist realism,” which captures the ideological underpinnings of that worldview.

The privatization of water is one of the scariest intensifying developments in my mind, especially given anticipated climate change effects, but I take some reassurance from projects that aim to counter such trends. One of the promising architectural proposals I’ve studied in Los Angeles is by Stephanie Newcomb. Stephanie’s work, Coopelluvia, aims to complement stormwater capture projects developed by governmental entities in LA county on public land and that form a major prong of the City of LA’s water planning strategy; it explores the possibility of turning stormwater captured in side setback spaces between private properties into a communal water resource in the low-income, predominantly Latino neighborhoods of Pacoima and Arletta in the San Fernando Valley.

Stephanie’s proposed intervention blurs the boundary between public and private and empowers marginalized communities through developing communal resource management systems with multiple environmental and social benefits. Her work is guided by theories of the commons, rather than privatization and market-oriented solutions — and I think such projects and theories hold a lot of promise for facilitating the kinds of radical change we need.

Series prepared by SHASS CommunicationsEditorial and Design Director: Emily HiestandCo-Editor: Kathryn O’Neill More