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    3 Questions: Antje Danielson on energy education and its role in climate action

    The MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) leads energy education at MIT, developing and implementing a robust educational toolkit for MIT graduate and undergraduate students, online learners around the world, and high school students who want to contribute to the energy transition. As MITEI’s director of education, Antje Danielson manages a team devoted to training the next generation of energy innovators, entrepreneurs, and policymakers. Here, she discusses new initiatives in MITEI’s education program and how they are preparing students to take an active role in climate action.

    Q: What role are MITEI’s education efforts playing in climate action initiatives at MIT, and what more could we be doing?

    A: This is a big question. The carbon emissions from energy are such an important factor in climate mitigation; therefore, what we do in energy education is practically synonymous with climate education. This is well illustrated in a 2018 Nature Energy paper by Fuso Nerini, which outlines that affordable, clean energy is related to many of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) — not just SDG 7, which specifically calls for “affordable, reliable, sustainable, and modern energy for all” by 2030. There are 17 SDGs containing 169 targets, of which 113 (65 percent) require actions to be taken concerning energy systems.

    Now, can we equate education with action? The answer is yes, but only if it is done correctly. From the behavioral change literature, we know that knowledge alone is not enough to change behavior. So, one important part of our education program is practice and experience through research, internships, stakeholder engagement, and other avenues. At a minimum, education must give the learner the knowledge, skills, and courage to be ready to jump into action, but ideally, practice is a part of the offering. We also want our learners to go out into the world and share what they know and do. If done right, education is an energy transition accelerator.

    At MITEI, our learners are not just MIT students. We are creating online offerings based on residential MIT courses to train global professionals, policymakers, and students in research methods and tools to support and accelerate the energy transition. These are free and open to learners worldwide. We have five courses available now, with more to come.

    Our latest program is a collaboration with MIT’s Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research (CEEPR): Climate Action through Education, or CATE. This is a teach-the-teacher program for high school curriculum and is a part of the MIT Climate Action Plan. The aim is to develop interdisciplinary, solutions-focused climate change curricula for U.S. high school teachers with components in history/social science, English/language arts, math, science, and computer science.

    We are rapidly expanding our programming. In the online space, for our global learners, we are bundling courses for professional development certificates; for our undergraduates, we are redesigning the energy studies minor to reflect what we have learned over the past 12 years; and for our graduate students, we are adding a new program that allows them to garner industry experience related to the energy transition. Meanwhile, CATE is creating a support network for the teachers who adopt the curriculum. We are also working on creating an energy and climate alliance with other universities around the world.

    On the Institute level, I am a member of the Climate Education Working Group, a subgroup of the Climate Nucleus, where we discuss and will soon recommend further climate action the Institute can take. Stay tuned for that.

    Q: You mentioned that you are leading an effort to create a consortium of energy and climate education programs at universities around the world. How does this effort fit into MITEI’s educational mission?

    A: Yes, we are currently calling it the “Energy and Climate Education Alliance.” The background to this is that the problem we are facing — transitioning the entire global energy system from high carbon emissions to low, no, and negative carbon emissions — is global, huge, and urgent. Following the proverbial “many hands make light work,” we believe that the success of this very complex task is accomplished quicker with more participants. There is, of course, more to this as well. The complexity of the problem is such that (1) MIT doesn’t have all the expertise needed to accomplish the educational needs of the climate and energy crisis, (2) there is a definite local and regional component to capacity building, and (3) collaborations with universities around the world will make our mission-driven work more efficient. Finally, these collaborations will be advantageous for our students as they will be able to learn from real-world case studies that are not U.S.-based and maybe even visit other universities abroad, do internships, and engage in collaborative research projects. Also, students from those universities will be able to come here and experience MIT’s unique intellectual environment.

    Right now, we are very much in the beginning stages of creating the alliance. We have signed a collaboration agreement with the Technical University of Berlin, Germany, and are engaged in talks with other European and Southeast Asian universities. Some of the collaborations we are envisioning relate to course development, student exchange, collaborative research, and course promotion. We are very excited about this collaboration. It fits well into MIT’s ambition to take climate action outside of the university, while still staying within our educational mission.

    Q: It is clear to me from this conversation that MITEI’s education program is undertaking a number of initiatives to prepare MIT students and interested learners outside of the Institute to take an active role in climate action. But, the reality is that despite our rapidly changing climate and the immediate need to decarbonize our global economy, climate denialism and a lack of climate and energy understanding persist in the greater global population. What do you think must be done, and what can MITEI do, to increase climate and energy literacy broadly?

    A: I think the basic problem is not necessarily a lack of understanding but an abundance of competing issues that people are dealing with every day. Poverty, personal health, unemployment, inflation, pandemics, housing, wars — all are very immediate problems people have. And climate change is perceived to be in the future.

    The United States is a very bottom-up country, where corporations offer what people buy, and politicians advocate for what voters want and what money buys. Of course, this is overly simplified, but as long as we don’t come up with mechanisms to achieve a monumental shift in consumer and voter behavior, we are up against these immediate pressures. However, we are seeing some movement in this area due to rising gas and heating oil prices and the many natural disasters we are encountering now. People are starting to understand that climate change will hit their pocketbook, whether or not we have a carbon tax. The recent Florida hurricane damage, wildfires in the west, extreme summer temperatures, frequent droughts, increasing numbers of poisonous and disease-carrying insects — they all illustrate the relationship between climate change, health, and financial damage. Fewer and fewer people will be able to deny the existence of climate change because they will either be directly affected or know someone who is.

    The question is one of speed and scale. The more we can help to make the connections even more visible and understood, the faster we get to the general acceptance that this is real. Research projects like CEEPR’s Roosevelt Project, which develops action plans to help communities deal with industrial upheaval in the context of the energy transition, are contributing to this effect, as are studies related to climate change and national security. This is a fast-moving world, and our research findings need to be translated as we speak. A real problem in education is that we have the tendency to teach the tried and true. Our education programs have to become much nimbler, which means curricula have to be updated frequently, and that is expensive. And of course, the speed and magnitude of our efforts are dependent on the funding we can attract, and fundraising for education is more difficult than fundraising for research.

    However, let me pivot: You alluded to the fact that this is a global problem. The immediate pressures of poverty and hunger are a matter of survival in many parts of the world, and when it comes to surviving another day, who cares if climate change will render your fields unproductive in 20 years? Or if the weather turns your homeland into a lake, will you think about lobbying your government to reduce carbon emissions, or will you ask for help to rebuild your existence? On the flip side, politicians and government authorities in those areas have to deal with extremely complex situations, balancing local needs with global demands. We should learn from them. What we need is to listen. What do these areas of the world need most, and how can climate action be included in the calculations? The Global Commission to End Energy Poverty, a collaboration between MITEI and the Rockefeller Foundation to bring electricity to the billion people across the globe who currently live without it, is a good example of what we are already doing. Both our online education program and the Energy and Climate Education Alliance aim to go in this direction.

    The struggle and challenge to solve climate change can be pretty depressing, and there are many days when I feel despondent about the speed and progress we are making in saving the future of humanity. But, the prospect of contributing to such a large mission, even if the education team can only nudge us a tiny bit away from the business-as-usual scenario, is exciting. In particular, working on an issue like this at MIT is amazing. So much is happening here, and there don’t seem to be intellectual limits; in fact, thinking big is encouraged. It is very refreshing when one has encountered the old “you can’t do this” too often in the past. I want our students to take this attitude with them and go out there and think big. More

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    New MIT internships expand research opportunities in Africa

    With new support from the Office of the Associate Provost for International Activities, MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives (MISTI) and the MIT-Africa program are expanding internship opportunities for MIT students at universities and leading academic research centers in Africa. This past summer, MISTI supported 10 MIT student interns at African universities, significantly more than in any previous year.

    “These internships are an opportunity to better merge the research ecosystem of MIT with academia-based research systems in Africa,” says Evan Lieberman, the Total Professor of Political Science and Contemporary Africa and faculty director for MISTI.

    For decades, MISTI has helped MIT students to learn and explore through international experiential learning opportunities and internships in industries like health care, education, agriculture, and energy. MISTI’s MIT-Africa Seed Fund supports collaborative research between MIT faculty and Africa-based researchers, and the new student research internship opportunities are part of a broader vision for deeper engagement between MIT and research institutions across the African continent.

    While Africa is home to 12.5 percent of the world’s population, it generates less than 1 percent of scientific research output in the form of academic journal publications, according to the African Academy of Sciences. Research internships are one way that MIT can build mutually beneficial partnerships across Africa’s research ecosystem, to advance knowledge and spawn innovation in fields important to MIT and its African counterparts, including health care, biotechnology, urban planning, sustainable energy, and education.

    Ari Jacobovits, managing director of MIT-Africa, notes that the new internships provide additional funding to the lab hosting the MIT intern, enabling them to hire a counterpart student research intern from the local university. This support can make the internships more financially feasible for host institutions and helps to grow the research pipeline.

    With the support of MIT, State University of Zanzibar (SUZA) lecturers Raya Ahmada and Abubakar Bakar were able to hire local students to work alongside MIT graduate students Mel Isidor and Rajan Hoyle. Together the students collaborated over a summer on a mapping project designed to plan and protect Zanzibar’s coastal economy.

    “It’s been really exciting to work with research peers in a setting where we can all learn alongside one another and develop this project together,” says Hoyle.

    Using low-cost drone technology, the students and their local counterparts worked to create detailed maps of Zanzibar to support community planning around resilience projects designed to combat coastal flooding and deforestation and assess climate-related impacts to seaweed farming activities. 

    “I really appreciated learning about how engagement happens in this particular context and how community members understand local environmental challenges and conditions based on research and lived experience,” says Isidor. “This is beneficial for us whether we’re working in an international context or in the United States.”

    For biology major Shaida Nishat, her internship at the University of Cape Town allowed her to work in a vital sphere of public health and provided her with the chance to work with a diverse, international team headed by Associate Professor Salome Maswine, head of the global surgery division and a widely-renowned expert in global surgery, a multidisciplinary field in the sphere of global health focused on improved and equitable surgical outcomes.

    “It broadened my perspective as to how an effort like global surgery ties so many nations together through a common goal that would benefit them all,” says Nishat, who plans to pursue a career in public health.

    For computer science sophomore Antonio L. Ortiz Bigio, the MISTI research internship in Africa was an incomparable experience, culturally and professionally. Bigio interned at the Robotics Autonomous Intelligence and Learning Laboratory at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, led by Professor Benjamin Rosman, where he developed software to enable a robot to play chess. The experience has inspired Bigio to continue to pursue robotics and machine learning.

    Participating faculty at the host institutions welcomed their MIT interns, and were impressed by their capabilities. Both Rosman and Maswime described their MIT interns as hard-working and valued team members, who had helped to advance their own work.  

    Building strong global partnerships, whether through faculty research, student internships, or other initiatives, takes time and cultivation, explains Jacobovits. Each successful collaboration helps to seed future exchanges and builds interest at MIT and peer institutions in creative partnerships. As MIT continues to deepen its connections to institutions and researchers across Africa, says Jacobovits, “students like Shaida, Rajan, Mel, and Antonio are really effective ambassadors in building those networks.” More

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    MIT student club Engineers Without Borders works with local village in Tanzania

    Four students from the MIT club Engineers Without Borders (EWB) spent part of their summer in Tanzania to begin assessment work for a health and sanitation project that will benefit the entire village, and an irrigated garden for the Mkutani Primary School.

    The club has been working with the Boston Professional Chapter of Engineers Without Borders (EWB-BPC) since 2019. The Boston chapter finds projects in underserved communities in the developing world and helped connect the MIT students with local government and school officials.

    Juniors Fiona Duong, female health and sanitation team lead, and Lai Wa Chu, irrigation team lead, spent two weeks over the summer in Mkutani conducting research for their projects. Chu was faced with finding more water supplies and a way to get water from the nearby river to the school to use in the gardens they were planting. Duong was charged with assessing the needs of the people who visit The Mkutani Dispensary, which serves as a local medical clinic. Juniors Hung Huynh, club president, and Vivian Cheng, student advisor, also made the trip to work on the projects.

    Health and sanitation project

    Duong looked into ways to help pregnant women with privacy issues as the facility they give birth in — The Mkutani Dispensary — is very small, with just two beds, and is in need of repairs and upgrades. Before leaving Cambridge, Duong led FaceTime meetings with government officials and facilities managers in the village. Once on the ground, she began collecting information and conducted focus groups with the local women and other constituents. She learned that one in three women were not giving birth in the dispensary due to privacy concerns and the lack of modern equipment needed for high-risk pregnancies.

    “The women said that the most pressing need there was water. The women were expected to bring their own water to their deliveries. The rain-catching system there was not enough to fulfill their needs and the river water wasn’t clean. When in labor, they relied on others to gather it and bring it to the dispensary by bike,” Duong says. “With broken windows, the dispensary did not allow for privacy or sanitary conditions.”

    Duong will also analyze the data she collected and share it with others before more MIT students head to Mkutani next summer.

    Farming, sustainability, and irrigation projectBefore heading to Mkutani, Chu conducted research regarding irrigation methods and water collection methods. She confirmed that the river water still contained E.coli and advised the teachers that it would need to be boiled or placed in the sun for a few hours before it could be used. Her technical background in fluid dynamics was helpful for the project.

    “We also found that there was a need for supplemental food for the school, as many children lived too far away to walk home for lunch. The headmaster reached out to us about building the garden, as the garden provides supplemental fruit and vegetables for many of the 600 students to eat. They needed water from the river that was quite far away from the school. We looked at ways to get the water to the garden,” Chu says.

    The group is considering conducting an ecological survey of the area to see if there is another source of water so they could drill another borehole. They will complete their analysis and then decide the best solution to implement.

    “Watching the whole team’s hard work pay off when the travel team got to Mkutani was so amazing,” says second-year student Maria Hernandez, club internal relations chair. “Now, we’re ready to get to work again so we can go back next year. I love being a part of Engineers Without Borders because it’s such a unique way to apply technical skills outside of the classroom and see the impact you make on the community. It’s a beautiful project that truly impacts so many people, and I can’t wait to go back to Mkutani next year.”

    Both Duong and Chu hope they’ll return to the school and the dispensary in summer 2023 to work on the implementation phase of their projects. “This project is one of the reasons I came to MIT. I wanted to work on a social impact project to help improve the world,” Chu says.

    “I hope to go back next summer and implement the project,” adds Duong. “If I do, we’ll go during the two most crucial weeks of the project — after the contractors have started the repair work on the dispensary, so we can see how things are going and then help with anything else related to the project.”

    Duong and Chu said students don’t have to be engineers to help with the EWB’s work — any MIT student interested in joining the club may do so. Both agree that fundraising is a priority, but there are numerous other roles students can help with.

    “MIT students shouldn’t be afraid to just dive right in. There’s a lot that needs to be done there, and even if you don’t have experience in a certain area, don’t let that be a barrier. It’s very rewarding work and it’s also great to get international work experience,” Duong says.

    Chu added, “The project may not seem flashy now, but the rewards are great. Students will get new technical skills and get to experience a new culture as well.” More

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    Migration Summit addresses education and workforce development in displacement

    “Refugees can change the world with access to education,” says Alnarjes Harba, a refugee from Syria who recently shared her story at the 2022 Migration Summit — a first-of-its-kind, global convening to address the challenges that displaced communities face in accessing education and employment.

    At the age of 13, Harba was displaced to Lebanon, where she graduated at the top of her high school class. But because of her refugee status, she recalls, no university in her host country would accept her. Today, Harba is a researcher in health-care architecture. She holds a bachelor’s degree from Southern New Hampshire University, where she was part of the Global Education Movement, a program providing refugees with pathways to higher education and work.

    Like many of the Migration Summit’s participants, Harba shared her story to call attention not only to the barriers to refugee education, but also to the opportunities to create more education-to-employment pathways like MIT Refugee Action Hub’s (ReACT) certificate programs for displaced learners.

    Organized by MIT ReACT, the MIT Abdul Latif Jameel World Education Lab (J-WEL), Na’amal, Karam Foundation, and Paper Airplanes, the Migration Summit sought to center the voices and experiences of those most directly impacted by displacement — both in narratives about the crisis and in the search for solutions. Themed “Education and Workforce Development in Displacement,” this year’s summit welcomed more than 900 attendees from over 30 countries, to a total of 40 interactive virtual sessions led by displaced learners, educators, and activists working to support communities in displacement.

    Sessions highlighted the experiences of refugees, migrants, and displaced learners, as well as current efforts across the education and workforce development landscape, ranging from pK-12 initiatives to post-secondary programs, workforce training to entrepreneurship opportunities.

    Overcoming barriers to access

    The vision for the Migration Summit developed, in part, out of the need to raise more awareness about the long-standing global displacement crisis. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), 82.4 million people worldwide today are forcibly displaced, a figure that doesn’t include the estimated 12 million people who have fled their homes in Ukraine since February.

    “Refugees not only leave their countries; they leave behind a thousand memories, their friends, their families,” says Mondiant Dogon, a human rights activist, refugee ambassador, and author who gave the Migration Summit’s opening keynote address. “Education is the most important thing that can happen to refugees. In that way, we can leave behind the refugee camps and build our own independent future.”

    Yet, as the stories of the summit’s participants highlight, many in displacement have lost their livelihoods or had their education disrupted — only to face further challenges when trying to access education or find work in their new places of residence. Obstacles range from legal restrictions, language and cultural barriers, and unaffordable costs to lack of verifiable credentials. UNHCR estimates that only 5 percent of refugees have access to higher education, compared to the global average of 39 percent.

    “There is another problem related to forced displacement — dehumanization of migrants,” says Lina Sergie Attar, the founder and CEO of Karam Foundation. “They are unjustly positioned as enemies, as a threat.”

    But as Blein Alem, an MIT ReACT alum and refugee from Eritrea, explains, “No one chooses to be a refugee — it just occurs. Whether by conflict, war, human rights violations, just because you have refugee status does not mean that you are not willing to make a change in your life and access to education and work.” Several participants, including Alem, shared that, even with a degree in hand, their refugee status limited their ability to work in their new countries of residence.

    Displaced communities face complex and structural challenges in accessing education and workforce development opportunities. Because of the varying and vast effects of displacement, efforts to address these challenges range in scale and focus and differ across sectors. As Lorraine Charles, co-founder and director of Na’amal, noted in the Migration Summit’s closing session, many organizations find themselves working in silos, or even competing with each other for funding and other resources. As a result, solution-making has been fragmented, with persistent gaps between different sectors that are, in fact, working toward the same goals.

    Imagining a modular, digital, collaborative approach

    A key takeaway from the month’s discussions, then, is the need to rethink the response to refugee education and workforce challenges. During the session, “From Intentions to Impact: Decolonizing Refugee Response,” participants emphasized the systemic nature of these challenges. Yet formal responses, such as the 1951 Refugee Convention, have been largely inadequate — in some instances even oppressing the communities they’re meant to support, explains Sana Mustafa, director of partnership and engagement for Asylum Access.

    “We have the opportunity to rethink how we are handling the situation,” Mustafa says, calling for more efforts to include refugees in the design and development of solutions.

    Presenters also agreed that educational institutions, particularly universities, could play a vital role in providing more pathways for refugees and displaced learners. Key to this is rethinking the structure of education itself, including its delivery.

    “The challenge right now is that degrees are monolithic,” says Sanjay Sarma, vice president for MIT Open Learning, who gave the keynote address on “Pathways to Education, Livelihood, and Hope.” “They’re like those gigantic rocks at Stonehenge or in other megalithic sites. What we need is a much more granular version of education: bricks. Bricks were invented several thousand years ago, but we don’t really have that yet formally and extensively in education.”

    “There is no way we can accommodate thousands and thousands of refugees face-to-face,” says Shai Reshef, the founder and president of University of the People. “The only path is a digital one.”

    Ultimately, explains Demetri Fadel of Karam Foundation, “We really need to think about how to create a vision of education as a right for every person all around the world.”

    Underlying many of the Migration Summit’s conclusions is the awareness that there is still much work to be done. However, as the summit’s co-chair Lana Cook said in her closing remarks, “This was not a convening of despair, but one about what we can build together.”

    The summit’s organizers are currently putting together a public report of the key findings that have emerged from the month’s conversations, including recommendations for thematic working groups and future Migration Summit activities. More

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    Empowering people to adapt on the frontlines of climate change

    On April 11, MIT announced five multiyear flagship projects in the first-ever Climate Grand Challenges, a new initiative to tackle complex climate problems and deliver breakthrough solutions to the world as quickly as possible. This article is the fifth in a five-part series highlighting the most promising concepts to emerge from the competition and the interdisciplinary research teams behind them.

    In the coastal south of Bangladesh, rice paddies that farmers could once harvest three times a year lie barren. Sea-level rise brings saltwater to the soil, ruining the staple crop. It’s one of many impacts, and inequities, of climate change. Despite producing less than 1 percent of global carbon emissions, Bangladesh is suffering more than most countries. Rising seas, heat waves, flooding, and cyclones threaten 90 million people.

    A platform being developed in a collaboration between MIT and BRAC, a Bangladesh-based global development organization, aims to inform and empower climate-threatened communities to proactively adapt to a changing future. Selected as one of five MIT Climate Grand Challenges flagship projects, the Climate Resilience Early Warning System (CREWSnet) will forecast the local impacts of climate change on people’s lives, homes, and livelihoods. These forecasts will guide BRAC’s development of climate-resiliency programs to help residents prepare for and adapt to life-altering conditions.

    “The communities that CREWSnet will focus on have done little to contribute to the problem of climate change in the first place. However, because of socioeconomic situations, they may be among the most vulnerable. We hope that by providing state-of-the-art projections and sharing them broadly with communities, and working through partners like BRAC, we can help improve the capacity of local communities to adapt to climate change, significantly,” says Elfatih Eltahir, the H.M. King Bhumibol Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

    Eltahir leads the project with John Aldridge and Deborah Campbell in the Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief Systems Group at Lincoln Laboratory. Additional partners across MIT include the Center for Global Change Science; the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences; the Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change; and the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab. 

    Predicting local risks

    CREWSnet’s forecasts rely upon a sophisticated model, developed in Eltahir’s research group over the past 25 years, called the MIT Regional Climate Model. This model zooms in on climate processes at local scales, at a resolution as granular as 6 miles. In Bangladesh’s population-dense cities, a 6-mile area could encompass tens, or even hundreds, of thousands of people. The model takes into account the details of a region’s topography, land use, and coastline to predict changes in local conditions.

    When applying this model over Bangladesh, researchers found that heat waves will get more severe and more frequent over the next 30 years. In particular, wet-bulb temperatures, which indicate the ability for humans to cool down by sweating, will rise to dangerous levels rarely observed today, particularly in western, inland cities.

    Such hot spots exacerbate other challenges predicted to worsen near Bangladesh’s coast. Rising sea levels and powerful cyclones are eroding and flooding coastal communities, causing saltwater to surge into land and freshwater. This salinity intrusion is detrimental to human health, ruins drinking water supplies, and harms crops, livestock, and aquatic life that farmers and fishermen depend on for food and income.

    CREWSnet will fuse climate science with forecasting tools that predict the social and economic impacts to villages and cities. These forecasts — such as how often a crop season may fail, or how far floodwaters will reach — can steer decision-making.

    “What people need to know, whether they’re a governor or head of a household, is ‘What is going to happen in my area, and what decisions should I make for the people I’m responsible for?’ Our role is to integrate this science and technology together into a decision support system,” says Aldridge, whose group at Lincoln Laboratory specializes in this area. Most recently, they transitioned a hurricane-evacuation planning system to the U.S. government. “We know that making decisions based on climate change requires a deep level of trust. That’s why having a powerful partner like BRAC is so important,” he says.

    Testing interventions

    Established 50 years ago, just after Bangladesh’s independence, BRAC works in every district of the nation to provide social services that help people rise from extreme poverty. Today, it is one of the world’s largest nongovernmental organizations, serving 110 million people across 11 countries in Asia and Africa, but its success is cultivated locally.

    “BRAC is thrilled to partner with leading researchers at MIT to increase climate resilience in Bangladesh and provide a model that can be scaled around the globe,” says Donella Rapier, president and CEO of BRAC USA. “Locally led climate adaptation solutions that are developed in partnership with communities are urgently needed, particularly in the most vulnerable regions that are on the frontlines of climate change.”

    CREWSnet will help BRAC identify communities most vulnerable to forecasted impacts. In these areas, they will share knowledge and innovate or bolster programs to improve households’ capacity to adapt.

    Many climate initiatives are already underway. One program equips homes to filter and store rainwater, as salinity intrusion makes safe drinking water hard to access. Another program is building resilient housing, able to withstand 120-mile-per-hour winds, that can double as local shelters during cyclones and flooding. Other services are helping farmers switch to different livestock or crops better suited for wetter or saltier conditions (e.g., ducks instead of chickens, or salt-tolerant rice), providing interest-free loans to enable this change.

    But adapting in place will not always be possible, for example in areas predicted to be submerged or unbearably hot by midcentury. “Bangladesh is working on identifying and developing climate-resilient cities and towns across the country, as closer-by alternative destinations as compared to moving to Dhaka, the overcrowded capital of Bangladesh,” says Campbell. “CREWSnet can help identify regions better suited for migration, and climate-resilient adaptation strategies for those regions.” At the same time, BRAC’s Climate Bridge Fund is helping to prepare cities for climate-induced migration, building up infrastructure and financial services for people who have been displaced.

    Evaluating impact

    While CREWSnet’s goal is to enable action, it can’t quite measure the impact of those actions. The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), a development economics program in the MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, will help evaluate the effectiveness of the climate-adaptation programs.

    “We conduct randomized controlled trials, similar to medical trials, that help us understand if a program improved people’s lives,” says Claire Walsh, the project director of the King Climate Action Initiative at J-PAL. “Once CREWSnet helps BRAC implement adaptation programs, we will generate scientific evidence on their impacts, so that BRAC and CREWSnet can make a case to funders and governments to expand effective programs.”

    The team aspires to bring CREWSnet to other nations disproportionately impacted by climate change. “Our vision is to have this be a globally extensible capability,” says Campbell. CREWSnet’s name evokes another early-warning decision-support system, FEWSnet, that helped organizations address famine in eastern Africa in the 1980s. Today it is a pillar of food-security planning around the world.

    CREWSnet hopes for a similar impact in climate change planning. Its selection as an MIT Climate Grand Challenges flagship project will inject the project with more funding and resources, momentum that will also help BRAC’s fundraising. The team plans to deploy CREWSnet to southwestern Bangladesh within five years.

    “The communities that we are aspiring to reach with CREWSnet are deeply aware that their lives are changing — they have been looking climate change in the eye for many years. They are incredibly resilient, creative, and talented,” says Ashley Toombs, the external affairs director for BRAC USA. “As a team, we are excited to bring this system to Bangladesh. And what we learn together, we will apply at potentially even larger scales.” More

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    Leveraging science and technology against the world’s top problems

    Looking back on nearly a half-century at MIT, Richard K. Lester, associate provost and Japan Steel Industry Professor, sees a “somewhat eccentric professional trajectory.”

    But while his path has been irregular, there has been a clearly defined through line, Lester says: the emergence of new science and new technologies, the potential of these developments to shake up the status quo and address some of society’s most consequential problems, and what the outcomes might mean for America’s place in the world.

    Perhaps no assignment in Lester’s portfolio better captures this theme than the new MIT Climate Grand Challenges competition. Spearheaded by Lester and Maria Zuber, MIT vice president for research, and launched at the height of the pandemic in summer 2020, this initiative is designed to mobilize the entire MIT research community around tackling “the really hard, challenging problems currently standing in the way of an effective global response to the climate emergency,” says Lester. “The focus is on those problems where progress requires developing and applying frontier knowledge in the natural and social sciences and cutting-edge technologies. This is the MIT community swinging for the fences in areas where we have a comparative advantage.”This is a passion project for him, not least because it has engaged colleagues from nearly all of MIT’s departments. After nearly 100 initial ideas were submitted by more than 300 faculty, 27 teams were named finalists and received funding to develop comprehensive research and innovation plans in such areas as decarbonizing complex industries; risk forecasting and adaptation; advancing climate equity; and carbon removal, management, and storage. In April, a small subset of this group will become multiyear flagship projects, augmenting the work of existing MIT units that are pursuing climate research. Lester is sunny in the face of these extraordinarily complex problems. “This is a bottom-up effort with exciting proposals, and where the Institute is collectively committed — it’s MIT at its best.”

    Nuclear to the core

    This initiative carries a particular resonance for Lester, who remains deeply engaged in nuclear engineering. “The role of nuclear energy is central and will need to become even more central if we’re to succeed in addressing the climate challenge,” he says. He also acknowledges that for nuclear energy technologies — both fission and fusion — to play a vital role in decarbonizing the economy, they must not just win “in the court of public opinion, but in the marketplace,” he says. “Over the years, my research has sought to elucidate what needs to be done to overcome these obstacles.”

    In fact, Lester has been campaigning for much of his career for a U.S. nuclear innovation agenda, a commitment that takes on increased urgency as the contours of the climate crisis sharpen. He argues for the rapid development and testing of nuclear technologies that can complement the renewable but intermittent energy sources of sun and wind. Whether powerful, large-scale, molten-salt-cooled reactors or small, modular, light water reactors, nuclear batteries or promising new fusion projects, U.S. energy policy must embrace nuclear innovation, says Lester, or risk losing the high-stakes race for a sustainable future.

    Chancing into a discipline

    Lester’s introduction to nuclear science was pure happenstance.

    Born in the English industrial city of Leeds, he grew up in a musical family and played piano, violin, and then viola. “It was a big part of my life,” he says, and for a time, music beckoned as a career. He tumbled into a chemical engineering concentration at Imperial College, London, after taking a job in a chemical factory following high school. “There’s a certain randomness to life, and in my case, it’s reflected in my choice of major, which had a very large impact on my ultimate career.”

    In his second year, Lester talked his way into running a small experiment in the university’s research reactor, on radiation effects in materials. “I got hooked, and began thinking of studying nuclear engineering.” But there were few graduate programs in British universities at the time. Then serendipity struck again. The instructor of Lester’s single humanities course at Imperial had previously taught at MIT, and suggested Lester take a look at the nuclear program there. “I will always be grateful to him (and, indirectly, to MIT’s Humanities program) for opening my eyes to the existence of this institution where I’ve spent my whole adult life,” says Lester.

    He arrived at MIT with the notion of mitigating the harms of nuclear weapons. It was a time when the nuclear arms race “was an existential threat in everyone’s life,” he recalls. He targeted his graduate studies on nuclear proliferation. But he also encountered an electrifying study by MIT meteorologist Jule Charney. “Professor Charney produced one of the first scientific assessments of the effects on climate of increasing CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere, with quantitative estimates that have not fundamentally changed in 40 years.”

    Lester shifted directions. “I came to MIT to work on nuclear security, but stayed in the nuclear field because of the contributions that it can and must make in addressing climate change,” he says.

    Research and policy

    His path forward, Lester believed, would involve applying his science and technology expertise to critical policy problems, grounded in immediate, real-world concerns, and aiming for broad policy impacts. Even as a member of NSE, he joined with colleagues from many MIT departments to study American industrial practices and what was required to make them globally competitive, and then founded MIT’s Industrial Performance Center (IPC). Working at the IPC with interdisciplinary teams of faculty and students on the sources of productivity and innovation, his research took him to many countries at different stages of industrialization, including China, Taiwan, Japan, and Brazil.

    Lester’s wide-ranging work yielded books (including the MIT Press bestseller “Made in America”), advisory positions with governments, corporations, and foundations, and unexpected collaborations. “My interests were always fairly broad, and being at MIT made it possible to team up with world-leading scholars and extraordinary students not just in nuclear engineering, but in many other fields such as political science, economics, and management,” he says.

    Forging cross-disciplinary ties and bringing creative people together around a common goal proved a valuable skill as Lester stepped into positions of ever-greater responsibility at the Institute. He didn’t exactly relish the prospect of a desk job, though. “I religiously avoided administrative roles until I felt I couldn’t keep avoiding them,” he says.

    Today, as associate provost, he tends to MIT’s international activities — a daunting task given increasing scrutiny of research universities’ globe-spanning research partnerships and education of foreign students. But even in the midst of these consuming chores, Lester remains devoted to his home department. “Being a nuclear engineer is a central part of my identity,” he says.

    To students entering the nuclear field nearly 50 years after he did, who are understandably “eager to fix everything that seems wrong immediately,” he has a message: “Be patient. The hard things, the ones that are really worth doing, will take a long time to do.” Putting the climate crisis behind us will take two generations, Lester believes. Current students will start the job, but it will also take the efforts of their children’s generation before it is done.  “So we need you to be energetic and creative, of course, but whatever you do we also need you to be patient and to have ‘stick-to-itiveness’ — and maybe also a moral compass that our generation has lacked.” More

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    MIT ReACT welcomes first Afghan cohort to its largest-yet certificate program

    Through the championing support of the faculty and leadership of the MIT Afghan Working Group convened last September by Provost Martin Schmidt and chaired by Associate Provost for International Activities Richard Lester, MIT has come together to support displaced Afghan learners and scholars in a time of crisis. The MIT Refugee Action Hub (ReACT) has opened opportunities for 25 talented Afghan learners to participate in the hub’s certificate program in computer and data science (CDS), now in its fourth year, welcoming its largest and most diverse cohort to date — 136 learners from 29 countries.

    ”Even in the face of extreme disruption, education and scholarship must continue, and MIT is committed to providing resources and safe forums for displaced scholars,” says Lester. “We greatly appreciate MIT ReACT’s work to create learning opportunities for Afghan students whose lives have been upended by the crisis in their homeland.”

    Currently, more than 3.5 million Afghans are internally displaced, while 2.5 million are registered refugees residing in other parts of the world. With millions in Afghanistan facing famine, poverty, and civil unrest in what has become the world’s largest humanitarian crisis, the United Nations predicts the number of Afghans forced to flee their homes will continue to rise. 

    “Forced displacement is on the rise, fueled not only by constant political, economical, and social turmoil worldwide, but also by the ongoing climate change crisis, which threatens costly disruptions to society and has potential to create unprecedented displacement internationally,” says associate professor of civil and environmental engineering and ReACT’s faculty founder Admir Masic. During the orientation for the new CDS cohort in January, Masic emphasized the great need for educational programs like ReACT’s that address the specific challenges refugees and displaced learners face.

    A former Bosnian refugee, Masic spent his teenage years in Croatia, where educational opportunities were limited for young people with refugee status. His experience motivated him to found ReACT, which launched in 2017. Housed within Open Learning, ReACT is an MIT-wide effort to deliver global education and professional development programs to underserved communities, including refugees and migrants. ReACT’s signature program, CDS is a year-long, online program that combines MITx courses in programming and data science, personal and professional development workshops including MIT Bootcamps, and opportunities for practical experience.

    ReACT’s group of 25 learners from Afghanistan, 52 percent of whom are women, joins the larger CDS cohort in the program. They will receive support from their new colleagues as well as members of ReACT’s mentor and alumni network. While the majority of the group are residing around the world, including in Europe, North America, and neighboring countries, several still remain in Afghanistan. With the support of the Afghan Working Group, ReACT is working to connect with communities from the region to provide safe and inclusive learning environments for the cohort. ​​

    Building community and confidence

    Selected from more than 1,000 applicants, the new CDS cohort reflected on their personal and professional goals during a weeklong orientation.

    “I am here because I want to change my career and learn basics in this field to then obtain networks that I wouldn’t have got if it weren’t for this program,” said Samiullah Ajmal, who is joining the program from Afghanistan.

    Interactive workshops on topics such as leadership development and virtual networking rounded out the week’s events. Members of ReACT’s greater community — which has grown in recent years to include a network of external collaborators including nonprofits, philanthropic supporters, universities, and alumni — helped facilitate these workshops and other orientation activities.

    For instance, Na’amal, a social enterprise that connects refugees to remote work opportunities, introduced the CDS learners to strategies for making career connections remotely. “We build confidence while doing,” says Susan Mulholland, a leadership and development coach with Na’amal who led the networking workshop.

    Along with the CDS program’s cohort-based model, ReACT also uses platforms that encourage regular communication between participants and with the larger ReACT network — making connections a critical component of the program.

    “I not only want to meet new people and make connections for my professional career, but I also want to test my communication and social skills,” says Pablo Andrés Uribe, a learner who lives in Colombia, describing ReACT’s emphasis on community-building. 

    Over the last two years, ReACT has expanded its geographic presence, growing from a hub in Jordan into a robust global community of many hubs, including in Colombia and Uganda. These regional sites connect talented refugees and displaced learners to internships and employment, startup networks and accelerators, and pathways to formal undergraduate and graduate education.

    This expansion is thanks to the generous support internally from the MIT Office of the Provost and Associate Provost Richard Lester and external organizations including the Western Union Foundation. ReACT will build new hubs this year in Greece, Uruguay, and Afghanistan, as a result of gifts from the Hatsopoulos family and the Pfeffer family.

    Holding space to learn from each other

    In addition to establishing new global hubs, ReACT plans to expand its network of internship and experiential learning opportunities, increasing outreach to new collaborators such as nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), companies, and universities. Jointly with Na’amal and Paper Airplanes, a nonprofit that connects conflict-affected individuals with personal language tutors, ReACT will host the first Migration Summit. Scheduled for April 2022, the month-long global convening invites a broad range of participants, including displaced learners, universities, companies, nonprofits and NGOs, social enterprises, foundations, philanthropists, researchers, policymakers, employers, and governments, to address the key challenges and opportunities for refugee and migrant communities. The theme of the summit is “Education and Workforce Development in Displacement.”

    “The MIT Migration Summit offers a platform to discuss how new educational models, such as those employed in ReACT, can help solve emerging challenges in providing quality education and career opportunities to forcibly displaced and marginalized people around the world,” says Masic. 

    A key goal of the convening is to center the voices of those most directly impacted by displacement, such as ReACT’s learners from Afghanistan and elsewhere, in solution-making. More

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    Can the world meet global climate targets without coordinated global action?

    Like many of its predecessors, the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) in Glasgow, Scotland concluded with bold promises on international climate action aimed at keeping global warming well below 2 degrees Celsius, but few concrete plans to ensure that those promises will be kept. While it’s not too late for the Paris Agreement’s nearly 200 signatory nations to take concerted action to cap global warming at 2 C — if not 1.5 C — there is simply no guarantee that they will do so. If they fail, how much warming is the Earth likely to see in the 21st century and beyond?

    A new study by researchers at the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change and the Shell Scenarios Team projects that without a globally coordinated mitigation effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the planet’s average surface temperature will reach 2.8 C, much higher than the “well below 2 C” level to which the Paris Agreement aspires, but a lot lower than what many widely used “business-as-usual” scenarios project.  

    Recognizing the limitations of such scenarios, which generally assume that historical trends in energy technology choices and climate policy inaction will persist for decades to come, the researchers have designed a “Growing Pressures” scenario that accounts for mounting social, technological, business, and political pressures that are driving a transition away from fossil-fuel use and toward a low-carbon future. Such pressures have already begun to expand low-carbon technology and policy options, which, in turn, have escalated demand to utilize those options — a trend that’s expected to self-reinforce. Under this scenario, an array of future actions and policies cause renewable energy and energy storage costs to decline; fossil fuels to be phased out; electrification to proliferate; and emissions from agriculture and industry to be sharply reduced.

    Incorporating these growing pressures in the MIT Joint Program’s integrated model of Earth and human systems, the study’s co-authors project future energy use, greenhouse gas emissions, and global average surface temperatures in a world that fails to implement coordinated, global climate mitigation policies, and instead pursues piecemeal actions at mostly local and national levels.

    “Few, if any, previous studies explore scenarios of how piecemeal climate policies might plausibly unfold into the future and impact global temperature,” says MIT Joint Program research scientist Jennifer Morris, the study’s lead author. “We offer such a scenario, considering a future in which the increasingly visible impacts of climate change drive growing pressure from voters, shareholders, consumers, and investors, which in turn drives piecemeal action by governments and businesses that steer investments away from fossil fuels and toward low-carbon alternatives.”

    In the study’s central case (representing the mid-range climate response to greenhouse gas emissions), fossil fuels persist in the global energy mix through 2060 and then slowly decline toward zero by 2130; global carbon dioxide emissions reach near-zero levels by 2130 (total greenhouse gas emissions decline to near-zero by 2150); and global surface temperatures stabilize at 2.8 C by 2150, 2.5 C lower than a widely used “business-as-usual” projection. The results appear in the journal Environmental Economics and Policy Studies.

    Such a transition could bring the global energy system to near-zero emissions, but more aggressive climate action would be needed to keep global temperatures well below 2 C in alignment with the Paris Agreement.

    “While we fully support the need to decarbonize as fast as possible, it is critical to assess realistic alternative scenarios of world development,” says Joint Program Deputy Director Sergey Paltsev, a co-author of the study. “We investigate plausible actions that could bring society closer to the long-term goals of the Paris Agreement. To actually meet those goals will require an accelerated transition away from fossil energy through a combination of R&D, technology deployment, infrastructure development, policy incentives, and business practices.”

    The study was funded by government, foundation, and industrial sponsors of the MIT Joint Program, including Shell International Ltd. More