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    Has remote work changed how people travel in the U.S?

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    The prevalence of remote work since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic has significantly changed urban transportation patterns in the U.S., according to new study led by MIT researchers.

    The research finds significant variation between the effects of remote work on vehicle miles driven and on mass-transit ridership across the U.S.

    “A 1 percent decrease in onsite workers leads to a roughly 1 percent reduction in [automobile] vehicle miles driven, but a 2.3 percent reduction in mass transit ridership,” says Yunhan Zheng SM ’21, PhD ’24, an MIT postdoc who is co-author of a the study.

    “This is one of the first studies that identifies the causal effect of remote work on vehicle miles traveled and transit ridership across the U.S.,” adds Jinhua Zhao, an MIT professor and another co-author of the paper.

    By accounting for many of the nuances of the issue, across the lower 48 states and the District of Columbia as well as 217 metropolitan areas, the scholars believe they have arrived at a robust conclusion demonstrating the effects of working from home on larger mobility patterns.

    The paper, “Impacts of remote work on vehicle miles traveled and transit ridership in the USA,” appears today in the journal Nature Cities. The authors are Zheng, a doctoral graduate of MIT’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and a postdoc at the Singapore–MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART); Shenhao Wang PhD ’20, an assistant professor at the University of Florida; Lun Liu, an assistant professor at Peking University; Jim Aloisi, a lecturer in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP); and Zhao, the Professor of Cities and Transportation, founder of the MIT Mobility Initiative, and director of MIT’s JTL Urban Mobility Lab and Transit Lab.

    The researchers gathered data on the prevalence of remote work from multiple sources, including Google location data, travel data from the U.S. Federal Highway Administration and the National Transit Database, and the monthly U.S. Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes (run jointly by Stanford University, the University of Chicago, ITAM, and MIT).

    The study reveals significant variation among U.S. states when it comes to how much the rise of remote work has affected mileage driven.

    “The impact of a 1 percent change in remote work on the reduction of vehicle miles traveled in New York state is only about one-quarter of that in Texas,” Zheng observes. “There is real variation there.”

    At the same time, remote work has had the biggest effect on mass-transit revenues in places with widely used systems, with New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, Boston, and Philadelphia making up the top five hardest-hit metro areas.

    The overall effect is surprisingly consistent over time, from early 2020 through late 2022.

    “In terms of the temporal variation, we found that the effect is quite consistent across our whole study period,” Zheng says. “It’s not just significant in the early stage of the pandemic, when remote work was a necessity for many. The magnitude remains consistent into the later period, when many people have the flexibility to choose where they want to work. We think this may have long-term implications.”

    Additionally, the study estimates the impact that still larger numbers of remote workers could have on the environment and mass transit.

    “On a national basis, we estimate that a 10 percent decrease in the number of onsite workers compared to prepandemic levels will reduce the annual total vehicle-related CO2 emissions by 191.8 million metric tons,” Wang says.

    The study also projects that across the 217 metropolitan areas in the study, a 10 percent decrease in the number of onsite workers, compared to prepandemic levels, would lead to an annual loss of 2.4 billion transit trips and $3.7 billion in fare revenue — equal to roughly 27 percent of the annual transit ridership and fare revenue in 2019.

    “The substantial influence of remote work on transit ridership highlights the need for transit agencies to adapt their services accordingly, investing in services tailored to noncommuting trips and implementing more flexible schedules to better accommodate the new demand patterns,” Zhao says.

    The research received support from the MIT Energy Initiative; the Barr Foundation; the National Research Foundation, Prime Minister’s Office, Singapore under its Campus for Research Excellence and Technological Enterprise program; the Research Opportunity Seed Fund 2023 from the University of Florida; and the Beijing Social Science Foundation. More

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      in Energy

      MIT researchers map the energy transition’s effects on jobs

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      A new analysis by MIT researchers shows the places in the U.S. where jobs are most linked to fossil fuels. The research could help policymakers better identify and support areas affected over time by a switch to renewable energy.

      While many of the places most potentially affected have intensive drilling and mining operations, the study also measures how areas reliant on other industries, such as heavy manufacturing, could experience changes. The research examines the entire U.S. on a county-by-county level.

      “Our result is that you see a higher carbon footprint for jobs in places that drill for oil, mine for coal, and drill for natural gas, which is evident in our maps,” says Christopher Knittel, an economist at the MIT Sloan School of Management and co-author of a new paper detailing the findings. “But you also see high carbon footprints in areas where we do a lot of manufacturing, which is more likely to be missed by policymakers when examining how the transition to a zero-carbon economy will affect jobs.”

      So, while certain U.S. areas known for fossil-fuel production would certainly be affected — including west Texas, the Powder River Basin of Montana and Wyoming, parts of Appalachia, and more — a variety of industrial areas in the Great Plains and Midwest could see employment evolve as well.

      The paper, “Assessing the distribution of employment vulnerability to the energy transition using employment carbon footprints,” is published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The authors are Kailin Graham, a master’s student in MIT’s Technology and Policy Program and graduate research assistant at MIT’s Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research; and Knittel, who is the George P. Shultz Professor at MIT Sloan.

      “Our results are unique in that we cover close to the entire U.S. economy and consider the impacts on places that produce fossil fuels but also on places that consume a lot of coal, oil, or natural gas for energy,” says Graham. “This approach gives us a much more complete picture of where communities might be affected and how support should be targeted.”

      Adjusting the targets

      The current study stems from prior research Knittel has conducted, measuring carbon footprints at the household level across the U.S. The new project takes a conceptually related approach, but for jobs in a given county. To conduct the study, the researchers used several data sources measuring energy consumption by businesses, as well as detailed employment data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

      The study takes advantage of changes in energy supply and demand over time to estimate how strongly a full range of jobs, not just those in energy production, are linked to use of fossil fuels. The sectors accounted for in the study comprise 86 percent of U.S. employment, and 94 percent of U.S. emissions apart from the transportation sector.

      The Inflation Reduction Act, passed by Congress and signed into law by President Joe Biden in August 2022, is the first federal legislation seeking to provide an economic buffer for places affected by the transition away from fossil fuels. The act provides expanded tax credits for economic projects located in “energy community” areas — defined largely as places with high fossil-fuel industry employment or tax revenue and with high unemployment. Areas with recently closed or downsized coal mines or power plants also qualify.

      Graham and Knittel measured the “employment carbon footprint” (ECF) of each county in the U.S., producing new results. Out of more than 3,000 counties in the U.S., the researchers found that 124 are at the 90th percentile or above in ECF terms, while not qualifying for Inflation Reduction Act assistance. Another 79 counties are eligible for Inflation Reduction Act assistance, while being in the bottom 20 percent nationally in ECF terms.

      Those may not seem like colossal differences, but the findings identify real communities potentially being left out of federal policy, and highlight the need for new targeting of such programs. The research by Graham and Knittel offers a precise way to assess the industrial composition of U.S. counties, potentially helping to target economic assistance programs.

      “The impact on jobs of the energy transition is not just going to be where oil and natural gas are drilled, it’s going to be all the way up and down the value chain of things we make in the U.S.,” Knittel says. “That’s a more extensive, but still focused, problem.”

      Graham adds: “It’s important that policymakers understand these economy-wide employment impacts. Our aim in providing these data is to help policymakers incorporate these considerations into future policies like the Inflation Reduction Act.”

      Adapting policy

      Graham and Knittel are still evaluating what the best policy measures might be to help places in the U.S. adapt to a move away from fossil fuels.

      “What we haven’t necessarily closed the loop on is the right way to build a policy that takes account of these factors,” Knittel says. “The Inflation Reduction Act is the first policy to think about a [fair] energy transition because it has these subsidies for energy-dependent counties.” But given enough political backing, there may be room for additional policy measures in this area.

      One thing clearly showing through in the study’s data is that many U.S. counties are in a variety of situations, so there may be no one-size-fits-all approach to encouraging economic growth while making a switch to clean energy. What suits west Texas or Wyoming best may not work for more manufacturing-based local economies. And even among primary energy-production areas, there may be distinctions, among those drilling for oil or natural gas and those producing coal, based on the particular economics of those fuels. The study includes in-depth data about each county, characterizing its industrial portfolio, which may help tailor approaches to a range of economic situations.

      “The next step is using this data more specifically to design policies to protect these communities,” Knittel says. More

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      in Environment

      How forests can cut carbon, restore ecosystems, and create jobs

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      To limit the frequency and severity of droughts, wildfires, flooding, and other adverse consequences of climate change, nearly 200 countries committed to the Paris Agreement’s long-term goal of keeping global warming well below 2 degrees Celsius. According to the latest United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Report, achieving that goal will require both large-scale greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reduction and removal of GHGs from the atmosphere.

      At present, the most efficient and scalable GHG-removal strategy is the massive planting of trees through reforestation or afforestation — a “natural climate solution” (NCS) that extracts atmospheric carbon dioxide through photosynthesis and soil carbon sequestration.

      Despite the potential of forestry-based NCS projects to address climate change, biodiversity loss, unemployment, and other societal needs — and their appeal to policymakers, funders, and citizens — they have yet to achieve critical mass, and often underperform due to a mix of interacting ecological, social, and financial constraints. To better understand these challenges and identify opportunities to overcome them, a team of researchers at Imperial College London and the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change recently studied how environmental scientists, local stakeholders, and project funders perceive the risks and benefits of NCS projects, and how these perceptions impact project goals and performance. To that end, they surveyed and consulted with dozens of recognized experts and organizations spanning the fields of ecology, finance, climate policy, and social science.

      The team’s analysis, which appears in the journal Frontiers in Climate, found two main factors that have hindered the success of forestry-based NCS projects.

      First, the ambition — levels of carbon removal, ecosystem restoration, job creation, and other environmental and social targets — of selected NCS projects is limited by funders’ perceptions of their overall risk. Among other things, funders aim to minimize operational risk (e.g., Will newly planted trees survive and grow?), political risk (e.g., Just how secure is their access to the land where trees will be planted?); and reputational risk (e.g., Will the project be perceived as an exercise in “greenwashing,” or fall way short of its promised environmental and social benefits?). Funders seeking a financial return on their initial investment are also concerned about the dependability of complex monitoring, reporting, and verification methods used to quantify atmospheric carbon removal, biodiversity gains, and other metrics of project performance.

      Second, the environmental and social benefits of NCS projects are unlikely to be realized unless the local communities impacted by these projects are granted ownership over their implementation and outcomes. But while engaging with local communities is critical to project performance, it can be challenging both legally and financially to set up incentives (e.g., payment and other forms of compensation) to mobilize such engagement.

      “Many carbon offset projects raise legitimate concerns about their effectiveness,” says study lead author Bonnie Waring, a senior lecturer at the Grantham Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, Imperial College London. “However, if nature climate solution projects are done properly, they can help with sustainable development and empower local communities.”

      Drawing on surveys and consultations with NCS experts, stakeholders, and funders, the research team highlighted several recommendations on how to overcome key challenges faced by forestry-based NCS projects and boost their environmental and social performance.

      These recommendations include encouraging funders to evaluate projects based on robust internal governance, support from regional and national governments, secure land tenure, material benefits for local communities, and full participation of community members from across a spectrum of socioeconomic groups; improving the credibility and verifiability of project emissions reductions and related co-benefits; and maintaining an open dialogue and shared costs and benefits among those who fund, implement, and benefit from these projects.

      “Addressing climate change requires approaches that include emissions mitigation from economic activities paired with greenhouse gas reductions by natural ecosystems,” says Sergey Paltsev, a co-author of the study and deputy director of the MIT Joint Program. “Guided by these recommendations, we advocate for a proper scaling-up of NCS activities from project levels to help assure integrity of emissions reductions across entire countries.” More

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      in Security

      Titanic robots make farming more sustainable

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      There’s a lot riding on farmers’ ability to fight weeds, which can strangle crops and destroy yields. To protect crops, farmers have two options: They can spray herbicides that pollute the environment and harm human health, or they can hire more workers.

      Unfortunately, both choices are becoming less tenable. Herbicide resistance is a growing problem in crops around the world, while widespread labor shortages have hit the agricultural sector particularly hard.

      Now the startup FarmWise, co-founded by Sebastien Boyer SM ’16, is giving farmers a third option. The company has developed autonomous weeding robots that use artificial intelligence to cut out weeds while leaving crops untouched.

      The company’s first robot, fittingly called the Titan — picture a large tractor that makes use of a trailer in lieu of a driver’s seat — uses machine vision to distinguish weeds from crops including leafy greens, cauliflower, artichokes, and tomatoes while snipping weeds with sub-inch precision.

      About 15 Titans have been roaming the fields of 30 large farms in California and Arizona for the last few years, providing weeding as a service while being directed by an iPad. Last month, the company unveiled its newest robot, Vulcan, which is more lightweight and pulled by a tractor.

      “We have growing population, and we can’t expand the land or water we have, so we need to drastically increase the efficiency of the farming industry,” Boyer says. “I think AI and data are going to be major players in that journey.”

      Finding a road to impact

      Boyer came to MIT in 2014 and earned masters’ degrees in technology and policy as well as electrical engineering and computer science over the next two years.

      “What stood out is the passion that my classmates had for what they did — the drive and passion people had to change the world,” Boyer says.

      As part of his graduate work, Boyer researched machine learning and machine vision techniques, and he soon began exploring ways to apply those technologies to environmental problems. He received a small amount of funding from MIT Sandbox to further develop the idea.

      “That helped me make the decision to not take a real job,” Boyer recalls.

      Following graduation, he and FarmWise co-founder Thomas Palomares, a graduate of Stanford University whom Boyer met in his home country of France, began going to farmers’ markets, introducing themselves to small farmers and asking for tours of their farms. About one in three farmers were happy to show them around. From there they’d ask for referrals to larger farmers and service providers in the industry.

      “We realized agriculture is a large contributor of both emissions and, more broadly, to the negative impact of human activities on the environment,” Boyer says. “It also hasn’t been as disrupted by software, cloud computing, AI, and robotics as other industries. That combination really excites us.”

      Through their conversations, the founders learned herbicides are becoming less effective as weeds develop genetic resistance. The only alternative is to hire more workers, which itself was becoming more difficult for farmers.

      “Labor is extremely tight,” says Boyer, adding that bending over and weeding for 10 hours a day is one of the hardest jobs out there. “The labor supply is shrinking if not collapsing in the U.S., and it’s a worldwide trend. That has real environmental implications because of the tradeoff [between labor and herbicides].”

      The problem is especially acute for farmers of specialty crops, including many fruits, vegetables, and nuts, which grow on smaller farms than corn and soybean and each require slightly different growing practices, limiting the effectiveness of many technical and chemical solutions.

      “We don’t harvest corn by hand today, but we still harvest lettuces and nuts and apples by hand,” Boyer says.

      The Titan was built to complement field workers’ efforts to grow and maintain crops. An operator directs it using an iPad, walking alongside the machine and inspecting progress. Both the Titan and Vulcan are powered by an AI that directs hundreds of tiny blades to snip out weeds around each crop. The Vulcan is controlled directly from the tractor cab, where the operator has a touchscreen interface Boyer compares to those found in a Tesla.

      With more than 15,000 commercial hours under its belt, FarmWise hopes the data it collects can be used for more than just weeding in the near future.

      “It’s all about precision,” Boyer says. “We’re going to better understand what the plant needs and make smarter decisions for each one. That will bring us to a point where we can use the same amount of land, much less water, almost no chemicals, much less fertilizer, and still produce more food than we’re producing today. That’s the mission. That’s what excites me.”

      Weeding out farming challenges

      A customer recently told Boyer that without the Titan, he would have to switch all of his organic crops back to conventional because he couldn’t find enough workers.

      “That’s happening with a lot of customers,” Boyer says. “They have no choice but to rely on herbicides. Acres are staying organic because of our product, and conventional farms are reducing their use of herbicides.”

      Now FarmWise is expanding its database to support weeding for six to 12 new crops each year, and Boyer says adding new crops is getting easier and easier for its system.

      As early partners have sought to expand their deployments, Boyer says the only thing limiting the company’s growth is how fast it can build new robots. FarmWise’s new machines will begin being deployed later this year.

      Although the hulking Titan robots are the face of the company today, the founders hope to leverage the data they’ve collected to further improve farming operations.

      “The mission of the company is to turn AI into a tool that is as reliable and dependable as GPS is now in the farming industry,” Boyer says. “Twenty-five years ago, GPS was a very complicated technology. You had to connect to satellites and do some crazy computation to define your position. But a few companies brought GPS to a new level of reliability and simplicity. Today, every farmer in the world uses GPS. We think AI can have an even deeper impact than GPS has had on the farming industry, and we want to be the company that makes it available and easy to use for every farmer in the world.” More

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      in Environment

      “Drawing Together” is awarded Norman B. Leventhal City Prize

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      “Drawing Together,” a social and ecological resilience project in New York City, has been awarded the 2022 Norman B. Leventhal City Prize. 

      The project is a collaboration between MIT faculty, researchers, and students, and Green City Force (GCF), a nonprofit organization in New York City that trains young people for careers with a sustainability focus while they serve local public housing communities.

      The winning proposal was submitted by a team led by MIT’s Miho Mazereeuw, associate professor and director of the Urban Risk Lab; Nicholas de Monchaux, professor and head of the Department of Architecture; Carlos Sandoval Olascoaga PhD ’21, a postdoc in the Department of Architecture and the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing; and Tonya Gayle, executive director of Green City Force.

      Through their Service Corps (affiliated with the national AmeriCorps service and training program), GCF trains young residents of New York City Housing Authority public housing to participate in large-scale environmental and health initiatives in public housing and other local communities.

      The Drawing Together team will collaborate with GCF on its “Eco-Hubs,” an urban farms initiative. In a co-design effort, Drawing Together will create a new digital platform to support community-led planning and design processes for the siting, design, and operation of these spaces. This platform will also facilitate the scaling-up of community engagement with Eco-Hubs.

      The $100,000 triennial prize was established in 2019 by MIT’s Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism (LCAU) to catalyze innovative interdisciplinary urban design and planning approaches worldwide to improve the environment as well as the quality of life for residents. The first awardee was “Malden River Works for Waterfront Equity and Resilience,” a project for a civic waterfront space in Malden, Massachusetts.

      The 2022 Leventhal City Prize call for submissions sought proposals that focused on digital urbanism — investigating how life in cities can be improved using digital tools that are equitable and responsive to social and environmental conditions. The jury reviewed proposals for projects that offered new urban design and planning solutions using evolving data sources and computational techniques that transform the quality of life in metropolitan environments.

      “Digital urbanism is the intersection between cities, design, and technology and how we can identify new ways to include technology and design in our cities,” says LCAU Director Sarah Williams. “Drawing Together perfectly exemplifies how digital urbanism can assist in the co-development of design solution and improve the quality of life for the public.”

      The team will expand the workforce training currently offered by GCF to incorporate digital skills, with the goal of developing and integrating a sustainability-focused data science curriculum that supports sustainable urban farming within the Eco-Hubs.

      “What is most inspiring about this project is that young people are the writers, rather than passive subjects of urban transformation,” says juror Garrett Dash Nelson, president and head curator of the Norman B. Leventhal Map and Education Center at the Boston Public Library. “By taking the information and design architectures and making them central to youth-driven decisions about environmental planning, this project has the potential to activate a new participatory paradigm that will resonate far beyond New York City.”

      “In addition to community-based digital methods for urban environmental design, this project has the potential to strengthen computational skills in green job opportunities for youth that the Green City Force Eco-Hubs serve,” says juror James Wescoat, MIT Aga Khan Professor Emeritus of Landscape Architecture and Geography. 

      In addition to Nelson and Wescoat, the jury for this year’s competition included Lilian Coral, director of National Strategy and Technology Innovation at the Knight Foundation; Jose Castillo, principal at a|911 and professor of urbanism at CENTRO University; and Nigel Jacob, senior fellow at the Burnes Center for Global Impact at Northeastern University.

      The prize jury identified two finalists. Co-HATY Accelerator Team is a multidisciplinary project that helps provide housing and social support to Ukraine’s displaced residents. The team of urban planners, information technologists, architects, and sociologists are using digital technology to better connect residents across the country with housing opportunities. Team members include Brent D. Ryan, associate professor of urban design and public policy at MIT, and Anastasiya Ponomaryova, urban designer and co-founder of co-HATY.

      “The Ukraine’s team proposal makes a point of the relevance of architecture and planning in the context of humanitarian crises,” says Castillo. “It forces us to deploy techniques, methods, and knowledge to resolve issues ‘on demand.’ Different from a view of architecture and planning as ’slow practices,’ where design processes, research, pedagogies, and buildings take a long time to be deployed and finalized, this research shows an agile but thorough approach to the immediate and the contingent.”

      The second finalist is “Ozymandias: Using Artificial Intelligence to Map Urban Power Structures and Produce Fairer Results for All,” a project led by the Portland, Maine, Society for Architecture. The team behind this project seeks to encourage broader civic participation and positive change in municipal governments. By using emerging AI computation tools to illuminate patterns in power structures and decision-making, the team hopes to highlight correctable yet previously unrecognizable inequities. Principal investigator for the project is Jeff Levine, a lecturer in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning and a past director of planning and urban development for Portland.

      “The Ozymandias project recognizes an important truth about urban decision-making — that it is neither a bottom-up nor a top-down structure, but a tangled and often obscure network of formal and informal power systems,” says Nelson. “By bringing analytical methods to bear on a perennial question for civic action — who really governs in a democratic system? — the project offers a provocative methodology for examining why nominally participatory urban processes so often fail at producing inclusive and equitable outcomes.” More