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      in Environment

      Cleaning up critical minerals and materials production, using microwave plasma

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      The push to bring manufacturing back to the U.S. is running up against an unfortunate truth: The processes for making many critical materials today create toxic byproducts and other environmental hazards. That’s true for commonly used industrial metals like nickel and titanium, as well as specialty minerals, materials, and coatings that go into batteries, advanced electronics, and defense applications.Now 6K, founded by former MIT research scientist Kamal Hadidi, is using a new production process to bring critical materials production back to America without the toxic byproducts.The company is actively scaling its microwave plasma technology, which it calls UniMelt, to transform the way critical minerals are processed, creating new domestic supply chains in the process. UniMelt uses beams of tightly controlled thermal plasma to melt or vaporize precursor materials into particles with precise sizes and crystalline phases.The technology converts metals, such as titanium, nickel, and refractory alloys, into particles optimized for additive manufacturing for a range of industrial applications. It is also being used to create battery materials for electric vehicles, grid infrastructure, and data centers.“The markets and critical materials we are focused on are important for not just economic reasons but also U.S. national security, because the bulk of these materials are manufactured today in nonfriendly countries,” 6K CEO Saurabh Ullal says. “Now, the [U.S. government] and our growing customer base can leverage this technology invented at MIT to make the U.S. less dependent on these nonfriendly countries, ensuring supply chain independence now and in the future.”Named after the 6,000-degree temperature of its plasma, 6K is currently selling its high-performance metal powders to parts manufacturers as well as defense, automotive, medical, and oil and gas companies for use in applications from engine components and medical implants to rockets. To scale its battery materials business, 6K is also building a 100,000-square-foot production facility in Jackson, Tennessee, which will begin construction later this year.A weekend projectBetween 1994 and 2007, Hadidi worked at the Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PFSC), where he developed plasma technologies for a range of applications, including hydrogen production, fuel reforming, and detecting environmental toxins. His first company was founded in 2000 out of the PFSC to detect mercury in coal-fired power plants’ smokestacks.“I loved working at MIT,” Hadidi says. “It’s an amazing place that really challenges you. Just being there is so stimulating because everyone’s trying to come up with new solutions and connect dots between different fields.”Hadidi also began using high-frequency microwave plasmas to create nanomaterials for use in optical applications. He wasn’t a materials expert, so he collaborated with Professor Eric Jordan, a materials synthesis expert from the University of Connecticut, and the researchers started working on nights and weekends in the PSFC to develop the idea further, eventually patenting the technology.Hadidi officially founded the company as Amastan in 2007, exploring the use of his microwave plasma technology, later named UniMelt for “uniform melt state process,” to make a host of different materials as part of a government grant he and Jordan received.The researchers soon realized the microwave plasma technology had several advantages over traditional production techniques for certain materials. For one, it could eliminate several high-energy steps of conventional processes, reducing production times from days to hours in some cases. For batteries and certain critical minerals, the process also works with recycled feedstocks. Amastan was renamed 6K in 2019.Early on, Hadidi produced metal powders used in additive manufacturing through a process called spheroidization, which results in dense, spherical powders that flow well and make high-performance 3D-printed parts.Following another grant, Hadidi explored methods for producing a type of battery cathode made from lithium, nickel, manganese, and cobalt (NMC). The standard process for making NMCs involved chemical synthesis, precipitation, heat treatment, and a lot of water. 6K is able to reduce many of those steps, speeding up production and lowering costs while also being more sustainable.“Our technology completely eliminates toxic waste and recycles all of the byproducts back through the process to utilize everything, including water,” Ullal says.Scaling domestic productionToday, 6K’s additive manufacturing arm operates out of a factory in Pennsylvania. The company’s critical minerals processing, refining, and recycling systems can produce about 400 tons of material per year and can be used to make more than a dozen types of metal powders. The company also has 33,000-square-foot battery center in North Andover, Massachusetts, where it produces battery cathode materials for its energy storage and mobility customers.The Tennessee facility will be used to produce battery cathode materials and represents a massive step up in throughput. The company says it will be able to produce 13,000 tons of material annually when construction is complete next year.“I’m happy if what I started brings something positive to society, and I’m extremely thankful to all the people that helped me,” says Hadidi, who left the company in 2019. “I’m an entrepreneur at heart. I like to make things. But that doesn’t mean I always succeed. It’s personally very satisfying to see this make an impact.”The 6K team says its technology can also create a variety of specialty ceramics, advanced coatings, and nanoengineered materials. They say it may also be used to eliminate PFAS, or “forever chemicals,” though that work is at an early stage.The company recently received a grant to demonstrate a process for recycling critical materials from military depots to produce aerospace and defense products, creating a new value stream for these materials that would otherwise deteriorate or go to landfill. That work is consistent with the company’s motto, “We take nothing from the ground and put nothing into the ground.”The company’s additive division recently received a $23.4 Defense Production Act grant “that will enable us to double processing capacity in the next three years,” Ullal says. “The next step is to scale battery materials production to the tens of thousands of tons per year. At this point, it’s a scale-up of known processes, and we just need to execute. The idea of creating a circular economy is near and dear to us because that’s how we’ve built this company and that’s how we generate value: addressing our U.S. national security concerns and protecting the planet as well.” More

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      in Environment

      Streamlining data collection for improved salmon population management

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      Sara Beery came to MIT as an assistant professor in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) eager to focus on ecological challenges. She has fashioned her research career around the opportunity to apply her expertise in computer vision, machine learning, and data science to tackle real-world issues in conservation and sustainability. Beery was drawn to the Institute’s commitment to “computing for the planet,” and set out to bring her methods to global-scale environmental and biodiversity monitoring.In the Pacific Northwest, salmon have a disproportionate impact on the health of their ecosystems, and their complex reproductive needs have attracted Beery’s attention. Each year, millions of salmon embark on a migration to spawn. Their journey begins in freshwater stream beds where the eggs hatch. Young salmon fry (newly hatched salmon) make their way to the ocean, where they spend several years maturing to adulthood. As adults, the salmon return to the streams where they were born in order to spawn, ensuring the continuation of their species by depositing their eggs in the gravel of the stream beds. Both male and female salmon die shortly after supplying the river habitat with the next generation of salmon. Throughout their migration, salmon support a wide range of organisms in the ecosystems they pass through. For example, salmon bring nutrients like carbon and nitrogen from the ocean upriver, enhancing their availability to those ecosystems. In addition, salmon are key to many predator-prey relationships: They serve as a food source for various predators, such as bears, wolves, and birds, while helping to control other populations, like insects, through predation. After they die from spawning, the decomposing salmon carcasses also replenish valuable nutrients to the surrounding ecosystem. The migration of salmon not only sustains their own species but plays a critical role in the overall health of the rivers and oceans they inhabit. At the same time, salmon populations play an important role both economically and culturally in the region. Commercial and recreational salmon fisheries contribute significantly to the local economy. And for many Indigenous peoples in the Pacific northwest, salmon hold notable cultural value, as they have been central to their diets, traditions, and ceremonies. Monitoring salmon migrationIncreased human activity, including overfishing and hydropower development, together with habitat loss and climate change, have had a significant impact on salmon populations in the region. As a result, effective monitoring and management of salmon fisheries is important to ensure balance among competing ecological, cultural, and human interests. Accurately counting salmon during their seasonal migration to their natal river to spawn is essential in order to track threatened populations, assess the success of recovery strategies, guide fishing season regulations, and support the management of both commercial and recreational fisheries. Precise population data help decision-makers employ the best strategies to safeguard the health of the ecosystem while accommodating human needs. Monitoring salmon migration is a labor-intensive and inefficient undertaking.Beery is currently leading a research project that aims to streamline salmon monitoring using cutting-edge computer vision methods. This project fits within Beery’s broader research interest, which focuses on the interdisciplinary space between artificial intelligence, the natural world, and sustainability. Its relevance to fisheries management made it a good fit for funding from MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS). Beery’s 2023 J-WAFS seed grant was the first research funding she was awarded since joining the MIT faculty.  Historically, monitoring efforts relied on humans to manually count salmon from riverbanks using eyesight. In the past few decades, underwater sonar systems have been implemented to aid in counting the salmon. These sonar systems are essentially underwater video cameras, but they differ in that they use acoustics instead of light sensors to capture the presence of a fish. Use of this method requires people to set up a tent alongside the river to count salmon based on the output of a sonar camera that is hooked up to a laptop. While this system is an improvement to the original method of monitoring salmon by eyesight, it still relies significantly on human effort and is an arduous and time-consuming process. Automating salmon monitoring is necessary for better management of salmon fisheries. “We need these technological tools,” says Beery. “We can’t keep up with the demand of monitoring and understanding and studying these really complex ecosystems that we work in without some form of automation.”In order to automate counting of migrating salmon populations in the Pacific Northwest, the project team, including Justin Kay, a PhD student in EECS, has been collecting data in the form of videos from sonar cameras at different rivers. The team annotates a subset of the data to train the computer vision system to autonomously detect and count the fish as they migrate. Kay describes the process of how the model counts each migrating fish: “The computer vision algorithm is designed to locate a fish in the frame, draw a box around it, and then track it over time. If a fish is detected on one side of the screen and leaves on the other side of the screen, then we count it as moving upstream.” On rivers where the team has created training data for the system, it has produced strong results, with only 3 to 5 percent counting error. This is well below the target that the team and partnering stakeholders set of no more than a 10 percent counting error. Testing and deployment: Balancing human effort and use of automationThe researchers’ technology is being deployed to monitor the migration of salmon on the newly restored Klamath River. Four dams on the river were recently demolished, making it the largest dam removal project in U.S. history. The dams came down after a more than 20-year-long campaign to remove them, which was led by Klamath tribes, in collaboration with scientists, environmental organizations, and commercial fishermen. After the removal of the dams, 240 miles of the river now flow freely and nearly 800 square miles of habitat are accessible to salmon. Beery notes the almost immediate regeneration of salmon populations in the Klamath River: “I think it was within eight days of the dam coming down, they started seeing salmon actually migrate upriver beyond the dam.” In a collaboration with California Trout, the team is currently processing new data to adapt and create a customized model that can then be deployed to help count the newly migrating salmon.One challenge with the system revolves around training the model to accurately count the fish in unfamiliar environments with variations such as riverbed features, water clarity, and lighting conditions. These factors can significantly alter how the fish appear on the output of a sonar camera and confuse the computer model. When deployed in new rivers where no data have been collected before, like the Klamath, the performance of the system degrades and the margin of error increases substantially to 15-20 percent. The researchers constructed an automatic adaptation algorithm within the system to overcome this challenge and create a scalable system that can be deployed to any site without human intervention. This self-initializing technology works to automatically calibrate to the new conditions and environment to accurately count the migrating fish. In testing, the automatic adaptation algorithm was able to reduce the counting error down to the 10 to 15 percent range. The improvement in counting error with the self-initializing function means that the technology is closer to being deployable to new locations without much additional human effort. Enabling real-time management with the “Fishbox”Another challenge faced by the research team was the development of an efficient data infrastructure. In order to run the computer vision system, the video produced by sonar cameras must be delivered via the cloud or by manually mailing hard drives from a river site to the lab. These methods have notable drawbacks: a cloud-based approach is limited due to lack of internet connectivity in remote river site locations, and shipping the data introduces problems of delay. Instead of relying on these methods, the team has implemented a power-efficient computer, coined the “Fishbox,” that can be used in the field to perform the processing. The Fishbox consists of a small, lightweight computer with optimized software that fishery managers can plug into their existing laptops and sonar cameras. The system is then capable of running salmon counting models directly at the sonar sites without the need for internet connectivity. This allows managers to make hour-by-hour decisions, supporting more responsive, real-time management of salmon populations.Community developmentThe team is also working to bring a community together around monitoring for salmon fisheries management in the Pacific Northwest. “It’s just pretty exciting to have stakeholders who are enthusiastic about getting access to [our technology] as we get it to work and having a tighter integration and collaboration with them,” says Beery. “I think particularly when you’re working on food and water systems, you need direct collaboration to help facilitate impact, because you’re ensuring that what you develop is actually serving the needs of the people and organizations that you are helping to support.”This past June, Beery’s lab organized a workshop in Seattle that convened nongovernmental organizations, tribes, and state and federal departments of fish and wildlife to discuss the use of automated sonar systems to monitor and manage salmon populations. Kay notes that the workshop was an “awesome opportunity to have everybody sharing different ways that they’re using sonar and thinking about how the automated methods that we’re building could fit into that workflow.” The discussion continues now via a shared Slack channel created by the team, with over 50 participants. Convening this group is a significant achievement, as many of these organizations would not otherwise have had an opportunity to come together and collaborate. Looking forwardAs the team continues to tune the computer vision system, refine their technology, and engage with diverse stakeholders — from Indigenous communities to fishery managers — the project is poised to make significant improvements to the efficiency and accuracy of salmon monitoring and management in the region. And as Beery advances the work of her MIT group, the J-WAFS seed grant is helping to keep challenges such as fisheries management in her sights.  “The fact that the J-WAFS seed grant existed here at MIT enabled us to continue to work on this project when we moved here,” comments Beery, adding “it also expanded the scope of the project and allowed us to maintain active collaboration on what I think is a really important and impactful project.” As J-WAFS marks its 10th anniversary this year, the program aims to continue supporting and encouraging MIT faculty to pursue innovative projects that aim to advance knowledge and create practical solutions with real-world impacts on global water and food system challenges.  More

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      in Energy

      3 Questions: What the laws of physics tell us about CO2 removal

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      Human activities continue to pump billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year, raising global temperatures and driving extreme weather events. As countries grapple with climate impacts and ways to significantly reduce carbon emissions, there have been various efforts to advance carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technologies that directly remove carbon dioxide from the air and sequester it for long periods of time.Unlike carbon capture and storage technologies, which are designed to remove carbon dioxide at point sources such as fossil-fuel plants, CDR aims to remove carbon dioxide molecules that are already circulating in the atmosphere.A new report by the American Physical Society and led by an MIT physicist provides an overview of the major experimental CDR approaches and determines their fundamental physical limits. The report focuses on methods that have the biggest potential for removing carbon dioxide, at the scale of gigatons per year, which is the magnitude that would be required to have a climate-stabilizing impact.The new report was commissioned by the American Physical Society’s Panel on Public Affairs, and appeared last week in the journal PRX. The report was chaired by MIT professor of physics Washington Taylor, who spoke with MIT News about CDR’s physical limitations and why it’s worth pursuing in tandem with global efforts to reduce carbon emissions.Q: What motivated you to look at carbon dioxide removal systems from a physical science perspective?A: The number one thing driving climate change is the fact that we’re taking carbon that has been stuck in the ground for 100 million years, and putting it in the atmosphere, and that’s causing warming. In the last few years there’s been a lot of interest both by the government and private entities in finding technologies to directly remove the CO2 from the air.How to manage atmospheric carbon is the critical question in dealing with our impact on Earth’s climate. So, it’s very important for us to understand whether we can affect the carbon levels not just by changing our emissions profile but also by directly taking carbon out of the atmosphere. Physics has a lot to say about this because the possibilities are very strongly constrained by thermodynamics, mass issues, and things like that.Q: What carbon dioxide removal methods did you evaluate?A: They’re all at an early stage. It’s kind of the Wild West out there in terms of the different ways in which companies are proposing to remove carbon from the atmosphere. In this report, we break down CDR processes into two classes: cyclic and once-through.Imagine we are in a boat that has a hole in the hull and is rapidly taking on water. Of course, we want to plug the hole as quickly as we can. But even once we have fixed the hole, we need to get the water out so we aren’t in danger of sinking or getting swamped. And this is particularly urgent if we haven’t completely fixed the hole so we still have a slow leak. Now, imagine we have a couple of options for how to get the water out so we don’t sink.The first is a sponge that we can use to absorb water, that we can then squeeze out and reuse. That’s a cyclic process in the sense that we have some material that we’re using over and over. There are cyclic CDR processes like chemical “direct air capture” (DAC), which acts basically like a sponge. You set up a big system with fans that blow air past some material that captures carbon dioxide. When the material is saturated, you close off the system and then use energy to essentially squeeze out the carbon and store it in a deep repository. Then you can reuse the material, in a cyclic process.The second class of approaches is what we call “once-through.” In the boat analogy, it would be as if you try to fix the leak using cartons of paper towels. You let them saturate and then throw them overboard, and you use each roll once.There are once-through CDR approaches, like enhanced rock weathering, that are designed to accelerate a natural process, by which certain rocks, when exposed to air, will absorb carbon from the atmosphere. Worldwide, this natural rock weathering is estimated to remove about 1 gigaton of carbon each year. “Enhanced rock weathering” is a CDR approach where you would dig up a lot of this rock, grind it up really small, to less than the width of a human hair, to get the process to happen much faster. The idea is, you dig up something, spread it out, and absorb CO2 in one go.The key difference between these two processes is that the cyclic process is subject to the second law of thermodynamics and there’s an energy constraint. You can set an actual limit from physics, saying any cyclic process is going to take a certain amount of energy, and that cannot be avoided. For example, we find that for cyclic direct-air-capture (DAC) plants, based on second law limits, the absolute minimum amount of energy you would need to capture a gigaton of carbon is comparable to the total yearly electric energy consumption of the state of Virginia. Systems currently under development use at least three to 10 times this much energy on a per ton basis (and capture tens of thousands, not billions, of tons). Such systems also need to move a lot of air; the air that would need to pass through a DAC system to capture a gigaton of CO2 is comparable to the amount of air that passes through all the air cooling systems on the planet.On the other hand, if you have a once-through process, you could in some respects avoid the energy constraint, but now you’ve got a materials constraint due to the central laws of chemistry. For once-through processes like enhanced rock weathering, that means that if you want to capture a gigaton of CO2, roughly speaking, you’re going to need a billion tons of rock.So, to capture gigatons of carbon through engineered methods requires tremendous amounts of physical material, air movement, and energy. On the other hand, everything we’re doing to put that CO2 in the atmosphere is extensive too, so large-scale emissions reductions face comparable challenges.Q: What does the report conclude, in terms of whether and how to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere?A: Our initial prejudice was, CDR is just going to take so much energy, and there’s no way around that because of the second law of thermodynamics, regardless of the method.But as we discussed, there is this nuance about cyclic versus once-through systems. And there are two points of view that we ended up threading a needle between. One is the view that CDR is a silver bullet, and we’ll just do CDR and not worry about emissions — we’ll just suck it all out of the atmosphere. And that’s not the case. It will be really expensive, and will take a lot of energy and materials to do large-scale CDR. But there’s another view, where people say, don’t even think about CDR. Even thinking about CDR will compromise our efforts toward emissions reductions. The report comes down somewhere in the middle, saying that CDR is not a magic bullet, but also not a no-go.If we are serious about managing climate change, we will likely want substantial CDR in addition to aggressive emissions reductions. The report concludes that research and development on CDR methods should be selectively and prudently pursued despite the expected cost and energy and material requirements.At a policy level, the main message is that we need an economic and policy framework that incentivizes emissions reductions and CDR in a common framework; this would naturally allow the market to optimize climate solutions. Since in many cases it is much easier and cheaper to cut emissions than it will likely ever be to remove atmospheric carbon, clearly understanding the challenges of CDR should help motivate rapid emissions reductions.For me, I’m optimistic in the sense that scientifically we understand what it will take to reduce emissions and to use CDR to bring CO2 levels down to a slightly lower level. Now, it’s really a societal and economic problem. I think humanity has the potential to solve these problems. I hope that we can find common ground so that we can take actions as a society that will benefit both humanity and the broader ecosystems on the planet, before we end up having bigger problems than we already have.  More

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      in Energy

      Smart carbon dioxide removal yields economic and environmental benefits

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      Last year the Earth exceeded 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming above preindustrial times, a threshold beyond which wildfires, droughts, floods, and other climate impacts are expected to escalate in frequency, intensity, and lethality. To cap global warming at 1.5 C and avert that scenario, the nearly 200 signatory nations of the Paris Agreement on climate change will need to not only dramatically lower their greenhouse gas emissions, but also take measures to remove carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere and durably store it at or below the Earth’s surface.Past analyses of the climate mitigation potential, costs, benefits, and drawbacks of different carbon dioxide removal (CDR) options have focused primarily on three strategies: bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS), in which CO2-absorbing plant matter is converted into fuels or directly burned to generate energy, with some of the plant’s carbon content captured and then stored safely and permanently; afforestation/reforestation, in which CO2-absorbing trees are planted in large numbers; and direct air carbon capture and storage (DACCS), a technology that captures and separates CO2 directly from ambient air, and injects it into geological reservoirs or incorporates it into durable products. To provide a more comprehensive and actionable analysis of CDR, a new study by researchers at the MIT Center for Sustainability Science and Strategy (CS3) first expands the option set to include biochar (charcoal produced from plant matter and stored in soil) and enhanced weathering (EW) (spreading finely ground rock particles on land to accelerate storage of CO2 in soil and water). The study then evaluates portfolios of all five options — in isolation and in combination — to assess their capability to meet the 1.5 C goal, and their potential impacts on land, energy, and policy costs.The study appears in the journal Environmental Research Letters. Aided by their global multi-region, multi-sector Economic Projection and Policy Analysis (EPPA) model, the MIT CS3 researchers produce three key findings.First, the most cost-effective, low-impact strategy that policymakers can take to achieve global net-zero emissions — an essential step in meeting the 1.5 C goal — is to diversify their CDR portfolio, rather than rely on any single option. This approach minimizes overall cropland and energy consumption, and negative impacts such as increased food insecurity and decreased energy supplies.By diversifying across multiple CDR options, the highest CDR deployment of around 31.5 gigatons of CO2 per year is achieved in 2100, while also proving the most cost-effective net-zero strategy. The study identifies BECCS and biochar as most cost-competitive in removing CO2 from the atmosphere, followed by EW, with DACCS as uncompetitive due to high capital and energy requirements. While posing logistical and other challenges, biochar and EW have the potential to improve soil quality and productivity across 45 percent of all croplands by 2100.“Diversifying CDR portfolios is the most cost-effective net-zero strategy because it avoids relying on a single CDR option, thereby reducing and redistributing negative impacts on agriculture, forestry, and other land uses, as well as on the energy sector,” says Solene Chiquier, lead author of the study who was a CS3 postdoc during its preparation.The second finding: There is no optimal CDR portfolio that will work well at global and national levels. The ideal CDR portfolio for a particular region will depend on local technological, economic, and geophysical conditions. For example, afforestation and reforestation would be of great benefit in places like Brazil, Latin America, and Africa, by not only sequestering carbon in more acreage of protected forest but also helping to preserve planetary well-being and human health.“In designing a sustainable, cost-effective CDR portfolio, it is important to account for regional availability of agricultural, energy, and carbon-storage resources,” says Sergey Paltsev, CS3 deputy director, MIT Energy Initiative senior research scientist, and supervising co-author of the study. “Our study highlights the need for enhancing knowledge about local conditions that favor some CDR options over others.”Finally, the MIT CS3 researchers show that delaying large-scale deployment of CDR portfolios could be very costly, leading to considerably higher carbon prices across the globe — a development sure to deter the climate mitigation efforts needed to achieve the 1.5 C goal. They recommend near-term implementation of policy and financial incentives to help fast-track those efforts. More

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      in Environment

      Building resiliency

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      Several years ago, the residents of a manufactured-home neighborhood in southeast suburban Houston, not far from the Buffalo Bayou, took a major step in dealing with climate problems: They bought the land under their homes. Then they installed better drainage and developed strategies to share expertise and tools for home repairs. The result? The neighborhood made it through Hurricane Harvey in 2017 and a winter freeze in 2021 without major damage.The neighborhood is part of a U.S. movement toward the Resident Owned Community (ROC) model for manufactured home parks. Many people in manufactured homes — mobile homes — do not own the land under them. But if the residents of a manufactured-home park can form an ROC, they can take action to adapt to climate risks — and ease the threat of eviction. With an ROC, manufactured-home residents can be there to stay.That speaks to a larger issue: In cities, lower-income residents are often especially vulnerable to natural hazards, such as flooding, extreme heat, and wildfire. But efforts aimed at helping cities as a whole withstand these disasters can lead to interventions that displace already-disadvantaged residents — by turning a low-lying neighborhood into a storm buffer, for instance.“The global climate crisis has very differential effects on cities, and neighborhoods within cities,” says Lawrence Vale, a professor of urban studies at MIT and co-author of a new book on the subject, “The Equitably Resilient City,” published by the MIT Press and co-authored with Zachary B. Lamb PhD ’18, an assistant professor at the University of California at Berkeley.In the book, the scholars delve into 12 case studies from around the globe which, they believe, have it both ways: Low- and middle-income communities have driven climate progress through tangible built projects, while also keeping people from being displaced, and indeed helping them participate in local governance and neighborhood decision-making.“We can either dive into despair about climate issues, or think they’re solvable and ask what it takes to succeed in a more equitable way,” says Vale, who is the Ford Professor of Urban Design and Planning at MIT. “This book is asking how people look at problems more holistically — to show how environmental impacts are integrated with their livelihoods, with feeling they can have security from displacement, and feeling they’re not going to be displaced, with being empowered to share in the governance where they live.”As Lamb notes, “Pursuing equitable urban climate adaptation requires both changes in the physical built environment of cities and innovations in institutions and governance practices to address deep-seated causes of inequality.”Twelve projects, four elementsResearch for “The Equitably Resilient City” began with exploration of about 200 potential cases, and ultimately focused on 12 projects from around the globe, including the U.S., Brazil, Thailand, and France. Vale and Lamb, coordinating with locally-based research teams, visited these diverse sites and conducted interviews in nine languages.All 12 projects work on multiple levels at once: They are steps toward environmental progress that also help local communities in civic and economic terms. The book uses the acronym LEGS (“livelihood, environment, governance, and security”) to encapsulate this need to make equitable progress on four different fronts.“Doing one of those things well is worth recognition, and doing all of them well is exciting,” Vale says. “It’s important to understand not just what these communities did, but how they did it and whose views were involved. These 12 cases are not a random sample. The book looks for people who are partially succeeding at difficult things in difficult circumstances.”One case study is set in São Paolo, Brazil, where low-income residents of a hilly favela benefitted from new housing in the area on undeveloped land that is less prone to slides. In San Juan, Puerto Rico, residents of low-lying neighborhoods abutting a water channel formed a durable set of community groups to create a fairer solution to flooding: Although the channel needed to be re-widened, the local coalition insisted on limiting displacement, supporting local livelihoods and improving environmental conditions and public space.“There is a backlash to older practices,” Vale says, referring to the large-scale urban planning and infrastructure projects of the mid-20th century, which often ignored community input. “People saw what happened during the urban renewal era and said, ‘You’re not going to do that to us again.’”Indeed, one through-line in “The Equitably Resilient City” is that cities, like all places, can be contested political terrain. Often, solid solutions emerge when local groups organize, advocate for new solutions, and eventually gain enough traction to enact them.“Every one of our examples and cases has probably 15 or 20 years of activity behind it, as well as engagements with a much deeper history,” Vale says. “They’re all rooted in a very often troubled [political] context. And yet these are places that have made progress possible.”Think locally, adapt anywhereAnother motif of “The Equitably Resilient City” is that local progress matters greatly, for a few reasons — including the value of having communities develop projects that meet their own needs, based on their input. Vale and Lamb are interested in projects even if they are very small-scale, and devote one chapter of the book to the Paris OASIS program, which has developed a series of cleverly designed, heavily tree-dotted school playgrounds across Paris. These projects provide environmental education opportunities and help mitigate flooding and urban heat while adding CO2-harnessing greenery to the cityscape.An individual park, by itself, can only do so much, but the concept behind it can be adopted by anyone.“This book is mostly centered on local projects rather than national schemes,” Vale says. “The hope is they serve as an inspiration for people to adapt to their own situations.”After all, the urban geography and governance of places such as Paris or São Paulo will differ widely. But efforts to make improvements to public open space or to well-located inexpensive housing stock applies in cities across the world.Similarly, the authors devote a chapter to work in the Cully neighborhood in Portland, Oregon, where community leaders have instituted a raft of urban environmental improvements while creating and preserving more affordable housing. The idea in the Cully area, as in all these cases, is to make places more resistant to climate change while enhancing them as good places to live for those already there.“Climate adaptation is going to mobilize enormous public and private resources to reshape cities across the globe,” Lamb notes. “These cases suggest pathways where those resources can make cities both more resilient in the face of climate change and more equitable. In fact, these projects show how making cities more equitable can be part of making them more resilient.”Other scholars have praised the book. Eric Klinenberg, director of New York University’s Institute for Public Knowledge has called it “at once scholarly, constructive, and uplifting, a reminder that better, more just cities remain within our reach.”Vale also teaches some of the book’s concepts in his classes, finding that MIT students, wherever they are from, enjoy the idea of thinking creatively about climate resilience.“At MIT, students want to find ways of applying technical skills to urgent global challenges,” Vale says. “I do think there are many opportunities, especially at a time of climate crisis. We try to highlight some of the solutions that are out there. Give us an opportunity, and we’ll show you what a place can be.” More

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      in Energy

      Toward sustainable decarbonization of aviation in Latin America

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      According to the International Energy Agency, aviation accounts for about 2 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions, and aviation emissions are expected to double by mid-century as demand for domestic and international air travel rises. To sharply reduce emissions in alignment with the Paris Agreement’s long-term goal to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius, the International Air Transport Association (IATA) has set a goal to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. Which raises the question: Are there technologically feasible and economically viable strategies to reach that goal within the next 25 years?To begin to address that question, a team of researchers at the MIT Center for Sustainability Science and Strategy (CS3) and the MIT Laboratory for Aviation and the Environment has spent the past year analyzing aviation decarbonization options in Latin America, where air travel is expected to more than triple by 2050 and thereby double today’s aviation-related emissions in the region.Chief among those options is the development and deployment of sustainable aviation fuel. Currently produced from low- and zero-carbon sources (feedstock) including municipal waste and non-food crops, and requiring practically no alteration of aircraft systems or refueling infrastructure, sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) has the potential to perform just as well as petroleum-based jet fuel with as low as 20 percent of its carbon footprint.Focused on Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico and Peru, the researchers assessed SAF feedstock availability, the costs of corresponding SAF pathways, and how SAF deployment would likely impact fuel use, prices, emissions, and aviation demand in each country. They also explored how efficiency improvements and market-based mechanisms could help the region to reach decarbonization targets. The team’s findings appear in a CS3 Special Report.SAF emissions, costs, and sourcesUnder an ambitious emissions mitigation scenario designed to cap global warming at 1.5 C and raise the rate of SAF use in Latin America to 65 percent by 2050, the researchers projected aviation emissions to be reduced by about 60 percent in 2050 compared to a scenario in which existing climate policies are not strengthened. To achieve net-zero emissions by 2050, other measures would be required, such as improvements in operational and air traffic efficiencies, airplane fleet renewal, alternative forms of propulsion, and carbon offsets and removals.As of 2024, jet fuel prices in Latin America are around $0.70 per liter. Based on the current availability of feedstocks, the researchers projected SAF costs within the six countries studied to range from $1.11 to $2.86 per liter. They cautioned that increased fuel prices could affect operating costs of the aviation sector and overall aviation demand unless strategies to manage price increases are implemented.Under the 1.5 C scenario, the total cumulative capital investments required to build new SAF producing plants between 2025 and 2050 were estimated at $204 billion for the six countries (ranging from $5 billion in Ecuador to $84 billion in Brazil). The researchers identified sugarcane- and corn-based ethanol-to-jet fuel, palm oil- and soybean-based hydro-processed esters and fatty acids as the most promising feedstock sources in the near term for SAF production in Latin America.“Our findings show that SAF offers a significant decarbonization pathway, which must be combined with an economy-wide emissions mitigation policy that uses market-based mechanisms to offset the remaining emissions,” says Sergey Paltsev, lead author of the report, MIT CS3 deputy director, and senior research scientist at the MIT Energy Initiative.RecommendationsThe researchers concluded the report with recommendations for national policymakers and aviation industry leaders in Latin America.They stressed that government policy and regulatory mechanisms will be needed to create sufficient conditions to attract SAF investments in the region and make SAF commercially viable as the aviation industry decarbonizes operations. Without appropriate policy frameworks, SAF requirements will affect the cost of air travel. For fuel producers, stable, long-term-oriented policies and regulations will be needed to create robust supply chains, build demand for establishing economies of scale, and develop innovative pathways for producing SAF.Finally, the research team recommended a region-wide collaboration in designing SAF policies. A unified decarbonization strategy among all countries in the region will help ensure competitiveness, economies of scale, and achievement of long-term carbon emissions-reduction goals.“Regional feedstock availability and costs make Latin America a potential major player in SAF production,” says Angelo Gurgel, a principal research scientist at MIT CS3 and co-author of the study. “SAF requirements, combined with government support mechanisms, will ensure sustainable decarbonization while enhancing the region’s connectivity and the ability of disadvantaged communities to access air transport.”Financial support for this study was provided by LATAM Airlines and Airbus. More

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      in Energy

      Study shows how households can cut energy costs

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      Many people around the globe are living in energy poverty, meaning they spend at least 8 percent of their annual household income on energy. Addressing this problem is not simple, but an experiment by MIT researchers shows that giving people better data about their energy use, plus some coaching on the subject, can lead them to substantially reduce their consumption and costs.The experiment, based in Amsterdam, resulted in households cutting their energy expenses in half, on aggregate — a savings big enough to move three-quarters of them out of energy poverty.“Our energy coaching project as a whole showed a 75 percent success rate at alleviating energy poverty,” says Joseph Llewellyn, a researcher with MIT’s Senseable City Lab and co-author of a newly published paper detailing the experiment’s results.“Energy poverty afflicts families all over the world. With empirical evidence on which policies work, governments could focus their efforts more effectively,” says Fábio Duarte, associate director of MIT’s Senseable City Lab, and another co-author of the paper.The paper, “Assessing the impact of energy coaching with smart technology interventions to alleviate energy poverty,” appears today in Nature Scientific Reports.The authors are Llewellyn, who is also a researcher at the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions (AMS) and the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm; Titus Venverloo, a research fellow at the MIT Senseable City Lab and AMS; Fábio Duarte, who is also a principal researcher MIT’s Senseable City Lab; Carlo Ratti, director of the Senseable City Lab; Cecilia Katzeff; Fredrik Johansson; and Daniel Pargman of the KTH Royal Institute of Technology.The researchers developed the study after engaging with city officials in Amsterdam. In the Netherlands, about 550,000 households, or 7 percent of the population, are considered to be in energy poverty; in the European Union, that figure is about 50 million. In the U.S., separate research has shown that about three in 10 households report trouble paying energy bills.To conduct the experiment, the researchers ran two versions of an energy coaching intervention. In one version, 67 households received one report on their energy usage, along with coaching about how to increase energy efficiency. In the other version, 50 households received those things as well as a smart device giving them real-time updates on their energy consumption. (All households also received some modest energy-savings improvements at the outset, such as additional insulation.)Across the two groups, homes typically reduced monthly consumption of electricity by 33 percent and gas by 42 percent. They lowered their bills by 53 percent, on aggregate, and the percentage of income they spent on energy dropped from 10.1 percent to 5.3 percent.What were these households doing differently? Some of the biggest behavioral changes included things such as only heating rooms that were in use and unplugging devices not being used. Both of those changes save energy, but their benefits were not always understood by residents before they received energy coaching.“The range of energy literacy was quite wide from one home to the next,” Llewellyn says. “And when I went somewhere as an energy coach, it was never to moralize about energy use. I never said, ‘Oh, you’re using way too much.’ It was always working on it with the households, depending on what people need for their homes.”Intriguingly, the homes receiving the small devices that displayed real-time energy data only tended to use them for three or four weeks following a coaching visit. After that, people seemed to lose interest in very frequent monitoring of their energy use. And yet, a few weeks of consulting the devices tended to be long enough to get people to change their habits in a lasting way.“Our research shows that smart devices need to be accompanied by a close understanding of what drives families to change their behaviors,” Venverloo says.As the researchers acknowledge, working with consumers to reduce their energy consumption is just one way to help people escape energy poverty. Other “structural” factors that can help include lower energy prices and more energy-efficient buildings.On the latter note, the current paper has given rise to a new experiment Llewellyn is developing with Amsterdam officials, to examine the benefits of retrofitting residental buildings to lower energy costs. In that case, local policymakers are trying to work out how to fund the retrofitting in such a way that landlords do not simply pass those costs on to tenants.“We don’t want a household to save money on their energy bills if it also means the rent increases, because then we’ve just displaced expenses from one item to another,” Llewellyn says.Households can also invest in products like better insulation themselves, for windows or heating components, although for low-income households, finding the money to pay for such things may not be trivial. That is especially the case, Llewellyn suggests, because energy costs can seem “invisible,” and a lower priority, than feeding and clothing a family.“It’s a big upfront cost for a household that does not have 100 Euros to spend,” Llewellyn says. Compared to paying for other necessities, he notes, “Energy is often the thing that tends to fall last on their list. Energy is always going to be this invisible thing that hides behind the walls, and it’s not easy to change that.”  More

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      in Environment

      Q&A: Examining American attitudes on global climate policies

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      Does the United States have a “moral responsibility” for providing aid to poor nations — which have a significantly smaller carbon footprint and face catastrophic climate events at a much higher rate than wealthy countries?A study published Dec. 11 in Climatic Change explores U.S. public opinion on global climate policies considering our nation’s historic role as a leading contributor of carbon emissions. The randomized, experimental survey specifically investigates American attitudes toward such a moral responsibility. The work was led by MIT Professor Evan Lieberman, the Total Chair on Contemporary African Politics and director of the MIT Center for International Studies, and Volha Charnysh, the Ford Career Development Associate Professor of Political Science, and was co-authored with MIT political science PhD student Jared Kalow and University of Pennsylvania postdoc Erin Walk PhD ’24. Here, Lieberman describes the team’s research and insights, and offers recommendations that could result in more effective climate advocacy.Q: What are the key findings — and any surprises — of your recent work on climate attitudes among the U.S. population?A: A big question at the COP29 Climate talks in Baku, Azerbaijan was: Who will pay the trillions of dollars needed to help lower-income countries adapt to climate change? During past meetings, global leaders have come to an increasing consensus that the wealthiest countries should pay, but there has been little follow-through on commitments. In countries like the United States, popular opinion about such policies can weigh heavily on politicians’ minds, as citizens focus on their own challenges at home.Prime Minister Gaston Browne of Antigua and Barbuda is one of many who views such transfers as a matter of moral responsibility, explaining that many rich countries see climate finance as “a random act of charity … not recognizing that they have a moral obligation to provide funding, especially the historical emitters and even those who currently have large emissions.”In our study, we set out to measure American attitudes towards climate-related foreign aid, and explicitly to test the impact of this particular moral responsibility narrative. We did this on an experimental basis, so subjects were randomly assigned to receive different messages.One message emphasized what we call a “climate justice” frame, and it argued that Americans should contribute to helping poor countries because of the United States’ disproportionate role in the emissions of greenhouse gasses that have led to global warming. That message had a positive impact on the extent to which citizens supported the use of foreign aid for climate adaptation in poor countries. However, when we looked at who was actually moved by the message, we found that the effect was larger and statistically significant only among Democrats, but not among Republicans.We were surprised that a message emphasizing solidarity, the idea that “we are all in this together,” had no overall effect on citizen attitudes, Democrats or Republicans. Q: What are your recommendations toward addressing the attitudes on global climate policies within the U.S.?A: First, given limited budgets and attention for communications campaigns, our research certainly suggests that emphasizing a bit of blaming and shaming is more powerful than more diffuse messages of shared responsibility.But our research also emphasized how critically important it is to find new ways to communicate with Republicans about climate change and about foreign aid. Republicans were overwhelmingly less supportive of climate aid and yet even from that low baseline, a message that moved Democrats had a much more mixed reception among Republicans. Researchers and those working on the front lines of climate communications need to do more to better understand Republican perspectives. Younger Republicans, for example, might be more movable on key climate policies.Q: With an incoming Trump administration, what are some of the specific hurdles and/or opportunities we face in garnering U.S. public support for international climate negotiations?A: Not only did Trump demonstrate his disdain for international action on climate change by withdrawing from the Paris agreement during his first term in office, but he has indicated his intention to double down on such strategies in his second term. And the idea that he would support assistance for the world’s poorest countries harmed by climate change? This seems unlikely. Because we find Republican public opinion so firmly in line with these perspectives, frankly, it is hard to be optimistic.Those Americans concerned with the effects of climate change may need to look to state-level, non-government, corporate, and more global organizations to support climate justice efforts.Q: Are there any other takeaways you’d like to share?A: Those working in the climate change area may need to rethink how we talk and message about the challenges the world faces. Right now, almost anything that sounds like “climate change” is likely to be rejected by Republican leaders and large segments of American society. Our approach of experimenting with different types of messages is a relatively low-cost strategy for identifying more promising strategies, targeted at Americans and at citizens in other wealthy countries.But our study, in line with other work, also demonstrates that partisanship — identifying as a Republican or Democrat — is by far the strongest predictor of attitudes toward climate aid. While climate justice messaging can move attitudes slightly, the effects are still modest relative to the contributions of party identification itself. Just as Republican party elites were once persuaded to take leadership in the global fight against HIV and AIDS, a similar challenge lies ahead for climate aid. More