Aurelia Butler

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Launched today, the MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium (MCSC) convenes an alliance of leaders from a broad range of industries and aims to vastly accelerate large-scale, real-world implementation of solutions to address the threat of climate change. The MCSC unites similarly motivated, highly creative and influential companies to work with MIT to build a process, market, and ambitious implementation strategy for environmental innovation. 
The work of the consortium will involve a true cross-sector collaboration to meet the urgency of climate change. The MCSC will take positive action and foster the necessary collaboration to meet this challenge, with the intention of influencing efforts across industries. Through a unifying, deeply inclusive, global effort, the MCSC will strive to drive down costs, lower barriers to adoption of best-available technology and processes, speed retirement of carbon-intensive power generating and materials-producing equipment, direct investment where it will be most effective, and rapidly translate best practices from one industry to the next in an effort to deploy social and technological solutions at a pace more rapid than the planet’s intensifying crises.

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“If we hope to decarbonize the economy, we must work with the companies that make the economy run. Drawing its members from a broad range of industries, the MCSC will convene an alliance of influential corporations motivated to work with MIT, and with each other, to pilot and deploy the solutions necessary to reach their own ambitious decarbonization commitments,” says MIT President L. Rafael Reif. “By sharing solutions across companies and sectors, the consortium has the potential to vastly accelerate the implementation of large-scale, real-world solutions to help meet the global climate emergency. And as an Institute-wide effort, it will also complement MIT’s existing climate initiatives and make them more effective: Just as the Climate Grand Challenges effort is accelerating research on climate science and solutions, the consortium aims to accelerate the adoption of such solutions, at scale and across industries.”
Led by the MIT School of Engineering and engaging students, faculty, and researchers from across the entire Institute, the MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium has called upon companies from a broad range of industries — from aviation to agriculture, consumer services to electronics, chemical production to textiles, and infrastructure to software — to roll up their sleeves and work closely with every corner of MIT.
“This new collaboration represents the incredible potential for academia and industry to work together on a shared mission to shape research, identify opportunities for innovation, and rapidly advance practical solutions with the sense of urgency needed to address our climate challenge. There are no bounds to what we can achieve together,” says Anantha P. Chandrakasan, dean of the School of Engineering, Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and chair of the MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium.
The inaugural members of the MCSC are companies with intricate supply chains that are among the best positioned to help lead the mission to solve the climate crisis. The inaugural member companies of the MCSC recognize the responsibility industry has in the rapid deployment of social and technology solutions. They represent the heart of global industry and have made a commitment to not only work with MIT but with one another, to tackle the climate challenge with the urgency required to realize their goals.
These industry leaders can both help inspire transformative change within their own sectors and demonstrate the value of working together, across sectors, at scale. The inaugural members of the MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium are:
Accenture is a global professional services company that delivers on the promise of technology and human ingenuity, which includes helping clients across 40 industries reach their sustainability goals by transitioning to low-carbon energy; reducing the carbon footprint of IT, cloud, and software; and designing and delivering net-zero, circular supply chains. 
Apple is a global leader in technology innovation, providing seamless experiences across Apple devices and empowering people with breakthrough services. 
Boeing is the world’s largest aerospace company and leading provider of commercial airplanes, defense, space and security systems, and global services. 
Cargill is a global food manufacturer with the goal of nourishing the world in a safe, responsible, and sustainable way. 
Dow is a global manufacturer of innovative products that solve the materials science challenges of its customers and contribute to a more sustainable world.  
IBM is a hybrid cloud platform and artificial intelligence company. 
Inditex is one of the world’s largest fashion retail groups with eight distinct brands focused on fitting its products to meet customer demands in a sustainable way through an integrated platform of physical and online stores. 
LafargeHolcim is the world’s global leader in building materials and solutions at the forefront of sustainable construction. 
MathWorks develops mathematical computing software used to accelerate the pace of engineering and science. 
Nexplore (Hochtief) is an innovative company that develops technology solutions to digitize the infrastructure sector, using next-generation technologies including artificial intelligence, blockchain, computer vision, natural language processing, and internet of things. Nexplore was founded in 2018 by HOCHTIEF, one of the largest infrastructure construction groups worldwide. 
Rand-Whitney Containerboard (RWCB), a Kraft Group company, is a manufacturer of lightweight, high-performance recycled linerboard for corrugated containers, using the most environmentally sustainable production processes and methods. 
PepsiCo is a global food and beverage company that aims to use its scale, reach, and expertise to help build a more sustainable food system. 
Verizon is one of the world’s leading providers of technology, communications, information and entertainment products and services.
Jeffrey Grossman will serve as director of the MCSC. Grossman is the Morton and Claire Goulder and Family Professor in Environmental Systems, head of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, and a MacVicar Faculty Fellow. Elsa Olivetti, the Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Associate Professor in Materials Science and Engineering, will serve as associate director. A steering committee comprised of faculty spanning all five of MIT’s schools and the MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing, will help to drive the work of the consortium. More

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Corals have evolved over millennia to live, and even thrive, in waters with few nutrients. In healthy reefs, the water is often exceptionally clear, mainly because corals have found ways to make optimal use of the few resources around them. Any change to these conditions can throw a coral’s health off balance.
Now, researchers at MIT and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), in collaboration with oceanographers and marine biologists in Cuba, have identified microbes living within the slimy biofilms of some coral species that may help protect the coral against certain nutrient imbalances.
The team found these microbes can take up and “scrub out” nitrogen from a coral’s surroundings. At low concentrations, nitrogen can be an essential nutrient for corals, providing energy for them to grow. But an overabundance of nitrogen, for instance from the leaching of nitrogen-rich fertilizers into the ocean, can trigger mats of algae to bloom. The algae can outcompete coral for resources, leaving the reefs stressed and bleached of color.
By taking up excess nitrogen, the newly identified microbes may prevent algal competition, thereby serving as tiny protectors of the coral they inhabit. While corals around the world are experiencing widespread stress and bleaching from global warming, it seems that some species have found ways to protect themselves from other, nitrogen-related sources of stress.
“One of the aspects of finding these organisms in association with corals is, there’s a natural way that corals are able to combat anthropogenic influence, at least in terms of nitrogen availability, and that’s a very good thing,” says Andrew Babbin, the Doherty Assistant Professor in Ocean Utilization in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences. “This could be a very natural way that reefs can protect themselves, at least to some extent.”
Babbin and his colleagues, including MIT graduate students Diana Dumit, Tyler Tamasi, Laura Weber, and Sarah Schwartz, have reported their findings in the ISME Journal.
Dead zone analogues
Babbin’s group studies how marine communities in the ocean cycle nitrogen, a key element for life. Nitrogen in the ocean can take various forms, such as ammonia, nitrite, and nitrate. Babbin has been especially interested in studying how nitrogen cycles, or is taken up, in anoxic environments — low-oxygen regions of the ocean, also known as “dead zones,” where fish are rarely found and microbial life can thrive.
“Locations without enough oxygen for fish are where bacteria start doing something different, which is exciting to us,” Babbin says. “For instance, they can start to consume nitrate, which has then an impact on how productive a specific part of the water can be.”
Dead zones are not the only anoxic regions of the ocean where bacteria exhibit nitrogen-feasting behavior. Low-oxygen environments can be found at smaller scales, such as within biofilms, the microbe-rich slime that covers marine surfaces from shipwrecked hulls to coral reefs.
“We have biofilms inside us that allow different anaerobic processes to happen,” Babbin notes. “The same is true of corals, which can generate a ton of mucus, which acts as this retardation barrier for oxygen.”
Despite the fact that corals are close to the surface and within reach of oxygen, Babbin wondered whether coral slime would serve to promote “anoxic pockets,” or concentrated regions of low oxygen, where nitrate-consuming bacteria might thrive.
He broached the idea to WHOI marine microbiologist Amy Apprill, and in 2017, the researchers set off with a science team on a cruise to Cuba, where Apprill had planned a study of corals in the protected national park, Jardines de la Reina, or Gardens of the Queen.
“This protected area is one of the last refuges for healthy Caribbean corals,” Babbin says. “Our hope was to study one of these less impacted areas to get a baseline for what kind of nitrogen cycle dynamics are associated with the corals themselves, which would allow us to understand what an anthropogenic perturbation would do to that system.”
Swabbing for scrubbers
In exploring the reefs, the scientists took small samples from coral species that were abundant in the area. Onboard the ship, they incubated each coral specimen in its own seawater, along with a tracer of nitrogen — a slightly heavier version of the molecules found naturally in seawater.
They brought the samples back to Cambridge and analyzed them with a mass spectrometer to measure how the balance of nitrogen molecules changed over time. Depending on the type of molecule that was consumed or produced in the sample, the researchers could estimate the rate at which nitrogen was reduced and essentially denitrified, or increased through other metabolic processes.
In almost every coral sample, they observed rates of denitrification were higher than most other processes; something on the coral itself was likely taking up the molecule.
The researchers swabbed the surface of each coral and grew the slimy specimens on Petri dishes, which they examined for specific bacteria that are known to metabolize nitrogen. This analysis revealed multiple nitrogen-scrubbing bacteria, which lived in most coral samples.
“Our results would imply that these organisms, living in association with the corals, have a way to clean up the very local environment,” Babbin says. “There are some coral species, like this brain coral Diploria, that exhibit extremely rapid nitrogen cycling and happen to be quite hardy, even through an anthropogenic change, whereas Acropora, which is in rough shape throughout the Caribbean, exhibits very little nitrogen cycling. ”
Whether nitrogen-scrubbing microbes directly contribute to a coral’s health is still unclear. The team’s results are the first evidence of such a connection. Going forward, Babbin plans to explore other parts of the ocean, such as the tropical Pacific, to see whether similar microbes exist on other corals, and to what extent the bacteria help to preserve their hosts. His guess is that their role is similar to the microbes in our own systems.
“The more we look at the human microbiome, the more we realize the organisms that are living in association with us do drive our health,” Babbin says. “The exact same thing is true of coral reefs. It’s the coral microbiome that defines the health of the coral system. And what we’re trying to do is reveal just what metabolisms are part of this microbial network within the coral system.”
This research was supported, in part, by MIT Sea Grant, the Simons Foundation, the MIT Montrym, Ferry, and mTerra funds, and by Bruce Heflinger ’69, SM ’71, PhD ’80. More