Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change

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      Computing our climate future

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      On Monday, 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 first in a five-part series highlighting the most promising concepts to emerge from the competition, and the interdisciplinary research teams behind them.

      With improvements to computer processing power and an increased understanding of the physical equations governing the Earth’s climate, scientists are continually working to refine climate models and improve their predictive power. But the tools they’re refining were originally conceived decades ago with only scientists in mind. When it comes to developing tangible climate action plans, these models remain inscrutable to the policymakers, public safety officials, civil engineers, and community organizers who need their predictive insight most.

      “What you end up having is a gap between what’s typically used in practice, and the real cutting-edge science,” says Noelle Selin, a professor in the Institute for Data, Systems and Society and the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS), and co-lead with Professor Raffaele Ferrari on the MIT Climate Grand Challenges flagship project “Bringing Computation to the Climate Crisis.” “How can we use new computational techniques, new understandings, new ways of thinking about modeling, to really bridge that gap between state-of-the-art scientific advances and modeling, and people who are actually needing to use these models?”

      Using this as a driving question, the team won’t just be trying to refine current climate models, they’re building a new one from the ground up.

      This kind of game-changing advancement is exactly what the MIT Climate Grand Challenges is looking for, which is why the proposal has been named one of the five flagship projects in the ambitious Institute-wide program aimed at tackling the climate crisis. The proposal, which was selected from 100 submissions and was among 27 finalists, will receive additional funding and support to further their goal of reimagining the climate modeling system. It also brings together contributors from across the Institute, including the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, the School of Engineering, and the Sloan School of Management.

      When it comes to pursuing high-impact climate solutions that communities around the world can use, “it’s great to do it at MIT,” says Ferrari, EAPS Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Oceanography. “You’re not going to find many places in the world where you have the cutting-edge climate science, the cutting-edge computer science, and the cutting-edge policy science experts that we need to work together.”

      The climate model of the future

      The proposal builds on work that Ferrari began three years ago as part of a joint project with Caltech, the Naval Postgraduate School, and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab. Called the Climate Modeling Alliance (CliMA), the consortium of scientists, engineers, and applied mathematicians is constructing a climate model capable of more accurately projecting future changes in critical variables, such as clouds in the atmosphere and turbulence in the ocean, with uncertainties at least half the size of those in existing models.

      To do this, however, requires a new approach. For one thing, current models are too coarse in resolution — at the 100-to-200-kilometer scale — to resolve small-scale processes like cloud cover, rainfall, and sea ice extent. But also, explains Ferrari, part of this limitation in resolution is due to the fundamental architecture of the models themselves. The languages most global climate models are coded in were first created back in the 1960s and ’70s, largely by scientists for scientists. Since then, advances in computing driven by the corporate world and computer gaming have given rise to dynamic new computer languages, powerful graphics processing units, and machine learning.

      For climate models to take full advantage of these advancements, there’s only one option: starting over with a modern, more flexible language. Written in Julia, a part of Julialab’s Scientific Machine Learning technology, and spearheaded by Alan Edelman, a professor of applied mathematics in MIT’s Department of Mathematics, CliMA will be able to harness far more data than the current models can handle.

      “It’s been real fun finally working with people in computer science here at MIT,” Ferrari says. “Before it was impossible, because traditional climate models are in a language their students can’t even read.”

      The result is what’s being called the “Earth digital twin,” a climate model that can simulate global conditions on a large scale. This on its own is an impressive feat, but the team wants to take this a step further with their proposal.

      “We want to take this large-scale model and create what we call an ‘emulator’ that is only predicting a set of variables of interest, but it’s been trained on the large-scale model,” Ferrari explains. Emulators are not new technology, but what is new is that these emulators, being referred to as the “Earth digital cousins,” will take advantage of machine learning.

      “Now we know how to train a model if we have enough data to train them on,” says Ferrari. Machine learning for projects like this has only become possible in recent years as more observational data become available, along with improved computer processing power. The goal is to create smaller, more localized models by training them using the Earth digital twin. Doing so will save time and money, which is key if the digital cousins are going to be usable for stakeholders, like local governments and private-sector developers.

      Adaptable predictions for average stakeholders

      When it comes to setting climate-informed policy, stakeholders need to understand the probability of an outcome within their own regions — in the same way that you would prepare for a hike differently if there’s a 10 percent chance of rain versus a 90 percent chance. The smaller Earth digital cousin models will be able to do things the larger model can’t do, like simulate local regions in real time and provide a wider range of probabilistic scenarios.

      “Right now, if you wanted to use output from a global climate model, you usually would have to use output that’s designed for general use,” says Selin, who is also the director of the MIT Technology and Policy Program. With the project, the team can take end-user needs into account from the very beginning while also incorporating their feedback and suggestions into the models, helping to “democratize the idea of running these climate models,” as she puts it. Doing so means building an interactive interface that eventually will give users the ability to change input values and run the new simulations in real time. The team hopes that, eventually, the Earth digital cousins could run on something as ubiquitous as a smartphone, although developments like that are currently beyond the scope of the project.

      The next thing the team will work on is building connections with stakeholders. Through participation of other MIT groups, such as the Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change and the Climate and Sustainability Consortium, they hope to work closely with policymakers, public safety officials, and urban planners to give them predictive tools tailored to their needs that can provide actionable outputs important for planning. Faced with rising sea levels, for example, coastal cities could better visualize the threat and make informed decisions about infrastructure development and disaster preparedness; communities in drought-prone regions could develop long-term civil planning with an emphasis on water conservation and wildfire resistance.

      “We want to make the modeling and analysis process faster so people can get more direct and useful feedback for near-term decisions,” she says.

      The final piece of the challenge is to incentivize students now so that they can join the project and make a difference. Ferrari has already had luck garnering student interest after co-teaching a class with Edelman and seeing the enthusiasm students have about computer science and climate solutions.

      “We’re intending in this project to build a climate model of the future,” says Selin. “So it seems really appropriate that we would also train the builders of that climate model.” More

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

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      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

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      Bringing climate reporting to local newsrooms

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      Last summer, Nora Hertel, a reporter for the St. Cloud Times in central Minnesota, visited a farm just northeast of the Twin Cities run by the Native American-led nonprofit Dream of Wild Health. The farm raises a mix of vegetables and flowering plants, and has a particular focus on cultivating rare heirloom varieties. It’s also dealing with severely depleted soil, inherited from previous owners who grew corn on the same land. Hertel had come to learn about the techniques the farm was using to restore its soil, many of which were traditional parts of Indigenous farming practice, including planting cover crops over the winter and incorporating burnt wood and manure into the earth.

      The trip was part of a multi-part reporting project that Hertel undertook as an inaugural fellow in a new program from the MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative (ESI). The ESI Journalism Fellowship was created to help local reporters around the United States connect climate change science and solutions with issues that are already of importance to their audiences — particularly in areas where many people are still unclear or unsure about climate change. For Hertel, that meant visiting 10 farms and forest lands across Minnesota to understand how natural climate solutions are taking shape in her state. The practices she saw at the Dream of Wild Health farm not only helped to restore soil, but also helped slow climate change by taking carbon dioxide out of the air and storing it in soils and plants.

      “There is enthusiasm for natural climate solutions,” Hertel says, but these practices can be expensive and difficult to adopt. She wanted to explain the benefits and the hurdles, especially for farmers and land managers considering new agricultural techniques.

      Hertel produced six news pieces for the St. Cloud Times as part of her project, as well as a six-episode podcast series and two videos. To conclude the series, she ran a public event where 130 attendees — including conventional farmers, regenerative farmers, state senators, the St. Cloud mayor, and other community stakeholders — gathered outside in the 40-degree Fahrenheit cold to discuss carbon markets in Minnesota. The stories were republished in 12 additional outlets, including USA Today, Associated Press, Yahoo News, and US News & World Report. 

      “I had been hoping to write about cover crops and carbon markets for about two years before I pitched my project to ESI,” says Hertel. “I hadn’t been able to take the time and resources with all my other responsibilities. Joining the fellowship allowed me to focus on those topics and dive in deep to understand how much is uncertain and changing in the field right now.”

      Supporting local climate reporting

      In today’s news landscape, local coverage is dwindling, which has major effects on the ways people hear about climate change. At times, the only in-depth climate coverage available is covered by specialty or national publications, which can miss the opportunity to understand the nuances of the communities they are parachuting into.

      “Climate change is or will impact all of us, but many Americans don’t see it as relevant to their lives,” says Laur Hesse Fisher, program director at the ESI, who created and manages the fellowship program. “We’re working to help change that.”

      In this first year of the fellowship, five local journalists were selected from around the country to pursue long-form or serial climate-focused reporting. Fellows received funding and stipends to help them dedicate extra time and resources to their projects. They gathered virtually for workshops and were connected with MIT experts in a variety of relevant fields: scientists such as Adam Schlosser, senior research scientist and deputy director for science research at the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change; economists and policy experts such as Joshua Hodge, executive director of the MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research (CEEPR); and journalism experts from the MIT Knight Science Journalism Program.

      Fellows were also given full access to MIT’s extensive library databases and geographic data visualization tools, along with tools focused specifically on climate science and policy like the MIT Socio-Environmental Triage platform and CEEPR’s working papers. All these resources aimed to give the journalism fellows the backing they needed to undertake ambitious projects on climate issues their audiences might otherwise never have known were playing out right in their backyards.

      Stories around the country

      The result was five distinct reporting projects spread across the United States.

      ESI Fellow Tristan Baurick is an environment reporter for the Times Picayune | New Orleans Advocate, Louisiana’s largest newspaper. His multi-part series, “Wind of Change: How the Gulf of Mexico could be the next offshore wind powerhouse,” ran on the front page of the Thanksgiving print edition of the paper. It explores how the state’s offshore oil companies are pivoting to support the emerging wind energy industry, as well as the outcomes of the U.S.’s first offshore wind farm in Rhode Island, which Baurick visited on an extended reporting trip. The series looks at the history of Louisiana, which, despite being a hub for wind engineering technology production, has seen most of that technology exported. “The project relied on experts from the oil and gas industry to introduce the idea of offshore wind energy and the opportunities it could offer the region,” says Baurick. “This approach made readers who are skeptical of climate change and renewable energy let their guard down and consider these topics with a more open mind.”

      Oregon-based environmental journalist Alex Schwartz explored water rights and climate change within the Klamath River Basin for the Herald & News. The result was a five-part digital series that examines the many stakeholders, including Indigenous groups, farmers, fishers, and park managers, who depend on the Klamath River for water even as the region enters a period of extended climate change-induced drought. “The fellowship provided me with financial resources to be able to execute a project at this scale,” says Schwartz. “We never would have been able to take the time off and travel throughout the basin without the support of the fellowship.”

      Melba Newsome is a North Carolina-based independent reporter. Her two-part series for NC Health News focuses on Smithfield’s Foods, whose hog houses continue to have lasting health and environmental implications for majority Black communities in the southeastern part of the state. The series, which has been republished by Indy Weekly, the Daily Yonder, and others, interviews residents and activists to untangle a history of legal battles, neglect, and accusations of environmental racism — while noting that sea-level rise has made the region increasingly vulnerable to dangerous releases of waste from its growing factory farms.

      The final project supported by the fellowship came from Wyoming, famous for its vast outdoors and coal industry. In his three-part series for WyoFile, journalist Dustin Bleizeffer — whose beat shifted from education to energy and climate in part as a result of his fellowship — spoke to local residents to capture their personal experiences of warming temperatures and changing landscapes. “[Of] the people I interviewed and featured in my reporting … all but one are climate skeptics, but they spoke in detail about climate changes they’ve observed, and very eloquently described their concerns,” says Bleizeffer. “I’m still receiving comments and enthusiasm to keep the conversation going.” He also looked at how two Wyoming counties, Gillette and Campbell, are faring through the coal industry’s decline. His series provided a boost to efforts by grassroots organizations and conservation groups that are trying to open “the climate conversation” in the state.

      Lessons for climate conversations

      All five fellows joined ESI for a wrap-up event on Nov. 4, Connecting with Americans on Climate Change, which both showcased their work and gave them the opportunity to publicly discuss ways to engage Americans across the political spectrum on climate change.

      The event was joined by sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild, author of the bestselling “Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right,” who had earlier joined the fellows in one of their workshops to offer her own experience engaging with people who feel ill-served by the national media. Her book, which followed members of the Tea Party in Louisiana for five years, illustrates the importance of deep listening to bridging America’s social and political divides. Hochschild applied this insight to climate change in talking with the fellows and event attendees about strategies to understand and respond to local perspectives on what is often framed as a contentious political issue. “Sociology gives us forgiveness; [it] gets blame and guilt out of the picture,” said Hochschild.

      That was an insight echoed by several of the journalism fellows. “I think rural people feel blamed a lot for every problem,” said Schwartz. “If we were to take the carbon footprint of the Klamath River Basin, it would be minuscule compared to any corporation, right? … We have to create that safety net for our communities to be able to bear the brunt of these cascading disasters that are already occurring and are just going to get worse in the future. Focusing on the adaptation side was really helpful in terms of just getting people to talk about climate change.”

      Other fellows had their own strategies for opening conversations about climate change — and by responding to their audiences’ concerns, they did see opportunities for change in their reporting. In Wyoming, Bleizeffer talked about the need to retain young people in the state, and about changes to landscapes residents loved. Newsome emphasized that people need to see climate change as not someone else’s problem — for her audience, it illustrated and exacerbated injustices they were already feeling.

      And Hertel, speaking of the conventional farmers, everyday people, and local government officials featured in her series, left event attendees with one more insight about effective climate reporting. “Don’t expect people to change on a dime,” she said. “You must bring people [along] on the journey.”

      ESI will be opening journalism fellowship applications for its second cohort later this year. Experienced reporters are encouraged to apply. If you are interested in supporting this fellowship or are curious about opportunities for partnerships, please contact Laur Hesse Fisher. More

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      Pricing carbon, valuing people

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      In November, inflation hit a 39-year high in the United States. The consumer price index was up 6.8 percent from the previous year due to major increases in the cost of rent, food, motor vehicles, gasoline, and other common household expenses. While inflation impacts the entire country, its effects are not felt equally. At greatest risk are low- and middle-income Americans who may lack sufficient financial reserves to absorb such economic shocks.

      Meanwhile, scientists, economists, and activists across the political spectrum continue to advocate for another potential systemic economic change that many fear will also put lower-income Americans at risk: the imposition of a national carbon price, fee, or tax. Framed by proponents as the most efficient and cost-effective way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and meet climate targets, a carbon penalty would incentivize producers and consumers to shift expenditures away from carbon-intensive products and services (e.g., coal or natural gas-generated electricity) and toward low-carbon alternatives (e.g., 100 percent renewable electricity). But if not implemented in a way that takes differences in household income into account, this policy strategy, like inflation, could place an unequal and untenable economic burden on low- and middle-income Americans.         

      To garner support from policymakers, carbon-penalty proponents have advocated for policies that recycle revenues from carbon penalties to all or lower-income taxpayers in the form of payroll tax reductions or lump-sum payments. And yet some of these proposed policies run the risk of reducing the overall efficiency of the U.S. economy, which would lower the nation’s GDP and impede its economic growth.

      Which begs the question: Is there a sweet spot at which a national carbon-penalty revenue-recycling policy can both avoid inflicting economic harm on lower-income Americans at the household level and degrading economic efficiency at the national level?

      In search of that sweet spot, researchers at the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change assess the economic impacts of four different carbon-penalty revenue-recycling policies: direct rebates from revenues to households via lump-sum transfers; indirect refunding of revenues to households via a proportional reduction in payroll taxes; direct rebates from revenues to households, but only for low- and middle-income groups, with remaining revenues recycled via a proportional reduction in payroll taxes; and direct, higher rebates for poor households, with remaining revenues recycled via a proportional reduction in payroll taxes.

      To perform the assessment, the Joint Program researchers integrate a U.S. economic model (MIT U.S. Regional Energy Policy) with a dataset (Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer Expenditure Survey) providing consumption patterns and other socioeconomic characteristics for 15,000 U.S. households. Using the combined model, they evaluate the distributional impacts and potential trade-offs between economic equity and efficiency of all four carbon-penalty revenue-recycling policies.

      The researchers find that household rebates have progressive impacts on consumers’ financial well-being, with the greatest benefits going to the lowest-income households, while policies centered on improving the efficiency of the economy (e.g., payroll tax reductions) have slightly regressive household-level financial impacts. In a nutshell, the trade-off is between rebates that provide more equity and less economic efficiency versus tax cuts that deliver the opposite result. The latter two policy options, which combine rebates to lower-income households with payroll tax reductions, result in an optimal blend of sufficiently progressive financial results at the household level and economy efficiency at the national level. Results of the study are published in the journal Energy Economics.

      “We have determined that only a portion of carbon-tax revenues is needed to compensate low-income households and thus reduce inequality, while the rest can be used to improve the economy by reducing payroll or other distortionary taxes,” says Xaquin García-Muros, lead author of the study, a postdoc at the MIT Joint Program who is affiliated with the Basque Centre for Climate Change in Spain. “Therefore, we can eliminate potential trade-offs between efficiency and equity, and promote a just and efficient energy transition.”

      “If climate policies increase the gap between rich and poor households or reduce the affordability of energy services, then these policies might be rejected by the public and, as a result, attempts to decarbonize the economy will be less efficient,” says Joint Program Deputy Director Sergey Paltsev, a co-author of the study. “Our findings provide guidance to decision-makers to advance more well-designed policies that deliver economic benefits to the nation as a whole.” 

      The study’s novel integration of a national economic model with household microdata creates a new and powerful platform to further investigate key differences among households that can help inform policies aimed at a just transition to a low-carbon economy. More

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      At UN climate change conference, trying to “keep 1.5 alive”

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      After a one-year delay caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, negotiators from nearly 200 countries met this month in Glasgow, Scotland, at COP26, the United Nations climate change conference, to hammer out a new global agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and prepare for climate impacts. A delegation of approximately 20 faculty, staff, and students from MIT was on hand to observe the negotiations, share and conduct research, and launch new initiatives.

      On Saturday, Nov. 13, following two weeks of negotiations in the cavernous Scottish Events Campus, countries’ representatives agreed to the Glasgow Climate Pact. The pact reaffirms the goal of the 2015 Paris Agreement “to pursue efforts” to limit the global average temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, and recognizes that achieving this goal requires “reducing global carbon dioxide emissions by 45 percent by 2030 relative to the 2010 level and to net zero around mid-century.”

      “On issues like the need to reach net-zero emissions, reduce methane pollution, move beyond coal power, and tighten carbon accounting rules, the Glasgow pact represents some meaningful progress, but we still have so much work to do,” says Maria Zuber, MIT’s vice president for research, who led the Institute’s delegation to COP26. “Glasgow showed, once again, what a wicked complex problem climate change is, technically, economically, and politically. But it also underscored the determination of a global community of people committed to addressing it.”

      An “ambition gap”

      Both within the conference venue and at protests that spilled through the streets of Glasgow, one rallying cry was “keep 1.5 alive.” Alok Sharma, who was appointed by the UK government to preside over COP26, said in announcing the Glasgow pact: “We can now say with credibility that we have kept 1.5 degrees alive. But, its pulse is weak and it will only survive if we keep our promises and translate commitments into rapid action.”

      In remarks delivered during the first week of the conference, Sergey Paltsev, deputy director of MIT’s Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, presented findings from the latest MIT Global Change Outlook, which showed a wide gap between countries’ nationally determined contributions (NDCs) — the UN’s term for greenhouse gas emissions reduction pledges — and the reductions needed to put the world on track to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement and, now, the Glasgow pact.

      Pointing to this ambition gap, Paltsev called on all countries to do more, faster, to cut emissions. “We could dramatically reduce overall climate risk through more ambitious policy measures and investments,” says Paltsev. “We need to employ an integrated approach of moving to zero emissions in energy and industry, together with sustainable development and nature-based solutions, simultaneously improving human well-being and providing biodiversity benefits.”

      Finalizing the Paris rulebook

      A key outcome of COP26 (COP stands for “conference of the parties” to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, held for the 26th time) was the development of a set of rules to implement Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, which provides a mechanism for countries to receive credit for emissions reductions that they finance outside their borders, and to cooperate by buying and selling emissions reductions on international carbon markets.

      An agreement on this part of the Paris “rulebook” had eluded negotiators in the years since the Paris climate conference, in part because negotiators were concerned about how to prevent double-counting, wherein both buyers and sellers would claim credit for the emissions reductions.

      Michael Mehling, the deputy director of MIT’s Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research (CEEPR) and an expert on international carbon markets, drew on a recent CEEPR working paper to describe critical negotiation issues under Article 6 during an event at the conference on Nov. 10 with climate negotiators and private sector representatives.

      He cited research that finds that Article 6, by leveraging the cost-efficiency of global carbon markets, could cut in half the cost that countries would incur to achieve their nationally determined contributions. “Which, seen from another angle, means you could double the ambition of these NDCs at no additional cost,” Mehling noted in his talk, adding that, given the persistent ambition gap, “any such opportunity is bitterly needed.”

      Andreas Haupt, a graduate student in the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society, joined MIT’s COP26 delegation to follow Article 6 negotiations. Haupt described the final days of negotiations over Article 6 as a “roller coaster.” Once negotiators reached an agreement, he says, “I felt relieved, but also unsure how strong of an effect the new rules, with all their weaknesses, will have. I am curious and hopeful regarding what will happen in the next year until the next large-scale negotiations in 2022.”

      Nature-based climate solutions

      World leaders also announced new agreements on the sidelines of the formal UN negotiations. One such agreement, a declaration on forests signed by more than 100 countries, commits to “working collectively to halt and reverse forest loss and land degradation by 2030.”

      A team from MIT’s Environmental Solutions Initiative (ESI), which has been working with policymakers and other stakeholders on strategies to protect tropical forests and advance other nature-based climate solutions in Latin America, was at COP26 to discuss their work and make plans for expanding it.

      Marcela Angel, a research associate at ESI, moderated a panel discussion featuring John Fernández, professor of architecture and ESI’s director, focused on protecting and enhancing natural carbon sinks, particularly tropical forests such as the Amazon that are at risk of deforestation, forest degradation, and biodiversity loss.

      “Deforestation and associated land use change remain one of the main sources of greenhouse gas emissions in most Amazonian countries, such as Brazil, Peru, and Colombia,” says Angel. “Our aim is to support these countries, whose nationally determined contributions depend on the effectiveness of policies to prevent deforestation and promote conservation, with an approach based on the integration of targeted technology breakthroughs, deep community engagement, and innovative bioeconomic opportunities for local communities that depend on forests for their livelihoods.”

      Energy access and renewable energy

      Worldwide, an estimated 800 million people lack access to electricity, and billions more have only limited or erratic electrical service. Providing universal access to energy is one of the UN’s sustainable development goals, creating a dual challenge: how to boost energy access without driving up greenhouse gas emissions.

      Rob Stoner, deputy director for science and technology of the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI), and Ignacio Pérez-Arriaga, a visiting professor at the Sloan School of Management, attended COP26 to share their work as members of the Global Commission to End Energy Poverty, a collaboration between MITEI and the Rockefeller Foundation. It brings together global energy leaders from industry, the development finance community, academia, and civil society to identify ways to overcome barriers to investment in the energy sectors of countries with low energy access.

      The commission’s work helped to motivate the formation, announced at COP26 on Nov. 2, of the Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet, a multibillion-dollar commitment by the Rockefeller and IKEA foundations and Bezos Earth Fund to support access to renewable energy around the world.

      Another MITEI member of the COP26 delegation, Martha Broad, the initiative’s executive director, spoke about MIT research to inform the U.S. goal of scaling offshore wind energy capacity from approximately 30 megawatts today to 30 gigawatts by 2030, including significant new capacity off the coast of New England.

      Broad described research, funded by MITEI member companies, on a coating that can be applied to the blades of wind turbines to prevent icing that would require the turbines’ shutdown; the use of machine learning to inform preventative turbine maintenance; and methodologies for incorporating the effects of climate change into projections of future wind conditions to guide wind farm siting decisions today. She also spoke broadly about the need for public and private support to scale promising innovations.

      “Clearly, both the public sector and the private sector have a role to play in getting these technologies to the point where we can use them in New England, and also where we can deploy them affordably for the developing world,” Broad said at an event sponsored by America Is All In, a coalition of nonprofit and business organizations.

      Food and climate alliance

      Food systems around the world are increasingly at risk from the impacts of climate change. At the same time, these systems, which include all activities from food production to consumption and food waste, are responsible for about one-third of the human-caused greenhouse gas emissions warming the planet.

      At COP26, MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab announced the launch of a new alliance to drive research-based innovation that will make food systems more resilient and sustainable, called the Food and Climate Systems Transformation (FACT) Alliance. With 16 member institutions, the FACT Alliance will better connect researchers to farmers, food businesses, policymakers, and other food systems stakeholders around the world.

      Looking ahead

      By the end of 2022, the Glasgow pact asks countries to revisit their nationally determined contributions and strengthen them to bring them in line with the temperature goals of the Paris Agreement. The pact also “notes with deep regret” the failure of wealthier countries to collectively provide poorer countries $100 billion per year in climate financing that they pledged in 2009 to begin in 2020.

      These and other issues will be on the agenda for COP27, to be held in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, next year.

      “Limiting warming to 1.5 degrees is broadly accepted as a critical goal to avoiding worsening climate consequences, but it’s clear that current national commitments will not get us there,” says ESI’s Fernández. “We will need stronger emissions reductions pledges, especially from the largest greenhouse gas emitters. At the same time, expanding creativity, innovation, and determination from every sector of society, including research universities, to get on with real-world solutions is essential. At Glasgow, MIT was front and center in energy systems, cities, nature-based solutions, and more. The year 2030 is right around the corner so we can’t afford to let up for one minute.” More

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      Scientists project increased risk to water supplies in South Africa this century

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      In 2018, Cape Town, South Africa’s second most populous city, came very close to running out of water as the multi-year “Day Zero” drought depleted its reservoirs. Since then, researchers from Stanford University determined that climate change had made this extreme drought five to six times more likely, and warned that a lot more Day Zero events could occur in regions with similar climates in the future. A better understanding of likely surface air temperature and precipitation trends in South Africa and other dry, populated areas around the world in the coming decades could empower decision-makers to pursue science-based climate mitigation and adaptation measures designed to reduce the risk of future Day Zero events.    

      Toward that end, researchers at the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, International Food Policy Research Institute, and CGIAR have produced modeled projections of 21st-century changes in seasonal surface air temperature and precipitation for South Africa that systematically and comprehensively account for uncertainties in how Earth and socioeconomic systems behave and co-evolve. Presented in a study in the journal Climatic Change, these projections show how temperature and precipitation over three sub-national regions — western, central, and eastern South Africa — are likely to change under a wide range of global climate mitigation policy scenarios.

      In a business-as-usual global climate policy scenario in which no emissions or climate targets are set or met, the projections show that for all three regions, there’s a greater-than 50 percent likelihood that mid-century temperatures will increase threefold over the current climate’s range of variability. But the risk of these mid-century temperature increases is effectively eliminated through more aggressive climate targets.

      The business-as-usual projections indicate that the risk of decreased precipitation levels in western and central South Africa is three to four times higher than the risk of increased precipitation levels. Under a global climate mitigation policy designed to cap global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2100, the risk of precipitation changes within South Africa toward the end of the century (2065-74) is similar to the risk during the 2030s in the business-as-usual scenario.

      Rising risks of substantially reduced precipitation levels throughout this century under a business-as-usual scenario suggest increased reliance and stress on the widespread water-efficiency measures established in the aftermath of the Day Zero drought. But a 1.5 C global climate mitigation policy would delay these risks by 30 years, giving South Africa ample lead time to prepare for and adapt to them.

      “Our analysis provides risk-based evidence on the benefits of climate mitigation policies as well as unavoidable climate impacts that will need to be addressed through adaptive measures,” says MIT Joint Program Deputy Director C. Adam Schlosser, the lead author of the study. “Global action to limit human-induced warming could give South Africa enough time to secure sufficient water supplies to sustain its population. Otherwise, anticipated climate shifts by the middle of the next decade may well make Day-Zero situations more common.”

      This study is part of an ongoing effort to assess the risks that climate change poses for South Africa’s agricultural, economic, energy and infrastructure sectors. More

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      in Environment

      MIT collaborates with Biogen on three-year, $7 million initiative to address climate, health, and equity

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      MIT and Biogen have announced that they will collaborate with the goal to accelerate the science and action on climate change to improve human health. This collaboration is supported by a three-year, $7 million commitment from the company and the Biogen Foundation. The biotechnology company, headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts’ Kendall Square, discovers and develops therapies for people living with serious neurological diseases.

      “We have long believed it is imperative for Biogen to make the fight against climate change central to our long-term corporate responsibility commitments. Through this collaboration with MIT, we aim to identify and share innovative climate solutions that will deliver co-benefits for both health and equity,” says Michel Vounatsos, CEO of Biogen. “We are also proud to support the MIT Museum, which promises to make world-class science and education accessible to all, and honor Biogen co-founder Phillip A. Sharp with a dedication inside the museum that recognizes his contributions to its development.”

      Biogen and the Biogen Foundation are supporting research and programs across a range of areas at MIT.

      Advancing climate, health, and equity

      The first such effort involves new work within the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change to establish a state-of-the-art integrated model of climate and health aimed at identifying targets that deliver climate and health co-benefits.

      “Evidence suggests that not all climate-related actions deliver equal health benefits, yet policymakers, planners, and stakeholders traditionally lack the tools to consider how decisions in one arena impact the other,” says C. Adam Schlosser, deputy director of the MIT Joint Program. “Biogen’s collaboration with the MIT Joint Program — and its support of a new distinguished Biogen Fellow who will develop the new climate/health model — will accelerate our efforts to provide decision-makers with these tools.”

      Biogen is also supporting the MIT Technology and Policy Program’s Research to Policy Engagement Initiative to infuse human health as a key new consideration in decision-making on the best pathways forward to address the global climate crisis, and bridge the knowledge-to-action gap by connecting policymakers, researchers, and diverse stakeholders. As part of this work, Biogen is underwriting a distinguished Biogen Fellow to advance new research on climate, health, and equity.

      “Our work with Biogen has allowed us to make progress on key questions that matter to human health and well-being under climate change,” says Noelle Eckley Selin, who directs the MIT Technology and Policy Program and is a professor in the MIT Institute for Data, Systems, and Society and the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences. “Further, their support of the Research to Policy Engagement Initiative helps all of our research become more effective in making change.”

      In addition, Biogen has joined 13 other companies in the MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium (MCSC), which is supporting faculty and student research and developing impact pathways that present a range of actionable steps that companies can take — within and across industries — to advance progress toward climate targets.

      “Biogen joining the MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium represents our commitment to working with member companies across a diverse range of industries, an approach that aims to drive changes swift and broad enough to match the scale of the climate challenge,” says Jeremy Gregory, executive director of the MCSC. “We are excited to welcome a member from the biotechnology space and look forward to harnessing Biogen’s perspectives as we continue to collaborate and work together with the MIT community in exciting and meaningful ways.”

      Making world-class science and education available to MIT Museum visitors

      Support from Biogen will honor Nobel laureate, MIT Institute professor, and Biogen co-founder Phillip A. Sharp with a named space inside the new Kendall Square location of the MIT Museum, set to open in spring 2022. Biogen also is supporting one of the museum’s opening exhibitions, “Essential MIT,” with a section focused on solving real-world problems such as climate change. It is also providing programmatic support for the museum’s Life Sciences Maker Engagement Program.

      “Phil has provided fantastic support to the MIT Museum for more than a decade as an advisory board member and now as board chair, and he has been deeply involved in plans for the new museum at Kendall Square,” says John Durant, the Mark R. Epstein (Class of 1963) Director of the museum. “Seeing his name on the wall will be a constant reminder of his key role in this development, as well as a mark of our gratitude.”

      Inspiring and empowering the next generation of scientists

      Biogen funding is also being directed to engage the next generation of scientists through support for the Biogen-MIT Biotech in Action: Virtual Lab, a program designed to foster a love of science among diverse and under-served student populations.

      Biogen’s support is part of its Healthy Climate, Healthy Lives initiative, a $250 million, 20-year commitment to eliminate fossil fuels across its operations and collaborate with renowned institutions to advance the science of climate and health and support under-served communities. Additional support is provided by the Biogen Foundation to further its long-standing focus on providing students with equitable access to outstanding science education. More

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      in Environment

      New “risk triage” platform pinpoints compounding threats to US infrastructure

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      Over a 36-hour period in August, Hurricane Henri delivered record rainfall in New York City, where an aging storm-sewer system was not built to handle the deluge, resulting in street flooding. Meanwhile, an ongoing drought in California continued to overburden aquifers and extend statewide water restrictions. As climate change amplifies the frequency and intensity of extreme events in the United States and around the world, and the populations and economies they threaten grow and change, there is a critical need to make infrastructure more resilient. But how can this be done in a timely, cost-effective way?

      An emerging discipline called multi-sector dynamics (MSD) offers a promising solution. MSD homes in on compounding risks and potential tipping points across interconnected natural and human systems. Tipping points occur when these systems can no longer sustain multiple, co-evolving stresses, such as extreme events, population growth, land degradation, drinkable water shortages, air pollution, aging infrastructure, and increased human demands. MSD researchers use observations and computer models to identify key precursory indicators of such tipping points, providing decision-makers with critical information that can be applied to mitigate risks and boost resilience in infrastructure and managed resources.

      At MIT, the Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change has since 2018 been developing MSD expertise and modeling tools and using them to explore compounding risks and potential tipping points in selected regions of the United States. In a two-hour webinar on Sept. 15, MIT Joint Program researchers presented an overview of the program’s MSD research tool set and its applications.  

      MSD and the risk triage platform

      “Multi-sector dynamics explores interactions and interdependencies among human and natural systems, and how these systems may adapt, interact, and co-evolve in response to short-term shocks and long-term influences and stresses,” says MIT Joint Program Deputy Director C. Adam Schlosser, noting that such analysis can reveal and quantify potential risks that would likely evade detection in siloed investigations. “These systems can experience cascading effects or failures after crossing tipping points. The real question is not just where these tipping points are in each system, but how they manifest and interact across all systems.”

      To address that question, the program’s MSD researchers have developed the MIT Socio-Environmental Triage (MST) platform, now publicly available for the first time. Focused on the continental United States, the first version of the platform analyzes present-day risks related to water, land, climate, the economy, energy, demographics, health, and infrastructure, and where these compound to create risk hot spots. It’s essentially a screening-level visualization tool that allows users to examine risks, identify hot spots when combining risks, and make decisions about how to deploy more in-depth analysis to solve complex problems at regional and local levels. For example, MST can identify hot spots for combined flood and poverty risks in the lower Mississippi River basin, and thereby alert decision-makers as to where more concentrated flood-control resources are needed.

      Successive versions of the platform will incorporate projections based on the MIT Joint Program’s Integrated Global System Modeling (IGSM) framework of how different systems and stressors may co-evolve into the future and thereby change the risk landscape. This enhanced capability could help uncover cost-effective pathways for mitigating and adapting to a wide range of environmental and economic risks.  

      MSD applications

      Five webinar presentations explored how MIT Joint Program researchers are applying the program’s risk triage platform and other MSD modeling tools to identify potential tipping points and risks in five key domains: water quality, land use, economics and energy, health, and infrastructure. 

      Joint Program Principal Research Scientist Xiang Gao described her efforts to apply a high-resolution U.S. water-quality model to calculate a location-specific, water-quality index over more than 2,000 river basins in the country. By accounting for interactions among climate, agriculture, and socioeconomic systems, various water-quality measures can be obtained ranging from nitrate and phosphate levels to phytoplankton concentrations. This modeling approach advances a unique capability to identify potential water-quality risk hot spots for freshwater resources.

      Joint Program Research Scientist Angelo Gurgel discussed his MSD-based analysis of how climate change, population growth, changing diets, crop-yield improvements and other forces that drive land-use change at the global level may ultimately impact how land is used in the United States. Drawing upon national observational data and the IGSM framework, the analysis shows that while current U.S. land-use trends are projected to persist or intensify between now and 2050, there is no evidence of any concerning tipping points arising throughout this period.  

      MIT Joint Program Research Scientist Jennifer Morris presented several examples of how the risk triage platform can be used to combine existing U.S. datasets and the IGSM framework to assess energy and economic risks at the regional level. For example, by aggregating separate data streams on fossil-fuel employment and poverty, one can target selected counties for clean energy job training programs as the nation moves toward a low-carbon future. 

      “Our modeling and risk triage frameworks can provide pictures of current and projected future economic and energy landscapes,” says Morris. “They can also highlight interactions among different human, built, and natural systems, including compounding risks that occur in the same location.”  

      MIT Joint Program research affiliate Sebastian Eastham, a research scientist at the MIT Laboratory for Aviation and the Environment, described an MSD approach to the study of air pollution and public health. Linking the IGSM with an atmospheric chemistry model, Eastham ultimately aims to better understand where the greatest health risks are in the United States and how they may compound throughout this century under different policy scenarios. Using the risk triage tool to combine current risk metrics for air quality and poverty in a selected county based on current population and air-quality data, he showed how one can rapidly identify cardiovascular and other air-pollution-induced disease risk hot spots.

      Finally, MIT Joint Program research affiliate Alyssa McCluskey, a lecturer at the University of Colorado at Boulder, showed how the risk triage tool can be used to pinpoint potential risks to roadways, waterways, and power distribution lines from flooding, extreme temperatures, population growth, and other stressors. In addition, McCluskey described how transportation and energy infrastructure development and expansion can threaten critical wildlife habitats.

      Enabling comprehensive, location-specific analyses of risks and hot spots within and among multiple domains, the Joint Program’s MSD modeling tools can be used to inform policymaking and investment from the municipal to the global level.

      “MSD takes on the challenge of linking human, natural, and infrastructure systems in order to inform risk analysis and decision-making,” says Schlosser. “Through our risk triage platform and other MSD models, we plan to assess important interactions and tipping points, and to provide foresight that supports action toward a sustainable, resilient, and prosperous world.”

      This research is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science as an ongoing project. More