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    Balancing economic development with natural resources protection

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    It’s one of the paradoxes of economic development: Many countries currently offer large subsidies to their industrial fishing fleets, even though the harms of overfishing are well-known. Governments might be willing to end this practice, if they saw that its costs outweighed its benefits. But each country, acting individually, faces an incentive to keep subsidies in place.This trap evokes the classic “tragedy of the commons” that economists have studied for generations. But despite the familiarity of the problem in theory, they don’t yet have a lot of hard evidence to offer policymakers about solutions, especially on a global scale. PhD student Aaron Berman is working on a set of projects that may change that.“Our goal is to get some empirical traction on the problem,” he says.Berman and his collaborators are combining a variety of datasets — not only economic data but also projections from ecological models — to identify how these subsidies are impacting fish stocks. They also hope to determine whether countries might benefit instead from sustainability measures to help rebuild fisheries, say through new trade arrangements or other international policy agreements.As a fourth-year doctoral candidate in MIT’s Department of Economics, Berman has a variety of other research projects underway as well, all connected by the central question of how to balance economic development with the pressure it puts on the environment and natural resources. While his study of fishing subsidies is global in scope, other projects are distinctly local: He is studying air pollution generated by road infrastructure in Pakistan, groundwater irrigation in Texas, the scallop fishing industry in New England, and industrial carbon-reduction measures in Turkey. For all of these projects, Berman and his collaborators are bringing data and models from many fields of science to bear on economic questions, from seafloor images taken by NOAA to atmospheric models of pollution dispersion.“One thing I find really exciting and joyful about the work I’m doing in environmental economics is that all of these projects involve some kind of crossover into the natural sciences,” he says.Several of Berman’s projects are so ambitious that he hopes to continue working on them even after completing his PhD. He acknowledges that keeping so many irons in the fire is a lot of work, but says he finds motivation in the knowledge that his research could shape policy and benefit society in a concrete way.“Something that MIT has really instilled in me is the value of going into the field and learning about how the research you’re doing connects to real-world issues,” he says. “You want your findings as a researcher to ultimately be useful to someone.”Testing the watersThe son of two public school teachers, Berman grew up in Maryland and then attended Yale University, where he majored in global affairs as an undergraduate, then stayed to get his master’s in public health, concentrating on global health in both programs.A pivotal moment came while taking an undergraduate class in development economics. “That class helped me realize the same questions I cared a lot about from a public health standpoint were also being studied by economists using very rigorous methods,” Berman says. “Economics has a lot to say about very pressing societal issues.”After reading the work of MIT economists and Nobel laureates Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee in that same class, he decided to pivot and “test the waters of economics a little bit more seriously.” The professor teaching that class also played an important role, by encouraging Berman to pursue a predoctoral research position as a first step toward a graduate degree in economics.Following that advice, Berman landed at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Evidence for Policy Design, a research initiative seeking to foster economic development by improving the policy design process. His time with this organization included five months in Jakarta, Indonesia, where he collaborated with professors Rema Hanna and Ben Olken — of Harvard and MIT, respectively — on a portfolio of projects focused on analyzing social protection and poverty alleviation.The work, which included working closely with government partners, “required me to think creatively about how to talk about economics research to several different types of audiences,” he says. “This also gave me experience thinking about the intersection between what is academically interesting and what is a policy priority.”The experience also gave him the skills and confidence to apply to the economics PhD program at MIT.(Re)discovering teachingAs an economist, Berman is now channeling his interests in global affairs to exploring the relationship between economic development and protecting the natural environment. (He’s aided by an affinity for languages — he speaks five, with varying degrees of proficiency, in addition to English: Mandarin, Cantonese, Spanish, Portuguese, and Indonesian.) His interest in natural resource governance was piqued while co-authoring a paper on the economic drivers of climate-altering tropical deforestation.The review article, written alongside Olken and two professors from the London School of Economics, explored questions such as “What does the current state of the evidence tell us about what causes deforestation in the tropics, and what further evidence is needed?” and “What are the economic barriers to implementing policies to prevent deforestation?” — the kinds of questions he seeks to answer broadly in his ongoing dissertation work.“I gained an appreciation for the importance and complexity of natural resource governance, both in developing and developed countries,” he says. “It really was a launching point for a lot of the things that I’m doing now.”These days, when not doing research, Berman can be found playing on MIT’s club tennis team or working as a teaching assistant, which he particularly enjoys. He’s ever mindful of the Yale professor whose encouragement shaped his own path, and he hopes that he can pay that forward in his own teaching roles.“The fact that he saw I had the ability to make this transition and encouraged me to take a leap of faith is really meaningful to me. I would like to be able to do that for others,” Berman says.His interest in teaching also connects him further with his family: His father is a middle school science teacher and mother is a paraeducator for students with special needs. He says they’ve encouraged him throughout his academic journey, even though they initially didn’t know much about what a PhD in economics entailed. Berman jokes that the most common question people ask economists is what stocks they should invest in, and his family was no exception.“But they’ve always been very excited to hear about the kinds of things I’m working on and very supportive,” he says. “It’s been a really amazing learning experience thus far,” Berman says about his doctoral program. “One of the coolest parts of economics research is to have a sense that you’re tangibly doing something that’s going to have an impact in the world.” More

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      China-based emissions of three potent climate-warming greenhouse gases spiked in past decade

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      When it comes to heating up the planet, not all greenhouse gases are created equal. They vary widely in their global warming potential (GWP), a measure of how much infrared thermal radiation a greenhouse gas would absorb over a given time frame once it enters the atmosphere. For example, measured over a 100-year period, the GWP of methane is about 28 times that of carbon dioxide (CO2), and the GWPs of a class of greenhouse gases known as perfluorocarbons (PFCs) are thousands of times that of CO2. The lifespans in the atmosphere of different greenhouse gases also vary widely. Methane persists in the atmosphere for around 10 years; CO2 for over 100 years, and PFCs for up to tens of thousands of years.Given the high GWPs and lifespans of PFCs, their emissions could pose a major roadblock to achieving the aspirational goal of the Paris Agreement on climate change — to limit the increase in global average surface temperature to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. Now, two new studies based on atmospheric observations inside China and high-resolution atmospheric models show a rapid rise in Chinese emissions over the last decade (2011 to 2020 or 2021) of three PFCs: tetrafluoromethane (PFC-14) and hexafluoroethane (PFC-116) (results in PNAS), and perfluorocyclobutane (PFC-318) (results in Environmental Science & Technology).Both studies find that Chinese emissions have played a dominant role in driving up global emission levels for all three PFCs.The PNAS study identifies substantial PFC-14 and PFC-116 emission sources in the less-populated western regions of China from 2011 to 2021, likely due to the large amount of aluminum industry in these regions. The semiconductor industry also contributes to some of the emissions detected in the more economically developed eastern regions. These emissions are byproducts from aluminum smelting, or occur during the use of the two PFCs in the production of semiconductors and flat panel displays. During the observation period, emissions of both gases in China rose by 78 percent, accounting for most of the increase in global emissions of these gases.The ES&T study finds that during 2011-20, a 70 percent increase in Chinese PFC-318 emissions (contributing more than half of the global emissions increase of this gas) — originated primarily in eastern China. The regions with high emissions of PFC-318 in China overlap with geographical areas densely populated with factories that produce polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE, commonly used for nonstick cookware coatings), implying that PTFE factories are major sources of PFC-318 emissions in China. In these factories, PFC-318 is formed as a byproduct.“Using atmospheric observations from multiple monitoring sites, we not only determined the magnitudes of PFC emissions, but also pinpointed the possible locations of their sources,” says Minde An, a postdoc at the MIT Center for Global Change Science (CGCS), and corresponding author of both studies. “Identifying the actual source industries contributing to these PFC emissions, and understanding the reasons for these largely byproduct emissions, can provide guidance for developing region- or industry-specific mitigation strategies.”“These three PFCs are largely produced as unwanted byproducts during the manufacture of otherwise widely used industrial products,” says MIT professor of atmospheric sciences Ronald Prinn, director of both the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change and CGCS, and a co-author of both studies. “Phasing out emissions of PFCs as early as possible is highly beneficial for achieving global climate mitigation targets and is likely achievable by recycling programs and targeted technological improvements in these industries.”Findings in both studies were obtained, in part, from atmospheric observations collected from nine stations within a Chinese network, including one station from the Advanced Global Atmospheric Gases Experiment (AGAGE) network. For comparison, global total emissions were determined from five globally distributed, relatively unpolluted “background” AGAGE stations, as reported in the latest United Nations Environment Program and World Meteorological Organization Ozone Assessment report. More

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      in Environment

      “They can see themselves shaping the world they live in”

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      During the journey from the suburbs to the city, the tree canopy often dwindles down as skyscrapers rise up. A group of New England Innovation Academy students wondered why that is.“Our friend Victoria noticed that where we live in Marlborough there are lots of trees in our own backyards. But if you drive just 30 minutes to Boston, there are almost no trees,” said high school junior Ileana Fournier. “We were struck by that duality.”This inspired Fournier and her classmates Victoria Leeth and Jessie Magenyi to prototype a mobile app that illustrates Massachusetts deforestation trends for Day of AI, a free, hands-on curriculum developed by the MIT Responsible AI for Social Empowerment and Education (RAISE) initiative, headquartered in the MIT Media Lab and in collaboration with the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing and MIT Open Learning. They were among a group of 20 students from New England Innovation Academy who shared their projects during the 2024 Day of AI global celebration hosted with the Museum of Science.The Day of AI curriculum introduces K-12 students to artificial intelligence. Now in its third year, Day of AI enables students to improve their communities and collaborate on larger global challenges using AI. Fournier, Leeth, and Magenyi’s TreeSavers app falls under the Telling Climate Stories with Data module, one of four new climate-change-focused lessons.“We want you to be able to express yourselves creatively to use AI to solve problems with critical-thinking skills,” Cynthia Breazeal, director of MIT RAISE, dean for digital learning at MIT Open Learning, and professor of media arts and sciences, said during this year’s Day of AI global celebration at the Museum of Science. “We want you to have an ethical and responsible way to think about this really powerful, cool, and exciting technology.”Moving from understanding to actionDay of AI invites students to examine the intersection of AI and various disciplines, such as history, civics, computer science, math, and climate change. With the curriculum available year-round, more than 10,000 educators across 114 countries have brought Day of AI activities to their classrooms and homes.The curriculum gives students the agency to evaluate local issues and invent meaningful solutions. “We’re thinking about how to create tools that will allow kids to have direct access to data and have a personal connection that intersects with their lived experiences,” Robert Parks, curriculum developer at MIT RAISE, said at the Day of AI global celebration.Before this year, first-year Jeremie Kwapong said he knew very little about AI. “I was very intrigued,” he said. “I started to experiment with ChatGPT to see how it reacts. How close can I get this to human emotion? What is AI’s knowledge compared to a human’s knowledge?”In addition to helping students spark an interest in AI literacy, teachers around the world have told MIT RAISE that they want to use data science lessons to engage students in conversations about climate change. Therefore, Day of AI’s new hands-on projects use weather and climate change to show students why it’s important to develop a critical understanding of dataset design and collection when observing the world around them.“There is a lag between cause and effect in everyday lives,” said Parks. “Our goal is to demystify that, and allow kids to access data so they can see a long view of things.”Tools like MIT App Inventor — which allows anyone to create a mobile application — help students make sense of what they can learn from data. Fournier, Leeth, and Magenyi programmed TreeSavers in App Inventor to chart regional deforestation rates across Massachusetts, identify ongoing trends through statistical models, and predict environmental impact. The students put that “long view” of climate change into practice when developing TreeSavers’ interactive maps. Users can toggle between Massachusetts’s current tree cover, historical data, and future high-risk areas.Although AI provides fast answers, it doesn’t necessarily offer equitable solutions, said David Sittenfeld, director of the Center for the Environment at the Museum of Science. The Day of AI curriculum asks students to make decisions on sourcing data, ensuring unbiased data, and thinking responsibly about how findings could be used.“There’s an ethical concern about tracking people’s data,” said Ethan Jorda, a New England Innovation Academy student. His group used open-source data to program an app that helps users track and reduce their carbon footprint.Christine Cunningham, senior vice president of STEM Learning at the Museum of Science, believes students are prepared to use AI responsibly to make the world a better place. “They can see themselves shaping the world they live in,” said Cunningham. “Moving through from understanding to action, kids will never look at a bridge or a piece of plastic lying on the ground in the same way again.”Deepening collaboration on earth and beyondThe 2024 Day of AI speakers emphasized collaborative problem solving at the local, national, and global levels.“Through different ideas and different perspectives, we’re going to get better solutions,” said Cunningham. “How do we start young enough that every child has a chance to both understand the world around them but also to move toward shaping the future?”Presenters from MIT, the Museum of Science, and NASA approached this question with a common goal — expanding STEM education to learners of all ages and backgrounds.“We have been delighted to collaborate with the MIT RAISE team to bring this year’s Day of AI celebration to the Museum of Science,” says Meg Rosenburg, manager of operations at the Museum of Science Centers for Public Science Learning. “This opportunity to highlight the new climate modules for the curriculum not only perfectly aligns with the museum’s goals to focus on climate and active hope throughout our Year of the Earthshot initiative, but it has also allowed us to bring our teams together and grow a relationship that we are very excited to build upon in the future.”Rachel Connolly, systems integration and analysis lead for NASA’s Science Activation Program, showed the power of collaboration with the example of how human comprehension of Saturn’s appearance has evolved. From Galileo’s early telescope to the Cassini space probe, modern imaging of Saturn represents 400 years of science, technology, and math working together to further knowledge.“Technologies, and the engineers who built them, advance the questions we’re able to ask and therefore what we’re able to understand,” said Connolly, research scientist at MIT Media Lab.New England Innovation Academy students saw an opportunity for collaboration a little closer to home. Emmett Buck-Thompson, Jeff Cheng, and Max Hunt envisioned a social media app to connect volunteers with local charities. Their project was inspired by Buck-Thompson’s father’s difficulties finding volunteering opportunities, Hunt’s role as the president of the school’s Community Impact Club, and Cheng’s aspiration to reduce screen time for social media users. Using MIT App Inventor, ​their combined ideas led to a prototype with the potential to make a real-world impact in their community.The Day of AI curriculum teaches the mechanics of AI, ethical considerations and responsible uses, and interdisciplinary applications for different fields. It also empowers students to become creative problem solvers and engaged citizens in their communities and online. From supporting volunteer efforts to encouraging action for the state’s forests to tackling the global challenge of climate change, today’s students are becoming tomorrow’s leaders with Day of AI.“We want to empower you to know that this is a tool you can use to make your community better, to help people around you with this technology,” said Breazeal.Other Day of AI speakers included Tim Ritchie, president of the Museum of Science; Michael Lawrence Evans, program director of the Boston Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics; Dava Newman, director of the MIT Media Lab; and Natalie Lao, executive director of the App Inventor Foundation. More

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      in Energy

      Getting to systemic sustainability

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      Add up the commitments from the Paris Agreement, the Glasgow Climate Pact, and various commitments made by cities, countries, and businesses, and the world would be able to hold the global average temperature increase to 1.9 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, says Ani Dasgupta, the president and chief executive officer of the World Resources Institute (WRI).While that is well above the 1.5 C threshold that many scientists agree would limit the most severe impacts of climate change, it is below the 2.0 degree threshold that could lead to even more catastrophic impacts, such as the collapse of ice sheets and a 30-foot rise in sea levels.However, Dasgupta notes, actions have so far not matched up with commitments.“There’s a huge gap between commitment and outcomes,” Dasgupta said during his talk, “Energizing the global transition,” at the 2024 Earth Day Colloquium co-hosted by the MIT Energy Initiative and MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, and sponsored by the Climate Nucleus.Dasgupta noted that oil companies did $6 trillion worth of business across the world last year — $1 trillion more than they were planning. About 7 percent of the world’s remaining tropical forests were destroyed during that same time, he added, and global inequality grew even worse than before.“None of these things were illegal, because the system we have today produces these outcomes,” he said. “My point is that it’s not one thing that needs to change. The whole system needs to change.”People, climate, and natureDasgupta, who previously held positions in nonprofits in India and at the World Bank, is a recognized leader in sustainable cities, poverty alleviation, and building cultures of inclusion. Under his leadership, WRI, a global research nonprofit that studies sustainable practices with the goal of fundamentally transforming the world’s food, land and water, energy, and cities, adopted a new five-year strategy called “Getting the Transition Right for People, Nature, and Climate 2023-2027.” It focuses on creating new economic opportunities to meet people’s essential needs, restore nature, and rapidly lower emissions, while building resilient communities. In fact, during his talk, Dasgupta said that his organization has moved away from talking about initiatives in terms of their impact on greenhouse gas emissions — instead taking a more holistic view of sustainability.“There is no net zero without nature,” Dasgupta said. He showed a slide with a graphic illustrating potential progress toward net-zero goals. “If nature gets diminished, that chart becomes even steeper. It’s very steep right now, but natural systems absorb carbon dioxide. So, if the natural systems keep getting destroyed, that curve becomes harder and harder.”A focus on people is necessary, Dasgupta said, in part because of the unequal climate impacts that the rich and the poor are likely to face in the coming years. “If you made it to this room, you will not be impacted by climate change,” he said. “You have resources to figure out what to do about it. The people who get impacted are people who don’t have resources. It is immensely unfair. Our belief is, if we don’t do climate policy that helps people directly, we won’t be able to make progress.”Where to start?Although Dasgupta stressed that systemic change is needed to bring carbon emissions in line with long-term climate goals, he made the case that it is unrealistic to implement this change around the globe all at once. “This transition will not happen in 196 countries at the same time,” he said. “The question is, how do we get to the tipping point so that it happens at scale? We’ve worked the past few years to ask the question, what is it you need to do to create this tipping point for change?”Analysts at WRI looked for countries that are large producers of carbon, those with substantial tropical forest cover, and those with large quantities of people living in poverty. “We basically tried to draw a map of, where are the biggest challenges for climate change?” Dasgupta said.That map features a relative handful of countries, including the United States, Mexico, China, Brazil, South Africa, India, and Indonesia. Dasgupta said, “Our argument is that, if we could figure out and focus all our efforts to help these countries transition, that will create a ripple effect — of understanding technology, understanding the market, understanding capacity, and understanding the politics of change that will unleash how the rest of these regions will bring change.”Spotlight on the subcontinentDasgupta used one of these countries, his native India, to illustrate the nuanced challenges and opportunities presented by various markets around the globe. In India, he noted, there are around 3 million projected jobs tied to the country’s transition to renewable energy. However, that number is dwarfed by the 10 to 12 million jobs per year the Indian economy needs to create simply to keep up with population growth.“Every developing country faces this question — how to keep growing in a way that reduces their carbon footprint,” Dasgupta said.Five states in India worked with WRI to pool their buying power and procure 5,000 electric buses, saving 60 percent of the cost as a result. Over the next two decades, Dasgupta said, the fleet of electric buses in those five states is expected to increase to 800,000.In the Indian state of Rajasthan, Dasgupta said, 59 percent of power already comes from solar energy. At times, Rajasthan produces more solar than it can use, and officials are exploring ways to either store the excess energy or sell it to other states. But in another state, Jharkhand, where much of the country’s coal is sourced, only 5 percent of power comes from solar. Officials in Jharkhand have reached out to WRI to discuss how to transition their energy economy, as they recognize that coal will fall out of favor in the future, Dasgupta said.“The complexities of the transition are enormous in a country this big,” Dasgupta said. “This is true in most large countries.”The road aheadDespite the challenges ahead, the colloquium was also marked by notes of optimism. In his opening remarks, Robert Stoner, the founding director of the MIT Tata Center for Technology and Design, pointed out how much progress has been made on environmental cleanup since the first Earth Day in 1970. “The world was a very different, much dirtier, place in many ways,” Stoner said. “Our air was a mess, our waterways were a mess, and it was beginning to be noticeable. Since then, Earth Day has become an important part of the fabric of American and global society.”While Dasgupta said that the world presently lacks the “orchestration” among various stakeholders needed to bring climate change under control, he expressed hope that collaboration in key countries could accelerate progress.“I strongly believe that what we need is a very different way of collaborating radically — across organizations like yours, organizations like ours, businesses, and governments,” Dasgupta said. “Otherwise, this transition will not happen at the scale and speed we need.” More

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      in Environment

      New MIT-LUMA Lab created to address climate challenges in the Mediterranean region

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      The MIT School of Architecture and Planning (SA+P) and the LUMA Foundation announced today the establishment of the MIT-LUMA Lab to advance paradigm-shifting innovations at the nexus of art, science, technology, conservation, and design. The aim is to empower innovative thinkers to realize their ambitions, support local communities as they seek to address climate-related issues, and scale solutions to pressing challenges facing the Mediterranean region.  The main programmatic pillars of the lab will be collaborative scholarship and research around design, new materials, and sustainability; scholar exchange and education collaborations between the two organizations; innovation and entrepreneurship activities to transfer new ideas into practical applications; and co-production of exhibitions and events. The hope is that this engagement will create a novel model for other institutions to follow to craft innovative solutions to the leading challenge of our time.The MIT-LUMA Lab draws on an establishing gift from the LUMA Foundation, a nonprofit organization based in Zurich formed by Maja Hoffmann in 2004 to support contemporary artistic production. The foundation supports a range of multidisciplinary projects that increase understanding of the environment, human rights, education, and culture.These themes are explored through programs organized by LUMA Arles, a project begun in 2013 and housed on a 27-acre interdisciplinary campus known as the Parc des Ateliers in Arles, France, an experimental site of exhibitions, artists’ residencies, research laboratories, and educational programs.“The Luma Foundation is committed to finding ways to address the current climate emergencies we are facing, focusing on exploring the potentials that can be found in diversity and engagement in every possible form,” says Maja Hoffmann, founder and president of the LUMA Foundation. “Cultural diversity, pluralism, and biodiversity feature at the top of our mission and our work is informed by these concepts.” A focus on the Mediterranean region“The culturally rich area of the Mediterranean, which has produced some of the most remarkable civilizational paradigms across geographies and historical periods, plays an important role in our thinking. Focusing the efforts of the MIT-LUMA Lab on the Mediterranean means extending the possibilities for positive change throughout other global ecosystems,” says Hoffmann. “Our projects of LUMA Arles and its research laboratory on materials and natural resources, the Atelier Luma, our position in one of Europe’s most important natural reserves, in conjunction with the expertise and forward-thinking approach of MIT, define the perfect framework that will allow us to explore new frontiers and devise novel ways to tackle our most significant civilizational risks,” she adds. “Supporting the production of new forms of knowledge and practices, and with locations in Cambridge and in Arles, our collaboration and partnership with MIT will generate solutions and models for the future, for the generations to come, in order to provide them the same and even better opportunities that what we have experienced.”“We know we do not have all the answers at MIT, but we do know how to ask the right questions, how to design effective experiments, and how to build meaningful collaborations,” says Hashim Sarkis, dean of SA+P, which will host the lab. “I am grateful to the LUMA Foundation for offering support for faculty research deployment designed to engage local communities and create jobs, for course development to empower our faculty to teach classes centered on these issues, and for students who seek to dedicate their lives and careers to sustainability. We also look forward to hosting fellows and researchers from the foundation to strengthen our collaboration,” he adds.The Mediterranean region, the MIT-LUMA Lab’s focus, is one of the world’s most vital and fragile global commons. The future of climate relies on the sustainability of the region’s forests, oceans, and deserts that have for millennia created the environmental conditions and system-regulating functions necessary for life on Earth. Those who live in these areas are often the most severely affected by even relatively modest changes in the climate. Climate research and action: A priority at MITTo reverse negative trends and provide a new approach to addressing the climate crisis in these vast areas, SA+P is establishing international collaborations that bring know-how to the field, and in turn to learn from the communities and groups most challenged by climate impacts.The MIT-LUMA Lab is the first in what is envisioned as a series of regionally focused labs at SA+P under the conceptual aegis of a collaborative platform called Our Global Commons. This project will support progress on today’s climate challenges by focusing on community empowerment, long-term local collaborations around research and education, and job creation. Faculty-led fieldwork, engagements with local stakeholders, and student involvement will be the key elements.The creation of Our Global Commons comes as MIT works to dramatically expand its efforts to address climate change. In February 2024, President Sally Kornbluth announced the Climate Project at MIT, a major new initiative to mobilize the Institute’s resources and capabilities to research, develop, deploy, and scale-up new climate solutions. The Institute will hire its first-ever vice president for climate to oversee the new effort. “With the Climate Project at MIT, we aim to help make a decisive difference, at scale, on crucial global climate challenges — and we can only do that by engaging with outstanding colleagues around the globe,” says Kornbluth. “By connecting us to creative thinkers steeped in the cultural and environmental history and emerging challenges of the Mediterranean region, the MIT-LUMA Lab promises to spark important new ideas and collaborations.”“We are excited that the LUMA team will be joining in MIT’s engagement with climate issues, especially given their expertise in advancing vital work at the intersection of art and science, and their long-standing commitment to expanding the frontiers of sustainability and biodiversity,” says Sarkis. “With climate change upending many aspects of our society, the time is now for us to reaffirm and strengthen our SA+P tradition of on-the-ground work with and for communities around the world. Shared efforts among local communities, governments and corporations, and academia are necessary to bring about real change.” More

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      in Environment

      Convening for cultural change

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      Whether working with fellow students in the Netherlands to design floating cities or interning for a local community-led environmental justice organization, Cindy Xie wants to help connect people grappling with the implications of linked social and environmental crises.The MIT senior’s belief that climate action is a collective endeavor grounded in systems change has led her to work at a variety of community organizations, and to travel as far as Malaysia and Cabo Verde to learn about the social and cultural aspects of global environmental change.“With climate action, there is such a need for collective change. We all need to be a part of creating the solutions,” she says.Xie recently returned from Kuala Lumpur, where she attended the Planetary Health Annual Meeting hosted by Sunway University, and met researchers, practitioners, and students from around the world who are working to address challenges facing human and planetary health.Since January 2023, Xie has been involved with the Planetary Health Alliance, a consortium of organizations working at the intersection of human health and global environmental change. As a campus ambassador, she organized events at MIT that built on students’ interests in climate change and health while exploring themes of community and well-being.“I think doing these events on campus and bringing people together has been my way of trying to understand how to put conceptual ideas into action,” she says.Grassroots community-buildingAn urban studies and planning major with minors in anthropology and biology, Xie is also earning her master’s degree in city planning in a dual degree program, which she will finish next year.Through her studies and numerous community activities, she has developed a multidimensional view of public health and the environment that includes spirituality and the arts as well as science and technology. “What I appreciate about being here at MIT is the opportunities to try to connect the sciences back to other disciplines,” she says.As a campus ambassador for the Planetary Health Alliance, Xie hosted a club mixer event during Earth Month last year, that brought together climate, health, and social justice groups from across the Institute. She also created a year-long series that concluded its final event last month, called Cultural Transformation for Planetary Health. Organized with the Radius Forum and other partners, the series explored social and cultural implications of the climate crisis, with a focus on how environmental change affects health and well-being.Xie has also worked with the Planetary Health Alliance’s Constellation Project through a Public Service Fellowship from the PKG Center, which she describes as “an effort to convene people from across different areas of the world to talk about the intersections of spirituality, the climate, and environmental change and planetary health.”She has also interned at the Comunidades Enraizadas Community Land Trust, the National Institutes of Health, and the World Wildlife Fund U.S. Markets Institute. And, she has taken her studies abroad through MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives (MISTI). In 2023 she spent her Independent Activities Period in a pilot MISTI Global Classroom program in Amsterdam, and in the summer of 2023, she spent two months in Cabo Verde helping to start a new research collaboration tracking the impacts of climate change on human health.The power of storytellingGrowing up, Xie was drawn to storytelling as a means of understanding the intersections of culture and health within diverse communities. This has largely driven her interest in medical anthropology and medical humanities, and impacts her work as a member of the Asian American Initiative.The AAI is a student-led organization that provides a space for pan-Asian advocacy and community building on campus. Xie joined the group in 2022 and currently serves as a member of the executive board as well as co-leader of the Mental Health Project Team. She credits this team with inspiring discussions on holistic framings of mental health.“Conversations on mental health stigma can sometimes frame it as a fault within certain communities,” she says. “It’s also important to highlight alternate paradigms for conceptualizing mental health beyond the highly individualized models often presented in U.S. higher education settings.”Last spring, the AAI Mental Health team led a listening tour with Asian American clinicians, academic experts, and community organizations in Greater Boston, expanding the group’s connections. That led the group to volunteer last November at the Asian Mental Health Careers Day, hosted by the Let’s Talk! Conference at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. In March, the club also traveled to Yale University to participate in the East Coast Asian American Student Union Conference alongside hundreds of attendees from different college campuses.On campus, the team hosts dialogue events where students convene in an informal setting to discuss topics such as family ties and burnout and overachievement. Recently, AAI also hosted a storytelling night in partnership with MIT Taara and the newly formed South Asian Initiative. “There’s been something really powerful about being in those kinds of settings and building collective stories among peers,” Xie says.Community connectionsWriting, both creative and non-fiction, is another of Xie’s longstanding interests. From 2022 to 2023, she wrote for The Yappie, a youth-led news publication covering Asian American and Pacific Islander policy and politics. She has also written articles for The Tech, MIT Science Policy Review, MISTI Blogs, and more. Last year, she was a spread writer for MIT’s fashion publication, Infinite Magazine, for which she interviewed the founder of a local streetwear company that aims to support victims of sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo.This year, she performed a spoken word piece in the “MIT Monologues,” an annual production at MIT that features stories of gender, relationships, race, and more. Her poetry was recently published in Sine Theta and included in MassPoetry’s 2024 Intercollegiate Showcase. Xie has previously been involved in the a capella group MIT Muses and enjoys live music and concerts as well. Tapping into her 2023 MISTI experience, Xie recently went to the concert of a Cabo Verdean artist at the Strand Theatre in Dorchester. “The crowd was packed,” she says. “It was just like being back in Cabo Verde. I feel very grateful to have seen these local connections.”After graduating, Xie hopes to continue building interdisciplinary connections. “I’m interested in working in policy or academia or somewhere in between the two, sort of around this idea of partnership and alliance building. My experiences abroad during my time at MIT have also made me more interested in working in an international context in the future.” More

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      in Environment

      Making steel with electricity

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      Steel is one of the most useful materials on the planet. A backbone of modern life, it’s used in skyscrapers, cars, airplanes, bridges, and more. Unfortunately, steelmaking is an extremely dirty process.The most common way it’s produced involves mining iron ore, reducing it in a blast furnace through the addition of coal, and then using an oxygen furnace to burn off excess carbon and other impurities. That’s why steel production accounts for around 7 to 9 percent of humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, making it one of the dirtiest industries on the planet.Now Boston Metal is seeking to clean up the steelmaking industry using an electrochemical process called molten oxide electrolysis (MOE), which eliminates many steps in steelmaking and releases oxygen as its sole byproduct.The company, which was founded by MIT Professor Emeritus Donald Sadoway, Professor Antoine Allanore, and James Yurko PhD ’01, is already using MOE to recover high-value metals from mining waste at its Brazilian subsidiary, Boston Metal do Brasil. That work is helping Boston Metal’s team deploy its technology at commercial scale and establish key partnerships with mining operators. It has also built a prototype MOE reactor to produce green steel at its headquarters in Woburn, Massachusetts.And despite its name, Boston Metal has global ambitions. The company has raised more than $370 million to date from organizations across Europe, Asia, the Americas, and the Middle East, and its leaders expect to scale up rapidly to transform steel production in every corner of the world.“There’s a worldwide recognition that we need to act rapidly, and that’s going to happen through technology solutions like this that can help us move away from incumbent technologies,” Boston Metal Chief Scientist and former MIT postdoc Guillaume Lambotte says. “More and more, climate change is a part of our lives, so the pressure is on everyone to act fast.”To the moon and backThe origins of Boston Metal’s technology start on the moon. In the mid 2000s, Sadoway, who is the John F. Elliott Professor Emeritus of Materials Chemistry in MIT’s Department of Materials Science, received a grant from NASA to explore ways to produce oxygen for future lunar bases. Sadoway and other MIT researchers explored the idea of sending an electric current through the iron oxide rock on the moon’s surface, using rock from an old asteroid in Arizona for their experiments. The reaction produced oxygen, with metal as a byproduct.The research stuck with Sadoway, who noticed that down here on Earth, that metal byproduct would be of interest. To help make the electrolysis reaction he studied more viable, he joined forces with Allanore, who is a professor of metallurgy at MIT and the Lechtman Chair in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. The professors were able to identify a less expensive anode and partnered with Yurko, a former student, to found Boston Metal.“All of the fundamental studies and the initial technologies came out of MIT,” Lambotte says. “We spun out of research that was patented at MIT and licensed from MIT’s Technology Licensing Office.”Lambotte joined the company shortly after Boston Metal’s team published a 2013 paper in Nature describing the MOE platform.“That’s when it went from the lab, with a coffee cup-sized experiment to prove the fundamentals and produce a few grams, to a company that can produce hundreds of kilograms, and soon, tons of metal,” Lambotte says.

      Boston Metal’s process takes place in modular MOE cells the size of a school bus. Here is a schematic of the process.

      Boston Metal’s molten oxide electrolysis process takes place in modular MOE cells the size of a school bus. Iron ore rock is fed into the cell, which contains the cathode (the negative terminal of the MOE cell) and an anode immersed in a liquid electrolyte. The anode is inert, meaning it doesn’t dissolve in the electrolyte or take part in the reaction other than serving as the positive terminal. When electricity runs between the anode and cathode and the cell reaches around 1,600 degrees Celsius, the iron oxide bonds in the ore are split, producing pure liquid metal at the bottom that can be tapped. The byproduct of the reaction is oxygen, and the process doesn’t require water, hazardous chemicals, or precious-metal catalysts.The production of each cell depends on the size of its current. Lambotte says with about 600,000 amps, each cell could produce up to 10 tons of metal every day. Steelmakers would license Boston Metal’s technology and deploy as many cells as needed to reach their production targets.Boston Metal is already using MOE to help mining companies recover high-value metals from their mining waste, which usually needs to undergo costly treatment or storage. Lambotte says it could also be used to produce many other kinds of metals down the line, and Boston Metal was recently selected to negotiate grant funding to produce chromium metal — critical for a number of clean energy applications — in West Virginia.“If you look around the world, a lot of the feedstocks for metal are oxides, and if it’s an oxide, then there’s a chance we can work with that feedstock,” Lambotte says. “There’s a lot of excitement because everyone needs a solution capable of decarbonizing the metal industry, so a lot of people are interested to understand where MOE fits in their own processes.”Gigatons of potentialBoston Metal’s steel decarbonization technology is currently slated to reach commercial-scale in 2026, though its Brazil plant is already introducing the industry to MOE.“I think it’s a window for the metal industry to get acquainted with MOE and see how it works,” Lambotte says. “You need people in the industry to grasp this technology. It’s where you form connections and how new technology spreads.”The Brazilian plant runs on 100 percent renewable energy.“We can be the beneficiary of this tremendous worldwide push to decarbonize the energy sector,” Lambotte says. “I think our approach goes hand in hand with that. Fully green steel requires green electricity, and I think what you’ll see is deployment of this technology where [clean electricity] is already readily available.”Boston Metal’s team is excited about MOE’s application across the metals industry but is focused first and foremost on eliminating the gigatons of emissions from steel production.“Steel produces around 10 percent of global emissions, so that is our north star,” Lambotte says. “Everyone is pledging carbon reductions, emissions reductions, and making net zero goals, so the steel industry is really looking hard for viable technology solutions. People are ready for new approaches.” More

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      in Energy

      Offering clean energy around the clock

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      As remarkable as the rise of solar and wind farms has been over the last 20 years, achieving complete decarbonization is going to require a host of complementary technologies. That’s because renewables offer only intermittent power. They also can’t directly provide the high temperatures necessary for many industrial processes.

      Now, 247Solar is building high-temperature concentrated solar power systems that use overnight thermal energy storage to provide round-the-clock power and industrial-grade heat.

      The company’s modular systems can be used as standalone microgrids for communities or to provide power in remote places like mines and farms. They can also be used in conjunction with wind and conventional solar farms, giving customers 24/7 power from renewables and allowing them to offset use of the grid.

      “One of my motivations for working on this system was trying to solve the problem of intermittency,” 247Solar CEO Bruce Anderson ’69, SM ’73 says. “I just couldn’t see how we could get to zero emissions with solar photovoltaics (PV) and wind. Even with PV, wind, and batteries, we can’t get there, because there’s always bad weather, and current batteries aren’t economical over long periods. You have to have a solution that operates 24 hours a day.”

      The company’s system is inspired by the design of a high-temperature heat exchanger by the late MIT Professor Emeritus David Gordon Wilson, who co-founded the company with Anderson. The company integrates that heat exchanger into what Anderson describes as a conventional, jet-engine-like turbine, enabling the turbine to produce power by circulating ambient pressure hot air with no combustion or emissions — what the company calls a first in the industry.

      Here’s how the system works: Each 247Solar system uses a field of sun-tracking mirrors called heliostats to reflect sunlight to the top of a central tower. The tower features a proprietary solar receiver that heats air to around 1,000 Celsius at atmospheric pressure. The air is then used to drive 247Solar’s turbines and generate 400 kilowatts of electricity and 600 kilowatts of heat. Some of the hot air is also routed through a long-duration thermal energy storage system, where it heats solid materials that retain the heat. The stored heat is then used to drive the turbines when the sun stops shining.

      “We offer round-the-clock electricity, but we also offer a combined heat and power option, with the ability to take heat up to 970 Celsius for use in industrial processes,” Anderson says. “It’s a very flexible system.”

      The company’s first deployment will be with a large utility in India. If that goes well, 247Solar hopes to scale up rapidly with other utilities, corporations, and communities around the globe.

      A new approach to concentrated solar

      Anderson kept in touch with his MIT network after graduating in 1973. He served as the director of MIT’s Industrial Liaison Program (ILP) between 1996 and 2000 and was elected as an alumni member of the MIT Corporation in 2013. The ILP connects companies with MIT’s network of students, faculty, and alumni to facilitate innovation, and the experience changed the course of Anderson’s career.

      “That was an extremely fascinating job, and from it two things happened,” Anderson says. “One is that I realized I was really an entrepreneur and was not well-suited to the university environment, and the other is that I was reminded of the countless amazing innovations coming out of MIT.”

      After leaving as director, Anderson began a startup incubator where he worked with MIT professors to start companies. Eventually, one of those professors was Wilson, who had invented the new heat exchanger and a ceramic turbine. Anderson and Wilson ended up putting together a small team to commercialize the technology in the early 2000s.

      Anderson had done his MIT master’s thesis on solar energy in the 1970s, and the team realized the heat exchanger made possible a novel approach to concentrated solar power. In 2010, they received a $6 million development grant from the U.S. Department of Energy. But their first solar receiver was damaged during shipping to a national laboratory for testing, and the company ran out of money.

      It wasn’t until 2015 that Anderson was able to raise money to get the company back off the ground. By that time, a new high-temperature metal alloy had been developed that Anderson swapped out for Wilson’s ceramic heat exchanger.

      The Covid-19 pandemic further slowed 247’s plans to build a demonstration facility at its test site in Arizona, but strong customer interest has kept the company busy. Concentrated solar power doesn’t work everywhere — Arizona’s clear sunshine is a better fit than Florida’s hazy skies, for example — but Anderson is currently in talks with communities in parts of the U.S., India, Africa, and Australia where the technology would be a good fit.

      These days, the company is increasingly proposing combining its systems with traditional solar PV, which lets customers reap the benefits of low-cost solar electricity during the day while using 247’s energy at night.

      “That way we can get at least 24, if not more, hours of energy from a sunny day,” Anderson says. “We’re really moving toward these hybrid systems, which work like a Prius: Sometimes you’re using one source of energy, sometimes you’re using the other.”

      The company also sells its HeatStorE thermal batteries as standalone systems. Instead of being heated by the solar system, the thermal storage is heated by circulating air through an electric coil that’s been heated by electricity, either from the grid, standalone PV, or wind. The heat can be stored for nine hours or more on a single charge and then dispatched as electricity plus industrial process heat at 250 Celsius, or as heat only, up to 970 Celsius.

      Anderson says 247’s thermal battery is about one-seventh the cost of lithium-ion batteries per kilowatt hour produced.

      Scaling a new model

      The company is keeping its system flexible for whatever path customers want to take to complete decarbonization.

      In addition to 247’s India project, the company is in advanced talks with off-grid communities in the Unites States and Egypt, mining operators around the world, and the government of a small country in Africa. Anderson says the company’s next customer will likely be an off-grid community in the U.S. that currently relies on diesel generators for power.

      The company has also partnered with a financial company that will allow it to access capital to fund its own projects and sell clean energy directly to customers, which Anderson says will help 247 grow faster than relying solely on selling entire systems to each customer.

      As it works to scale up its deployments, Anderson believes 247 offers a solution to help customers respond to increasing pressure from governments as well as community members.

      “Emerging economies in places like Africa don’t have any alternative to fossil fuels if they want 24/7 electricity,” Anderson says. “Our owning and operating costs are less than half that of diesel gen-sets. Customers today really want to stop producing emissions if they can, so you’ve got villages, mines, industries, and entire countries where the people inside are saying, ‘We can’t burn diesel anymore.’” More

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      in Environment

      Atmospheric observations in China show rise in emissions of a potent greenhouse gas

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      To achieve the aspirational goal of the Paris Agreement on climate change — limiting the increase in global average surface temperature to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels — will require its 196 signatories to dramatically reduce their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Those greenhouse gases differ widely in their global warming potential (GWP), or ability to absorb radiative energy and thereby warm the Earth’s surface. For example, measured over a 100-year period, the GWP of methane is about 28 times that of carbon dioxide (CO2), and the GWP of sulfur hexafluoride (SF6) is 24,300 times that of CO2, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report. 

      Used primarily in high-voltage electrical switchgear in electric power grids, SF6 is one of the most potent greenhouse gases on Earth. In the 21st century, atmospheric concentrations of SF6 have risen sharply along with global electric power demand, threatening the world’s efforts to stabilize the climate. This heightened demand for electric power is particularly pronounced in China, which has dominated the expansion of the global power industry in the past decade. Quantifying China’s contribution to global SF6 emissions — and pinpointing its sources in the country — could lead that nation to implement new measures to reduce them, and thereby reduce, if not eliminate, an impediment to the Paris Agreement’s aspirational goal. 

      To that end, a new study by researchers at the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, Fudan University, Peking University, University of Bristol, and Meteorological Observation Center of China Meteorological Administration determined total SF6 emissions in China over 2011-21 from atmospheric observations collected from nine stations within a Chinese network, including one station from the Advanced Global Atmospheric Gases Experiment (AGAGE) network. For comparison, global total emissions were determined from five globally distributed, relatively unpolluted “background” AGAGE stations, involving additional researchers from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and CSIRO, Australia’s National Science Agency.

      The researchers found that SF6 emissions in China almost doubled from 2.6 gigagrams (Gg) per year in 2011, when they accounted for 34 percent of global SF6 emissions, to 5.1 Gg per year in 2021, when they accounted for 57 percent of global total SF6 emissions. This increase from China over the 10-year period — some of it emerging from the country’s less-populated western regions — was larger than the global total SF6 emissions rise, highlighting the importance of lowering SF6 emissions from China in the future.

      The open-access study, which appears in the journal Nature Communications, explores prospects for future SF6 emissions reduction in China.

      “Adopting maintenance practices that minimize SF6 leakage rates or using SF6-free equipment or SF6 substitutes in the electric power grid will benefit greenhouse-gas mitigation in China,” says Minde An, a postdoc at the MIT Center for Global Change Science (CGCS) and the study’s lead author. “We see our findings as a first step in quantifying the problem and identifying how it can be addressed.”

      Emissions of SF6 are expected to last more than 1,000 years in the atmosphere, raising the stakes for policymakers in China and around the world.

      “Any increase in SF6 emissions this century will effectively alter our planet’s radiative budget — the balance between incoming energy from the sun and outgoing energy from the Earth — far beyond the multi-decadal time frame of current climate policies,” says MIT Joint Program and CGCS Director Ronald Prinn, a coauthor of the study. “So it’s imperative that China and all other nations take immediate action to reduce, and ultimately eliminate, their SF6 emissions.”

      The study was supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China and Shanghai B&R Joint Laboratory Project, the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and other funding agencies.   More