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      in Energy

      The changing geography of “energy poverty”

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      A growing portion of Americans who are struggling to pay for their household energy live in the South and Southwest, reflecting a climate-driven shift away from heating needs and toward air conditioning use, an MIT study finds.The newly published research also reveals that a major U.S. federal program that provides energy subsidies to households, by assigning block grants to states, does not yet fully match these recent trends.The work evaluates the “energy burden” on households, which reflects the percentage of income needed to pay for energy necessities, from 2015 to 2020. Households with an energy burden greater than 6 percent of income are considered to be in “energy poverty.” With climate change, rising temperatures are expected to add financial stress in the South, where air conditioning is increasingly needed. Meanwhile, milder winters are expected to reduce heating costs in some colder regions.“From 2015 to 2020, there is an increase in burden generally, and you do also see this southern shift,” says Christopher Knittel, an MIT energy economist and co-author of a new paper detailing the study’s results. About federal aid, he adds, “When you compare the distribution of the energy burden to where the money is going, it’s not aligned too well.”The paper, “U.S. federal resource allocations are inconsistent with concentrations of energy poverty,” is published today in Science Advances.The authors are Carlos Batlle, a professor at Comillas University in Spain and a senior lecturer with the MIT Energy Initiative; Peter Heller SM ’24, a recent graduate of the MIT Technology and Policy Program; Knittel, the George P. Shultz Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and associate dean for climate and sustainability at MIT; and Tim Schittekatte, a senior lecturer at MIT Sloan.A scorching decadeThe study, which grew out of graduate research that Heller conducted at MIT, deploys a machine-learning estimation technique that the scholars applied to U.S. energy use data.Specifically, the researchers took a sample of about 20,000 households from the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s Residential Energy Consumption Survey, which includes a wide variety of demographic characteristics about residents, along with building-type and geographic information. Then, using the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey data for 2015 and 2020, the research team estimated the average household energy burden for every census tract in the lower 48 states — 73,057 in 2015, and 84,414 in 2020.That allowed the researchers to chart the changes in energy burden in recent years, including the shift toward a greater energy burden in southern states. In 2015, Maine, Mississippi, Arkansas, Vermont, and Alabama were the five states (ranked in descending order) with the highest energy burden across census bureau tracts. In 2020, that had shifted somewhat, with Maine and Vermont dropping on the list and southern states increasingly having a larger energy burden. That year, the top five states in descending order were Mississippi, Arkansas, Alabama, West Virginia, and Maine.The data also reflect a urban-rural shift. In 2015, 23 percent of the census tracts where the average household is living in energy poverty were urban. That figure shrank to 14 percent by 2020.All told, the data are consistent with the picture of a warming world, in which milder winters in the North, Northwest, and Mountain West require less heating fuel, while more extreme summer temperatures in the South require more air conditioning.“Who’s going to be harmed most from climate change?” asks Knittel. “In the U.S., not surprisingly, it’s going to be the southern part of the U.S. And our study is confirming that, but also suggesting it’s the southern part of the U.S that’s least able to respond. If you’re already burdened, the burden’s growing.”An evolution for LIHEAP?In addition to identifying the shift in energy needs during the last decade, the study also illuminates a longer-term change in U.S. household energy needs, dating back to the 1980s. The researchers compared the present-day geography of U.S. energy burden to the help currently provided by the federal Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP), which dates to 1981.Federal aid for energy needs actually predates LIHEAP, but the current program was introduced in 1981, then updated in 1984 to include cooling needs such as air conditioning. When the formula was updated in 1984, two “hold harmless” clauses were also adopted, guaranteeing states a minimum amount of funding.Still, LIHEAP’s parameters also predate the rise of temperatures over the last 40 years, and the current study shows that, compared to the current landscape of energy poverty, LIHEAP distributes relatively less of its funding to southern and southwestern states.“The way Congress uses formulas set in the 1980s keeps funding distributions nearly the same as it was in the 1980s,” Heller observes. “Our paper illustrates the shift in need that has occurred over the decades since then.”Currently, it would take a fourfold increase in LIHEAP to ensure that no U.S. household experiences energy poverty. But the researchers tested out a new funding design, which would help the worst-off households first, nationally, ensuring that no household would have an energy burden of greater than 20.3 percent.“We think that’s probably the most equitable way to allocate the money, and by doing that, you now have a different amount of money that should go to each state, so that no one state is worse off than the others,” Knittel says.And while the new distribution concept would require a certain amount of subsidy reallocation among states, it would be with the goal of helping all households avoid a certain level of energy poverty, across the country, at a time of changing climate, warming weather, and shifting energy needs in the U.S.“We can optimize where we spend the money, and that optimization approach is an important thing to think about,” Knittel says.  More

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      in Environment

      Where flood policy helps most — and where it could do more

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      Flooding, including the devastation caused recently by Hurricane Helene, is responsible for $5 billion in annual damages in the U.S. That’s more than any other type of weather-related extreme event.To address the problem, the federal government instituted a program in 1990 that helps reduce flood insurance costs in communities enacting measures to better handle flooding. If, say, a town preserves open space as a buffer against coastal flooding, or develops better stormwater management, area policy owners get discounts on their premiums. Studies show the program works well: It has reduced overall flood damage in participating communities.However, a new study led by an MIT researcher shows that the effects of the program differ greatly from place to place. For instance, higher-population communities, which likely have more means to introduce flood defenses, benefit more than smaller communities, to the tune of about $4,000 per insured household.“When we evaluate it, the effects of the same policy vary widely among different types of communities,” says study co-author Lidia Cano Pecharromán, a PhD candidate in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning.Referring to climate and environmental justice concerns, she adds: “It’s important to understand not just if a policy is effective, but who is benefitting, so that we can make necessary adjustments and reach all the targets we want to reach.”The paper, “Exposing Disparities in Flood Adaptation for Equitable Future Interventions in the USA,” is published today in Nature Communications. The authors are Cano Pecharromán and ChangHoon Hahn, an associate research scholar at Princeton University.Able to afford helpThe program in question was developed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which has a division, the Flood Insurance Mitigation Administration, focusing on this issue. In 1990, FEMA initiated the National Flood Insurance Program’s Community Rating System, which incentivizes communities to enact measures that help prevent or reduce flooding.Communities can engage in a broad set of related activities, including floodplain mapping, preservation of open spaces, stormwater management activities, creating flood warning systems, or even developing public information and participation programs. In exchange, area residents receive a discount on their flood insurance premium rates.To conduct the study, the researchers examined 2.5 million flood insurance claims filed with FEMA since then. They also examined U.S. Census Bureau data to analyze demographic and economic data about communities, and incorporated flood risk data from the First Street Foundation.By comparing over 1,500 communities in the FEMA program, the researchers were able to quantify its different relative effects — depending on community characteristics such as population, race, income or flood risk. For instance, higher-income communities seem better able to make more flood-control and mitigation investments, earning better FEMA ratings and, ultimately, enacting more effective measures.“You see some positive effects for low-income communities, but as the risks go up, these disappear, while only high-income communities continue seeing these positive effects,” says Cano Pecharromán. “They are likely able to afford measures that handle a higher risk indices for flooding.”Similarly, the researchers found, communities with higher overall levels of education fare better from the flood-insurance program, with about $2,000 more in savings per individual policy than communities with lower levels of education. One way or another, communities with more assets in the first place — size, wealth, education — are better able to deploy or hire the civic and technical expertise necessary to enact more best practices against flood damage.And even among lower-income communities in the program, communities with less population diversity see greater effectiveness from their flood program activities, realizing a gain of about $6,000 per household compared to communities where racial and ethnic minorities are predominant.“These are substantial effects, and we should consider these things when making decisions and reviewing if our climate adaptation policies work,” Cano Pecharromán says.An even larger number of communities is not in the FEMA program at all. The study identified 14,729 unique U.S. communities with flood issues. Many of those are likely lacking the capacity to engage on flooding issues the way even the lower-ranked communities within the FEMA program have at least taken some action so far.“If we are able to consider all the communities that are not in the program because they can’t afford to do the basics, we would likely see that the effects are even larger among different communities,” Cano Pecharromán says.Getting communities startedTo make the program more effective for more people, Cano Pecharromán suggests that the federal government should consider how to help communities enact flood-control and mitigation measures in the first place.“When we set out these kinds of policies, we need to consider how certain types of communities might need help with implementation,” she says.Methodologically, the researchers arrived at their conclusions using an advanced statistical approach that Hahn, who is an astrophysicist by training, has applied to the study of dark energy and galaxies. Instead of finding one “average treatment effect” of the FEMA program across all participating communities, they quantified the program’s impact while subdividing the set of participating set of communities according to their characteristics.“We are able to calculate the causal effect of [the program], not as an average, which can hide these inequalities, but at every given level of the specific characteristic of communities we’re looking at, different levels of income, different levels of education, and more,” Cano Pecharromán says.Government officials have seen Cano Pecharromán present the preliminary findings at meetings, and expressed interest in the results. Currently, she is also working on a follow-up study, which aims to pinpoint which types of local flood-mitigation programs provide the biggest benefits for local communities.Support for the research was provided, in part, by the La Caixa Foundation, the MIT Martin Family Society of Fellows for Sustainability, and the AI Accelerator program of the Schmidt Futures Foundation. More

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      in Environment

      3 Questions: The past, present, and future of sustainability science

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      It was 1978, over a decade before the word “sustainable” would infiltrate environmental nomenclature, and Ronald Prinn, MIT professor of atmospheric science, had just founded the Advanced Global Atmospheric Gases Experiment (AGAGE). Today, AGAGE provides real-time measurements for well over 50 environmentally harmful trace gases, enabling us to determine emissions at the country level, a key element in verifying national adherence to the Montreal Protocol and the Paris Accord. This, Prinn says, started him thinking about doing science that informed decision making.Much like global interest in sustainability, Prinn’s interest and involvement continued to grow into what would become three decades worth of achievements in sustainability science. The Center for Global Change Science (CGCS) and Joint Program on the Science and Policy Global Change, respectively founded and co-founded by Prinn, have recently joined forces to create the MIT School of Science’s new Center for Sustainability Science and Strategy (CS3), lead by former CGCS postdoc turned MIT professor, Noelle Selin.As he prepares to pass the torch, Prinn reflects on how far sustainability has come, and where it all began.Q: Tell us about the motivation for the MIT centers you helped to found around sustainability.A: In 1990 after I founded the Center for Global Change Science, I also co-founded the Joint Program on the Science and Policy Global Change with a very important partner, [Henry] “Jake” Jacoby. He’s now retired, but at that point he was a professor in the MIT Sloan School of Management. Together, we determined that in order to answer questions related to what we now call sustainability of human activities, you need to combine the natural and social sciences involved in these processes. Based on this, we decided to make a joint program between the CGCS and a center that he directed, the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research (CEEPR).It was called the “joint program” and was joint for two reasons — not only were two centers joining, but two disciplines were joining. It was not about simply doing the same science. It was about bringing a team of people together that could tackle these coupled issues of environment, human development and economy. We were the first group in the world to fully integrate these elements together.Q: What has been your most impactful contribution and what effect did it have on the greater public’s overall understanding?A: Our biggest contribution is the development, and more importantly, the application of the Integrated Global System Model [IGSM] framework, looking at human development in both developing countries and developed countries that had a significant impact on the way people thought about climate issues. With IGSM, we were able to look at the interactions among human and natural components, studying the feedbacks and impacts that climate change had on human systems; like how it would alter agriculture and other land activities, how it would alter things we derive from the ocean, and so on.Policies were being developed largely by economists or climate scientists working independently, and we started showing how the real answers and analysis required a coupling of all of these components. We showed, and I think convincingly, that what people used to study independently, must be coupled together, because the impacts of climate change and air pollution affected so many things.To address the value of policy, despite the uncertainty in climate projections, we ran multiple runs of the IGSM with and without policy, with different choices for uncertain IGSM variables. For public communication, around 2005, we introduced our signature Greenhouse Gamble interactive visualization tools; these have been renewed over time as science and policies evolved.Q: What can MIT provide now at this critical juncture in understanding climate change and its impact?A: We need to further push the boundaries of integrated global system modeling to ensure full sustainability of human activity and all of its beneficial dimensions, which is the exciting focus that the CS3 is designed to address. We need to focus on sustainability as a central core element and use it to not just analyze existing policies but to propose new ones. Sustainability is not just climate or air pollution, it’s got to do with human impacts in general. Human health is central to sustainability, and equally important to equity. We need to expand the capability for credibly assessing what the impact policies have not just on developed countries, but on developing countries, taking into account that many places around the world are at artisanal levels of their economies. They cannot be blamed for anything that is changing climate and causing air pollution and other detrimental things that are currently going on. They need our help. That’s what sustainability is in its full dimensions.Our capabilities are evolving toward a modeling system so detailed that we can find out detrimental things about policies even at local levels before investing in changing infrastructure. This is going to require collaboration among even more disciplines and creating a seamless connection between research and decision making; not just for policies enacted in the public sector, but also for decisions that are made in the private sector.  More

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      in Environment

      Q&A: What past environmental success can teach us about solving the climate crisis

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      Susan Solomon, MIT professor of Earth, atmospheric, and planetary sciences (EAPS) and of chemistry, played a critical role in understanding how a class of chemicals known as chlorofluorocarbons were creating a hole in the ozone layer. Her research was foundational to the creation of the Montreal Protocol, an international agreement established in the 1980s that phased out products releasing chlorofluorocarbons. Since then, scientists have documented signs that the ozone hole is recovering thanks to these measures.Having witnessed this historical process first-hand, Solomon, the Lee and Geraldine Martin Professor of Environmental Studies, is aware of how people can come together to make successful environmental policy happen. Using her story, as well as other examples of success — including combating smog, getting rid of DDT, and more — Solomon draws parallels from then to now as the climate crisis comes into focus in her new book, “Solvable: How we Healed the Earth and How we can do it Again.”Solomon took a moment to talk about why she picked the stories in her book, the students who inspired her, and why we need hope and optimism now more than ever.Q: You have first-hand experience seeing how we’ve altered the Earth, as well as the process of creating international environmental policy. What prompted you to write a book about your experiences?A: Lots of things, but one of the main ones is the things that I see in teaching. I have taught a class called Science, Politics and Environmental Policy for many years here at MIT. Because my emphasis is always on how we’ve actually fixed problems, students come away from that class feeling hopeful, like they really want to stay engaged with the problem.It strikes me that students today have grown up in a very contentious and difficult era in which they feel like nothing ever gets done. But stuff does get done, even now. Looking at how we did things so far really helps you to see how we can do things in the future.Q: In the book, you use five different stories as examples of successful environmental policy, and then end talking about how we can apply these lessons to climate change. Why did you pick these five stories?A: I picked some of them because I’m closer to those problems in my own professional experience, like ozone depletion and smog. I did other issues partly because I wanted to show that even in the 21st century, we’ve actually got some stuff done — that’s the story of the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol, which is a binding international agreement on some greenhouse gases.Another chapter is on DDT. One of the reasons I included that is because it had an enormous effect on the birth of the environmental movement in the United States. Plus, that story allows you to see how important the environmental groups can be.Lead in gasoline and paint is the other one. I find it a very moving story because the idea that we were poisoning millions of children and not even realizing it is so very, very sad. But it’s so uplifting that we did figure out the problem, and it happened partly because of the civil rights movement, that made us aware that the problem was striking minority communities much more than non-minority communities.Q: What surprised you the most during your research for the book?A: One of the things that that I didn’t realize and should have, was the outsized role played by one single senator, Ed Muskie of Maine. He made pollution control his big issue and devoted incredible energy to it. He clearly had the passion and wanted to do it for many years, but until other factors helped him, he couldn’t. That’s where I began to understand the role of public opinion and the way in which policy is only possible when public opinion demands change.Another thing about Muskie was the way in which his engagement with these issues demanded that science be strong. When I read what he put into congressional testimony I realized how highly he valued the science. Science alone is never enough, but it’s always necessary. Over the years, science got a lot stronger, and we developed ways of evaluating what the scientific wisdom across many different studies and many different views actually is. That’s what scientific assessment is all about, and it’s crucial to environmental progress.Q: Throughout the book you argue that for environmental action to succeed, three things must be met which you call the three Ps: a threat much be personal, perceptible, and practical. Where did this idea come from?A: My observations. You have to perceive the threat: In the case of the ozone hole, you could perceive it because those false-color images of the ozone loss were so easy to understand, and it was personal because few things are scarier than cancer, and a reduced ozone layer leads to too much sun, increasing skin cancers. Science plays a role in communicating what can be readily understood by the public, and that’s important to them perceiving it as a serious problem.Nowadays, we certainly perceive the reality of climate change. We also see that it’s personal. People are dying because of heat waves in much larger numbers than they used to; there are horrible problems in the Boston area, for example, with flooding and sea level rise. People perceive the reality of the problem and they feel personally threatened.The third P is practical: People have to believe that there are practical solutions. It’s interesting to watch how the battle for hearts and minds has shifted. There was a time when the skeptics would just attack the whole idea that the climate was changing. Eventually, they decided ‘we better accept that because people perceive it, so let’s tell them that it’s not caused by human activity.’ But it’s clear enough now that human activity does play a role. So they’ve moved on to attacking that third P, that somehow it’s not practical to have any kind of solutions. This is progress! So what about that third P?What I tried to do in the book is to point out some of the ways in which the problem has also become eminently practical to deal with in the last 10 years, and will continue to move in that direction. We’re right on the cusp of success, and we just have to keep going. People should not give in to eco despair; that’s the worst thing you could do, because then nothing will happen. If we continue to move at the rate we have, we will certainly get to where we need to be.Q: That ties in very nicely with my next question. The book is very optimistic; what gives you hope?A: I’m optimistic because I’ve seen so many examples of where we have succeeded, and because I see so many signs of movement right now that are going to push us in the same direction.If we had kept conducting business as usual as we had been in the year 2000, we’d be looking at 4 degrees of future warming. Right now, I think we’re looking at 3 degrees. I think we can get to 2 degrees. We have to really work on it, and we have to get going seriously in the next decade, but globally right now over 30 percent of our energy is from renewables. That’s fantastic! Let’s just keep going.Q: Throughout the book, you show that environmental problems won’t be solved by individual actions alone, but requires policy and technology driving. What individual actions can people take to help push for those bigger changes?A: A big one is choose to eat more sustainably; choose alternative transportation methods like public transportation or reducing the amount of trips that you make. Older people usually have retirement investments, you can shift them over to a social choice funds and away from index funds that end up funding companies that you might not be interested in. You can use your money to put pressure: Amazon has been under a huge amount of pressure to cut down on their plastic packaging, mainly coming from consumers. They’ve just announced they’re not going to use those plastic pillows anymore. I think you can see lots of ways in which people really do matter, and we can matter more.Q: What do you hope people take away from the book?A: Hope for their future and resolve to do the best they can getting engaged with it. More

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      in Environment

      How to increase the rate of plastics recycling

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      While recycling systems and bottle deposits have become increasingly widespread in the U.S., actual rates of recycling are “abysmal,” according to a team of MIT researchers who studied the rates for recycling of PET, the plastic commonly used in beverage bottles. However, their findings suggest some ways to change this.The present rate of recycling for PET, or polyethylene terephthalate, bottles nationwide is about 24 percent and has remained stagnant for a decade, the researchers say. But their study indicates that with a nationwide bottle deposit program, the rates could increase to 82 percent, with nearly two-thirds of all PET bottles being recycled into new bottles, at a net cost of just a penny a bottle when demand is robust. At the same time, they say, policies would be needed to ensure a sufficient demand for the recycled material.The findings are being published today in the Journal of Industrial Ecology, in a paper by MIT professor of materials science and engineering Elsa Olivetti, graduate students Basuhi Ravi and Karan Bhuwalka, and research scientist Richard Roth.The team looked at PET bottle collection and recycling rates in different states as well as other nations with and without bottle deposit policies, and with or without curbside recycling programs, as well as the inputs and outputs of various recycling companies and methods. The researchers say this study is the first to look in detail at the interplay between public policies and the end-to-end realities of the packaging production and recycling market.They found that bottle deposit programs are highly effective in the areas where they are in place, but at present there is not nearly enough collection of used bottles to meet the targets set by the packaging industry. Their analysis suggests that a uniform nationwide bottle deposit policy could achieve the levels of recycling that have been mandated by proposed legislation and corporate commitments.The recycling of PET is highly successful in terms of quality, with new products made from all-recycled material virtually matching the qualities of virgin material. And brands have shown that new bottles can be safely made with 100 percent postconsumer waste. But the team found that collection of the material is a crucial bottleneck that leaves processing plants unable to meet their needs. However, with the right policies in place, “one can be optimistic,” says Olivetti, who is the Jerry McAfee Professor in Engineering and the associate dean of the School of Engineering.“A message that we have found in a number of cases in the recycling space is that if you do the right work to support policies that think about both the demand but also the supply,” then significant improvements are possible, she says. “You have to think about the response and the behavior of multiple actors in the system holistically to be viable,” she says. “We are optimistic, but there are many ways to be pessimistic if we’re not thinking about that in a holistic way.”For example, the study found that it is important to consider the needs of existing municipal waste-recovery facilities. While expanded bottle deposit programs are essential to increase recycling rates and provide the feedstock to companies recycling PET into new products, the current facilities that process material from curbside recycling programs will lose revenue from PET bottles, which are a relatively high-value product compared to the other materials in the recycled waste stream. These companies would lose a source of their income if the bottles are collected through deposit programs, leaving them with only the lower-value mixed plastics.The researchers developed economic models based on rates of collection found in the states with deposit programs, recycled-content requirements, and other policies, and used these models to extrapolate to the nation as a whole. Overall, they found that the supply needs of packaging producers could be met through a nationwide bottle deposit system with a 10-cent deposit per bottle — at a net cost of about 1 cent per bottle produced when demand is strong. This need not be a federal program, but rather one where the implementation would be left up to the individual states, Olivetti says.Other countries have been much more successful in implementing deposit systems that result in very high participation rates. Several European countries manage to collect more than 90 percent of PET bottles for recycling, for example. But in the U.S., less than 29 percent are collected, and after losses in the recycling chain about 24 percent actually get recycled, the researchers found. Whereas 73 percent of Americans have access to curbside recycling, presently only 10 states have bottle deposit systems in place.Yet the demand is there so far. “There is a market for this material,” says Olivetti. While bottles collected through mixed-waste collection can still be recycled to some extent, those collected through deposit systems tend to be much cleaner and require less processing, and so are more economical to recycle into new bottles, or into textiles.To be effective, policies need to not just focus on increasing rates of recycling, but on the whole cycle of supply and demand and the different players involved, Olivetti says. Safeguards would need to be in place to protect existing recycling facilities from the lost revenues they would suffer as a result of bottle deposits, perhaps in the form of subsidies funded by fees on the bottle producers, to avoid putting these essential parts of the processing chain out of business. And other policies may be needed to ensure the continued market for the material that gets collected, including recycled content requirements and extended producer responsibility regulations, the team found.At this stage, it’s important to focus on the specific waste streams that can most effectively be recycled, and PET, along with many metals, clearly fit that category. “When we start to think about mixed plastic streams, that’s much more challenging from an environmental perspective,” she says. “Recycling systems need to be pursuing extended producers’ responsibility, or specifically thinking about materials designed more effectively toward recycled content,” she says.It’s also important to address “what the right metrics are to design for sustainably managed materials streams,” she says. “It could be energy use, could be circularity [for example, making old bottles into new bottles], could be around waste reduction, and making sure those are all aligned. That’s another kind of policy coordination that’s needed.” More

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      in Environment

      Making climate models relevant for local decision-makers

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      Climate models are a key technology in predicting the impacts of climate change. By running simulations of the Earth’s climate, scientists and policymakers can estimate conditions like sea level rise, flooding, and rising temperatures, and make decisions about how to appropriately respond. But current climate models struggle to provide this information quickly or affordably enough to be useful on smaller scales, such as the size of a city. Now, authors of a new open-access paper published in the Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems have found a method to leverage machine learning to utilize the benefits of current climate models, while reducing the computational costs needed to run them. “It turns the traditional wisdom on its head,” says Sai Ravela, a principal research scientist in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS) who wrote the paper with EAPS postdoc Anamitra Saha. Traditional wisdomIn climate modeling, downscaling is the process of using a global climate model with coarse resolution to generate finer details over smaller regions. Imagine a digital picture: A global model is a large picture of the world with a low number of pixels. To downscale, you zoom in on just the section of the photo you want to look at — for example, Boston. But because the original picture was low resolution, the new version is blurry; it doesn’t give enough detail to be particularly useful. “If you go from coarse resolution to fine resolution, you have to add information somehow,” explains Saha. Downscaling attempts to add that information back in by filling in the missing pixels. “That addition of information can happen two ways: Either it can come from theory, or it can come from data.” Conventional downscaling often involves using models built on physics (such as the process of air rising, cooling, and condensing, or the landscape of the area), and supplementing it with statistical data taken from historical observations. But this method is computationally taxing: It takes a lot of time and computing power to run, while also being expensive. A little bit of both In their new paper, Saha and Ravela have figured out a way to add the data another way. They’ve employed a technique in machine learning called adversarial learning. It uses two machines: One generates data to go into our photo. But the other machine judges the sample by comparing it to actual data. If it thinks the image is fake, then the first machine has to try again until it convinces the second machine. The end-goal of the process is to create super-resolution data. Using machine learning techniques like adversarial learning is not a new idea in climate modeling; where it currently struggles is its inability to handle large amounts of basic physics, like conservation laws. The researchers discovered that simplifying the physics going in and supplementing it with statistics from the historical data was enough to generate the results they needed. “If you augment machine learning with some information from the statistics and simplified physics both, then suddenly, it’s magical,” says Ravela. He and Saha started with estimating extreme rainfall amounts by removing more complex physics equations and focusing on water vapor and land topography. They then generated general rainfall patterns for mountainous Denver and flat Chicago alike, applying historical accounts to correct the output. “It’s giving us extremes, like the physics does, at a much lower cost. And it’s giving us similar speeds to statistics, but at much higher resolution.” Another unexpected benefit of the results was how little training data was needed. “The fact that that only a little bit of physics and little bit of statistics was enough to improve the performance of the ML [machine learning] model … was actually not obvious from the beginning,” says Saha. It only takes a few hours to train, and can produce results in minutes, an improvement over the months other models take to run. Quantifying risk quicklyBeing able to run the models quickly and often is a key requirement for stakeholders such as insurance companies and local policymakers. Ravela gives the example of Bangladesh: By seeing how extreme weather events will impact the country, decisions about what crops should be grown or where populations should migrate to can be made considering a very broad range of conditions and uncertainties as soon as possible.“We can’t wait months or years to be able to quantify this risk,” he says. “You need to look out way into the future and at a large number of uncertainties to be able to say what might be a good decision.”While the current model only looks at extreme precipitation, training it to examine other critical events, such as tropical storms, winds, and temperature, is the next step of the project. With a more robust model, Ravela is hoping to apply it to other places like Boston and Puerto Rico as part of a Climate Grand Challenges project.“We’re very excited both by the methodology that we put together, as well as the potential applications that it could lead to,” he says.  More

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      in Energy

      Getting to systemic sustainability

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

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      in Environment

      Q&A: Exploring ethnic dynamics and climate change in Africa

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      Evan Lieberman is the Total Professor of Political Science and Contemporary Africa at MIT, and is also director of the Center for International Studies. During a semester-long sabbatical, he’s currently based at the African Climate and Development Initiative at the University of Cape Town.In this Q&A, Lieberman discusses several climate-related research projects he’s pursuing in South Africa and surrounding countries. This is part of an ongoing series exploring how the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences is addressing the climate crisis.Q: South Africa is a nation whose political and economic development you have long studied and written about. Do you see this visit as an extension of the kind of research you have been pursuing, or a departure from it?A: Much of my previous work has been animated by the question of understanding the causes and consequences of group-based disparities, whether due to AIDS or Covid. These are problems that know no geographic boundaries, and where ethnic and racial minorities are often hardest hit. Climate change is an analogous problem, with these minority populations living in places where they are most vulnerable, in heat islands in cities, and in coastal areas where they are not protected. The reality is they might get hit much harder by longer-term trends and immediate shocks.In one line of research, I seek to understand how people in different African countries, in different ethnic groups, perceive the problems of climate change and their governments’ response to it. There are ethnic divisions of labor in terms of what people do — whether they are farmers or pastoralists, or live in cities. So some ethnic groups are simply more affected by drought or extreme weather than others, and this can be a basis for conflict, especially when competing for often limited government resources.In this area, just like in my previous research, learning what shapes ordinary citizen perspectives is really important, because these views affect people’s everyday practices, and the extent to which they support certain kinds of policies and investments their government makes in response to climate-related challenges. But I will also try to learn more about the perspectives of policymakers and various development partners who seek to balance climate-related challenges against a host of other problems and priorities.Q: You recently published “Until We Have Won Our Liberty,” which examines the difficult transition of South Africa from apartheid to a democratic government, scrutinizing in particular whether the quality of life for citizens has improved in terms of housing, employment, discrimination, and ethnic conflicts. How do climate change-linked issues fit into your scholarship?A: I never saw myself as a climate researcher, but a number of years ago, heavily influenced by what I was learning at MIT, I began to recognize more and more how important the issue of climate change is. And I realized there were lots of ways in which the climate problem resonated with other kinds of problems I had tackled in earlier parts of my work.There was once a time when climate and the environment was the purview primarily of white progressives: the “tree huggers.” And that’s really changed in recent decades as it has become evident that the people who’ve been most affected by the climate emergency are ethnic and racial minorities. We saw with Hurricane Katrina and other places [that] if you are Black, you’re more likely to live in a vulnerable area and to just generally experience more environmental harms, from pollution and emissions, leaving these communities much less resilient than white communities. Government has largely not addressed this inequity. When you look at American survey data in terms of who’s concerned about climate change, Black Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Asian Americans are more unified in their worries than are white Americans.There are analogous problems in Africa, my career research focus. Governments there have long responded in different ways to different ethnic groups. The research I am starting looks at the extent to which there are disparities in how governments try to solve climate-related challenges.Q: It’s difficult enough in the United States taking the measure of different groups’ perceptions of the impact of climate change and government’s effectiveness in contending with it. How do you go about this in Africa?A: Surprisingly, there’s only been a little bit of work done so far on how ordinary African citizens, who are ostensibly being hit the hardest in the world by the climate emergency, are thinking about this problem. Climate change has not been politicized there in a very big way. In fact, only 50 percent of Africans in one poll had heard of the term.In one of my new projects, with political science faculty colleague Devin Caughey and political science doctoral student Preston Johnston, we are analyzing social and climate survey data [generated by the Afrobarometer research network] from over 30 African countries to understand within and across countries the ways in which ethnic identities structure people’s perception of the climate crisis, and their beliefs in what government ought to be doing. In largely agricultural African societies, people routinely experience drought, extreme rain, and heat. They also lack the infrastructure that can shield them from the intense variability of weather patterns. But we’re adding a lens, which is looking at sources of inequality, especially ethnic differences.I will also be investigating specific sectors. Africa is a continent where in most places people cannot take for granted universal, piped access to clean water. In Cape Town, several years ago, the combination of failure to replace infrastructure and lack of rain caused such extreme conditions that one of the world’s most important cities almost ran out of water.While these studies are in progress, it is clear that in many countries, there are substantively large differences in perceptions of the severity of climate change, and attitudes about who should be doing what, and who’s capable of doing what. In several countries, both perceptions and policy preferences are differentiated along ethnic lines, more so than with respect to generational or class differences within societies.This is interesting as a phenomenon, but substantively, I think it’s important in that it may provide the basis for how politicians and government actors decide to move on allocating resources and implementing climate-protection policies. We see this kind of political calculation in the U.S. and we shouldn’t be surprised that it happens in Africa as well.That’s ultimately one of the challenges from the perch of MIT, where we’re really interested in understanding climate change, and creating technological tools and policies for mitigating the problem or adapting to it. The reality is frustrating. The political world — those who make decisions about whether to acknowledge the problem and whether to implement resources in the best technical way — are playing a whole other game. That game is about rewarding key supporters and being reelected.Q: So how do you go from measuring perceptions and beliefs among citizens about climate change and government responsiveness to those problems, to policies and actions that might actually reduce disparities in the way climate-vulnerable African groups receive support?A: Some of the work I have been doing involves understanding what local and national governments across Africa are actually doing to address these problems. We will have to drill down into government budgets to determine the actual resources devoted to addressing a challenge, what sorts of practices the government follows, and the political ramifications for governments that act aggressively versus those that don’t. With the Cape Town water crisis, for example, the government dramatically changed residents’ water usage through naming and shaming, and transformed institutional practices of water collection. They made it through a major drought by using much less water, and doing it with greater energy efficiency. Through the government’s strong policy and implementation, and citizens’ active responses, an entire city, with all its disparate groups, gained resilience. Maybe we can highlight creative solutions to major climate-related problems and use them as prods to push more effective policies and solutions in other places.In the MIT Global Diversity Lab, along with political science faculty colleague Volha Charnysh, political science doctoral student Jared Kalow, and Institute for Data, Systems and Society doctoral student Erin Walk, we are exploring American perspectives on climate-related foreign aid, asking survey respondents whether the U.S. should be giving more to people in the global South who didn’t cause the problems of climate change but have to suffer the externalities. We are particularly interested in whether people’s desire to help vulnerable communities rests on the racial or national identity of those communities.From my new seat as director of the Center for International Studies (CIS), I hope to do more and more to connect social science findings to relevant policymakers, whether in the U.S. or in other places. CIS is making climate one of our thematic priority areas, directing hundreds of thousands of dollars for MIT faculty to spark climate collaborations with researchers worldwide through the Global Seed Fund program. COP 28 (the U.N. Climate Change Conference), which I attended in December in Dubai, really drove home the importance of people coming together from around the world to exchange ideas and form networks. It was unbelievably large, with 85,000 people. But so many of us shared the belief that we are not doing enough. We need enforceable global solutions and innovation. We need ways of financing. We need to provide opportunities for journalists to broadcast the importance of this problem. And we need to understand the incentives that different actors have and what sorts of messages and strategies will resonate with them, and inspire those who have resources to be more generous. More