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      in Energy

      Explained: Carbon credits

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      One of the most contentious issues faced at the 28th Conference of Parties (COP28) on climate change last December was a proposal for a U.N.-sanctioned market for trading carbon credits. Such a mechanism would allow nations and industries making slow progress in reducing their own carbon emissions to pay others to take emissions-reducing measures, such as improving energy efficiency or protecting forests.

      Such trading systems have already grown to a multibillion-dollar market despite a lack of clear international regulations to define and monitor the claimed emissions reductions. During weeks of feverish negotiations, some nations, including the U.S., advocated for a somewhat looser approach to regulations in the interests of getting a system in place quickly. Others, including the European Union, advocated much tighter regulation, in light of a history of questionable or even counterproductive projects of this kind in the past. In the end, no agreement was reached on the subject, which will be revisited at a later meeting.

      The concept seems simple enough: Offset emissions in one place by preventing or capturing an equal amount of emissions elsewhere. But implementing that idea has turned out to be far more complex and fraught with problems than many expected.

      For example, projects that aim to preserve a section of forest — which can remove carbon dioxide from the air and sequester it in the soil — face numerous issues. Will the preservation of one parcel just lead to the clearcutting of an adjacent parcel? Would the preserved land have been left uncut anyway? And what if it ends up being destroyed by wildfire, drought, or insect infestation — all of which are expected to become more likely with climate change?

      Similarly, projects that aim to capture carbon dioxide emissions and inject them into the ground are sometimes used to justify increasing the production of petroleum or natural gas, negating the intended climate mitigation of the process.

      Several experts at MIT now say that the system could be effective, at least in certain circumstances, but it must be thoroughly evaluated and regulated.

      Carbon removal, natural or mechanical

      Sergey Paltsev, deputy director of MIT’s Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, co-led a study and workshop last year that included policymakers, industry representatives, and researchers. They focused on one kind of carbon offsets, those based on natural climate solutions — restoration or preservation of natural systems that not only sequester carbon but also provide other benefits, such as greater biodiversity. “We find a lot of confusion and misperceptions and misinformation, even about how you define the term carbon credit or offset,” he says.

      He points out that there has been a lot of criticism of the whole idea of carbon offsets, “and that criticism is well-placed. I think that’s a very healthy conversation, to clarify what makes sense and what doesn’t make sense. What are the real actions versus what is greenwashing?”

      He says that government-mandated and managed carbon trading programs in some places, including British Columbia and parts of Europe, have been somewhat effective because they have clear standards in place, whereas unregulated carbon credit systems have often been abused.

      Charles Harvey, an MIT professor of civil and environmental engineering, should know, having been actively involved in both sides of the issue over the last two decades. He co-founded a company in 2008 that was the first private U.S. company to attempt to remove carbon dioxide from emissions on a commercial scale, a process called carbon capture and sequestration, or CCS. Such projects have been a major recipient of federal subsidies aimed at combatting climate change, but Harvey now says these are largely a waste of money and in most cases do not achieve their stated objective.

      In fact, he says that according to industry sources, as of 2021 more than 90 percent of CCS projects in the U.S. have been used for the production of more fossil fuels — oil and natural gas. Here’s how it works: Natural gas wells often produce methane mixed with carbon dioxide, which must be removed to produce a marketable natural gas. This carbon dioxide is then injected into oil wells to stimulate more production. So, the net effect is the creation of more total greenhouse gas emissions rather than less, explains Harvey, who recently received a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to explore CCS projects and whether they can be made to contribute to true emissions reductions.

      What went wrong with the ambitious startup CCS company Harvey co-founded? “What happened is that the prices of renewables and energy storage are now incredibly cheap,” he says. “It makes no sense to do this, ever, on power plants because honestly, fossil fuel power plants don’t even really make economic sense anymore.”

      Where does Harvey see potential for carbon credits to work? One possibility is the preservation or restoration of tropical peatlands, which he has received another grant to study. These are vast areas of permanently waterlogged land in which dead plant matter —and the carbon it contains — remains in place because the water prevents the normal decomposition processes that would otherwise release the stored carbon back into the air.

      While it is virtually impossible to quantify the amount of carbon stored in the soil of forest or farmland, in peatlands that’s easy to do because essentially all of the submerged material is carbon-based. Simply measuring changes in the elevation of such land, which can be done remotely by plane or satellite, gives a precise measure of how much carbon has been stored or released. When a patch of peat forest that has been clear-cut to build plantations or roads is reforested, the amount of carbon emissions that were prevented can be measured accurately.

      Because of that potential for accurate documentation, protecting or restoring peat bogs can also be a good way to achieve meaningful offsets for carbon emissions elsewhere, Harvey says. Rewetting a previously drained peat forest can immediately counteract the release of its stored carbon and can keep it there as long as it is not drained again — something that can be verified using satellite data.

      Paltsev adds that while such nature-based systems for countering carbon emissions can be a key component of addressing climate change, especially in very difficult-to-decarbonize industries such as aviation, carbon credits for such programs “shouldn’t be a replacement for our efforts at emissions reduction. It should be in addition.”

      Criteria for meaningful offsets

      John Sterman, the Jay W. Forrester Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management, has published a set of criteria for evaluating proposed carbon offset plans to make sure they would provide the benefits they claim. At present, “there’s no regulation, there’s no oversight” for carbon offsets, he says. “There have been many scandals over this.”

      For example, one company was providing what it claimed was certification for carbon offset projects but was found to have such lax standards that the claimed offsets were often not real. For example, there were multiple claims to protect the same piece of forest and claims to protect land that was already legally protected.

      Sterman’s proposed set of criteria goes by the acronym AVID+. “It stands for four principles that you have to meet in order for your offset to be legitimate: It has to be additional, verifiable, immediate, and durable,” he says. “And then I call it AVID+,” he adds, the “plus” being for plans that have additional benefits as well, such as improving health, creating jobs, or helping historically disadvantaged communities.

      Offsets can be useful, he says, for addressing especially hard-to-abate industries such as steel or cement manufacturing, or aviation. But it is essential to meet all four of the criteria, or else real emissions are not really being offset. For example, planting trees today, while often a good thing to do, would take decades to offset emissions going into the atmosphere now, where they may persist for centuries — so that fails to meet the “immediate” requirement.

      And protecting existing forests, while also desirable, is very hard to prove as being additional, because “that requires a counterfactual that you can never observe,” he says. “That’s where a lot of squirrely accounting and a lot of fraud comes in, because how do you know that the forest would have been cut down but for the offset?” In one well-documented case, he points out, a company tried to sell carbon offsets for a section of forest that was already an established nature preserve.

      Are there offsets that can meet all the criteria and provide real benefits in helping to address climate change? Yes, Sterman and Harvey say, but they need to be evaluated carefully.

      “My favorite example,” Sterman says, “is doing deep energy retrofits and putting solar panels on low-income housing.” These measures can help address the so-called landlord-tenant problem: If tenants typically pay the utility bills, landlords have little incentive to pay for efficiency improvements, and the tenants don’t have the capital to make such improvements on their own. “Policies that would make this possible are pretty good candidates for legitimate offsets, because they are additional — low-income households can’t afford to do it without assistance, so it’s not going to happen without a program. It’s verifiable, because you’ve got the utility bills pre and post.” They are also quite immediate, typically taking only a year or so to implement, and “they’re pretty durable,” he says.

      Another example is a recent plan in Alaska that allows cruise ships to offset the emissions caused by their trips by paying into a fund that provides subsidies for Alaskan citizens to install heat pumps in their homes, thus preventing emissions from wood or fossil fuel heating systems. “I think this is a pretty good candidate to meet the criteria, certainly a lot better than much of what’s being done today,” Sterman says.

      But eventually, what is really needed, the researchers agree, are real, enforceable standards. After COP28, carbon offsets are still allowed, Sterman says, “but there is still no widely accepted mandatory regulation. We’re still in the wild West.”

      Paltsev nevertheless sees reasons for optimism about nature-based carbon offset systems. For example, he says the aviation industry has recently agreed to implement a set of standards for offsetting their emissions, known as CORSIA, for carbon offsetting and reduction scheme for international aviation. “It’s a point for optimism,” he says, “because they issued very tough guidelines as to what projects are eligible and what projects are not.”

      He adds, “There is a solution if you want to find a good solution. It is doable, when there is a will and there is the need.” More

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      in Environment

      Gosha Geogdzhayev and Sadhana Lolla named 2024 Gates Cambridge Scholars

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      This article was updated on April 23 to reflect the promotion of Gosha Geogdzhayev from alternate to winner of the Gates Cambridge Scholarship.

      MIT seniors Gosha Geogdzhayev and Sadhana Lolla have won the prestigious Gates Cambridge Scholarship, which offers students an opportunity to pursue graduate study in the field of their choice at Cambridge University in the U.K.

      Established in 2000, Gates Cambridge offers full-cost post-graduate scholarships to outstanding applicants from countries outside of the U.K. The mission of Gates Cambridge is to build a global network of future leaders committed to improving the lives of others.

      Gosha Geogdzhayev

      Originally from New York City, Geogdzhayev is a senior majoring in physics with minors in mathematics and computer science. At Cambridge, Geogdzhayev intends to pursue an MPhil in quantitative climate and environmental science. He is interested in applying these subjects to climate science and intends to spend his career developing novel statistical methods for climate prediction.

      At MIT, Geogdzhayev researches climate emulators with Professor Raffaele Ferrari’s group in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences and is part of the “Bringing Computation to the Climate Challenge” Grand Challenges project. He is currently working on an operator-based emulator for the projection of climate extremes. Previously, Geogdzhayev studied the statistics of changing chaotic systems, work that has recently been published as a first-author paper.

      As a recipient of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA) Hollings Scholarship, Geogdzhayev has worked on bias correction methods for climate data at the NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory. He is the recipient of several other awards in the field of earth and atmospheric sciences, notably the American Meteorological Society Ward and Eileen Seguin Scholarship.

      Outside of research, Geogdzhayev enjoys writing poetry and is actively involved with his living community, Burton 1, for which he has previously served as floor chair.

      Sadhana Lolla

      Lolla, a senior from Clarksburg, Maryland, is majoring in computer science and minoring in mathematics and literature. At Cambridge, she will pursue an MPhil in technology policy.

      In the future, Lolla aims to lead conversations on deploying and developing technology for marginalized communities, such as the rural Indian village that her family calls home, while also conducting research in embodied intelligence.

      At MIT, Lolla conducts research on safe and trustworthy robotics and deep learning at the Distributed Robotics Laboratory with Professor Daniela Rus. Her research has spanned debiasing strategies for autonomous vehicles and accelerating robotic design processes. At Microsoft Research and Themis AI, she works on creating uncertainty-aware frameworks for deep learning, which has impacts across computational biology, language modeling, and robotics. She has presented her work at the Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) conference and the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML). 

      Outside of research, Lolla leads initiatives to make computer science education more accessible globally. She is an instructor for class 6.s191 (MIT Introduction to Deep Learning), one of the largest AI courses in the world, which reaches millions of students annually. She serves as the curriculum lead for Momentum AI, the only U.S. program that teaches AI to underserved students for free, and she has taught hundreds of students in Northern Scotland as part of the MIT Global Teaching Labs program.

      Lolla was also the director for xFair, MIT’s largest student-run career fair, and is an executive board member for Next Sing, where she works to make a cappella more accessible for students across musical backgrounds. In her free time, she enjoys singing, solving crossword puzzles, and baking. More

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      in Energy

      Generative AI for smart grid modeling

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      MIT’s Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) has been awarded $1,365,000 in funding from the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) to support its involvement with an innovative project, “Forming the Smart Grid Deployment Consortium (SGDC) and Expanding the HILLTOP+ Platform.”

      The grant was made available through ARC’s Appalachian Regional Initiative for Stronger Economies, which fosters regional economic transformation through multi-state collaboration.

      Led by Kalyan Veeramachaneni, research scientist and principal investigator at LIDS’ Data to AI Group, the project will focus on creating AI-driven generative models for customer load data. Veeramachaneni and colleagues will work alongside a team of universities and organizations led by Tennessee Tech University, including collaborators across Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Tennessee, to develop and deploy smart grid modeling services through the SGDC project.

      These generative models have far-reaching applications, including grid modeling and training algorithms for energy tech startups. When the models are trained on existing data, they create additional, realistic data that can augment limited datasets or stand in for sensitive ones. Stakeholders can then use these models to understand and plan for specific what-if scenarios far beyond what could be achieved with existing data alone. For example, generated data can predict the potential load on the grid if an additional 1,000 households were to adopt solar technologies, how that load might change throughout the day, and similar contingencies vital to future planning.

      The generative AI models developed by Veeramachaneni and his team will provide inputs to modeling services based on the HILLTOP+ microgrid simulation platform, originally prototyped by MIT Lincoln Laboratory. HILLTOP+ will be used to model and test new smart grid technologies in a virtual “safe space,” providing rural electric utilities with increased confidence in deploying smart grid technologies, including utility-scale battery storage. Energy tech startups will also benefit from HILLTOP+ grid modeling services, enabling them to develop and virtually test their smart grid hardware and software products for scalability and interoperability.

      The project aims to assist rural electric utilities and energy tech startups in mitigating the risks associated with deploying these new technologies. “This project is a powerful example of how generative AI can transform a sector — in this case, the energy sector,” says Veeramachaneni. “In order to be useful, generative AI technologies and their development have to be closely integrated with domain expertise. I am thrilled to be collaborating with experts in grid modeling, and working alongside them to integrate the latest and greatest from my research group and push the boundaries of these technologies.”

      “This project is testament to the power of collaboration and innovation, and we look forward to working with our collaborators to drive positive change in the energy sector,” says Satish Mahajan, principal investigator for the project at Tennessee Tech and a professor of electrical and computer engineering. Tennessee Tech’s Center for Rural Innovation director, Michael Aikens, adds, “Together, we are taking significant steps towards a more sustainable and resilient future for the Appalachian region.” More

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      in Energy

      With just a little electricity, MIT researchers boost common catalytic reactions

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      A simple technique that uses small amounts of energy could boost the efficiency of some key chemical processing reactions, by up to a factor of 100,000, MIT researchers report. These reactions are at the heart of petrochemical processing, pharmaceutical manufacturing, and many other industrial chemical processes.

      The surprising findings are reported today in the journal Science, in a paper by MIT graduate student Karl Westendorff, professors Yogesh Surendranath and Yuriy Roman-Leshkov, and two others.

      “The results are really striking,” says Surendranath, a professor of chemistry and chemical engineering. Rate increases of that magnitude have been seen before but in a different class of catalytic reactions known as redox half-reactions, which involve the gain or loss of an electron. The dramatically increased rates reported in the new study “have never been observed for reactions that don’t involve oxidation or reduction,” he says.

      The non-redox chemical reactions studied by the MIT team are catalyzed by acids. “If you’re a first-year chemistry student, probably the first type of catalyst you learn about is an acid catalyst,” Surendranath says. There are many hundreds of such acid-catalyzed reactions, “and they’re super important in everything from processing petrochemical feedstocks to making commodity chemicals to doing transformations in pharmaceutical products. The list goes on and on.”

      “These reactions are key to making many products we use daily,” adds Roman-Leshkov, a professor of chemical engineering and chemistry.

      But the people who study redox half-reactions, also known as electrochemical reactions, are part of an entirely different research community than those studying non-redox chemical reactions, known as thermochemical reactions. As a result, even though the technique used in the new study, which involves applying a small external voltage, was well-known in the electrochemical research community, it had not been systematically applied to acid-catalyzed thermochemical reactions.

      People working on thermochemical catalysis, Surendranath says, “usually don’t consider” the role of the electrochemical potential at the catalyst surface, “and they often don’t have good ways of measuring it. And what this study tells us is that relatively small changes, on the order of a few hundred millivolts, can have huge impacts — orders of magnitude changes in the rates of catalyzed reactions at those surfaces.”

      “This overlooked parameter of surface potential is something we should pay a lot of attention to because it can have a really, really outsized effect,” he says. “It changes the paradigm of how we think about catalysis.”

      Chemists traditionally think about surface catalysis based on the chemical binding energy of molecules to active sites on the surface, which influences the amount of energy needed for the reaction, he says. But the new findings show that the electrostatic environment is “equally important in defining the rate of the reaction.”

      The team has already filed a provisional patent application on parts of the process and is working on ways to apply the findings to specific chemical processes. Westendorff says their findings suggest that “we should design and develop different types of reactors to take advantage of this sort of strategy. And we’re working right now on scaling up these systems.”

      While their experiments so far were done with a two-dimensional planar electrode, most industrial reactions are run in three-dimensional vessels filled with powders. Catalysts are distributed through those powders, providing a lot more surface area for the reactions to take place. “We’re looking at how catalysis is currently done in industry and how we can design systems that take advantage of the already existing infrastructure,” Westendorff says.

      Surendranath adds that these new findings “raise tantalizing possibilities: Is this a more general phenomenon? Does electrochemical potential play a key role in other reaction classes as well? In our mind, this reshapes how we think about designing catalysts and promoting their reactivity.”

      Roman-Leshkov adds that “traditionally people who work in thermochemical catalysis would not associate these reactions with electrochemical processes at all. However, introducing this perspective to the community will redefine how we can integrate electrochemical characteristics into thermochemical catalysis. It will have a big impact on the community in general.”

      While there has typically been little interaction between electrochemical and thermochemical catalysis researchers, Surendranath says, “this study shows the community that there’s really a blurring of the line between the two, and that there is a huge opportunity in cross-fertilization between these two communities.”

      Westerndorff adds that to make it work, “you have to design a system that’s pretty unconventional to either community to isolate this effect.” And that helps explain why such a dramatic effect had never been seen before. He notes that even their paper’s editor asked them why this effect hadn’t been reported before. The answer has to do with “how disparate those two ideologies were before this,” he says. “It’s not just that people don’t really talk to each other. There are deep methodological differences between how the two communities conduct experiments. And this work is really, we think, a great step toward bridging the two.”

      In practice, the findings could lead to far more efficient production of a wide variety of chemical materials, the team says. “You get orders of magnitude changes in rate with very little energy input,” Surendranath says. “That’s what’s amazing about it.”

      The findings, he says, “build a more holistic picture of how catalytic reactions at interfaces work, irrespective of whether you’re going to bin them into the category of electrochemical reactions or thermochemical reactions.” He adds that “it’s rare that you find something that could really revise our foundational understanding of surface catalytic reactions in general. We’re very excited.”

      “This research is of the highest quality,” says Costas Vayenas, a professor of engineering at the university of Patras, in Greece, who was not associated with the study. The work “is very promising for practical applications, particularly since it extends previous related work in redox catalytic systems,” he says.

      The team included MIT postdoc Max Hulsey PhD ’22 and graduate student Thejas Wesley PhD ’23, and was supported by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the U.S. Department of Energy Basic Energy Sciences. More

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      in Environment

      MIT researchers remotely map crops, field by field

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      Crop maps help scientists and policymakers track global food supplies and estimate how they might shift with climate change and growing populations. But getting accurate maps of the types of crops that are grown from farm to farm often requires on-the-ground surveys that only a handful of countries have the resources to maintain.

      Now, MIT engineers have developed a method to quickly and accurately label and map crop types without requiring in-person assessments of every single farm. The team’s method uses a combination of Google Street View images, machine learning, and satellite data to automatically determine the crops grown throughout a region, from one fraction of an acre to the next. 

      The researchers used the technique to automatically generate the first nationwide crop map of Thailand — a smallholder country where small, independent farms make up the predominant form of agriculture. The team created a border-to-border map of Thailand’s four major crops — rice, cassava, sugarcane, and maize — and determined which of the four types was grown, at every 10 meters, and without gaps, across the entire country. The resulting map achieved an accuracy of 93 percent, which the researchers say is comparable to on-the-ground mapping efforts in high-income, big-farm countries.

      The team is applying their mapping technique to other countries such as India, where small farms sustain most of the population but the type of crops grown from farm to farm has historically been poorly recorded.

      “It’s a longstanding gap in knowledge about what is grown around the world,” says Sherrie Wang, the d’Arbeloff Career Development Assistant Professor in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, and the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS). “The final goal is to understand agricultural outcomes like yield, and how to farm more sustainably. One of the key preliminary steps is to map what is even being grown — the more granularly you can map, the more questions you can answer.”

      Wang, along with MIT graduate student Jordi Laguarta Soler and Thomas Friedel of the agtech company PEAT GmbH, will present a paper detailing their mapping method later this month at the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence.

      Ground truth

      Smallholder farms are often run by a single family or farmer, who subsist on the crops and livestock that they raise. It’s estimated that smallholder farms support two-thirds of the world’s rural population and produce 80 percent of the world’s food. Keeping tabs on what is grown and where is essential to tracking and forecasting food supplies around the world. But the majority of these small farms are in low to middle-income countries, where few resources are devoted to keeping track of individual farms’ crop types and yields.

      Crop mapping efforts are mainly carried out in high-income regions such as the United States and Europe, where government agricultural agencies oversee crop surveys and send assessors to farms to label crops from field to field. These “ground truth” labels are then fed into machine-learning models that make connections between the ground labels of actual crops and satellite signals of the same fields. They then label and map wider swaths of farmland that assessors don’t cover but that satellites automatically do.

      “What’s lacking in low- and middle-income countries is this ground label that we can associate with satellite signals,” Laguarta Soler says. “Getting these ground truths to train a model in the first place has been limited in most of the world.”

      The team realized that, while many developing countries do not have the resources to maintain crop surveys, they could potentially use another source of ground data: roadside imagery, captured by services such as Google Street View and Mapillary, which send cars throughout a region to take continuous 360-degree images with dashcams and rooftop cameras.

      In recent years, such services have been able to access low- and middle-income countries. While the goal of these services is not specifically to capture images of crops, the MIT team saw that they could search the roadside images to identify crops.

      Cropped image

      In their new study, the researchers worked with Google Street View (GSV) images taken throughout Thailand — a country that the service has recently imaged fairly thoroughly, and which consists predominantly of smallholder farms.

      Starting with over 200,000 GSV images randomly sampled across Thailand, the team filtered out images that depicted buildings, trees, and general vegetation. About 81,000 images were crop-related. They set aside 2,000 of these, which they sent to an agronomist, who determined and labeled each crop type by eye. They then trained a convolutional neural network to automatically generate crop labels for the other 79,000 images, using various training methods, including iNaturalist — a web-based crowdsourced  biodiversity database, and GPT-4V, a “multimodal large language model” that enables a user to input an image and ask the model to identify what the image is depicting. For each of the 81,000 images, the model generated a label of one of four crops that the image was likely depicting — rice, maize, sugarcane, or cassava.

      The researchers then paired each labeled image with the corresponding satellite data taken of the same location throughout a single growing season. These satellite data include measurements across multiple wavelengths, such as a location’s greenness and its reflectivity (which can be a sign of water). 

      “Each type of crop has a certain signature across these different bands, which changes throughout a growing season,” Laguarta Soler notes.

      The team trained a second model to make associations between a location’s satellite data and its corresponding crop label. They then used this model to process satellite data taken of the rest of the country, where crop labels were not generated or available. From the associations that the model learned, it then assigned crop labels across Thailand, generating a country-wide map of crop types, at a resolution of 10 square meters.

      This first-of-its-kind crop map included locations corresponding to the 2,000 GSV images that the researchers originally set aside, that were labeled by arborists. These human-labeled images were used to validate the map’s labels, and when the team looked to see whether the map’s labels matched the expert, “gold standard” labels, it did so 93 percent of the time.

      “In the U.S., we’re also looking at over 90 percent accuracy, whereas with previous work in India, we’ve only seen 75 percent because ground labels are limited,” Wang says. “Now we can create these labels in a cheap and automated way.”

      The researchers are moving to map crops across India, where roadside images via Google Street View and other services have recently become available.

      “There are over 150 million smallholder farmers in India,” Wang says. “India is covered in agriculture, almost wall-to-wall farms, but very small farms, and historically it’s been very difficult to create maps of India because there are very sparse ground labels.”

      The team is working to generate crop maps in India, which could be used to inform policies having to do with assessing and bolstering yields, as global temperatures and populations rise.

      “What would be interesting would be to create these maps over time,” Wang says. “Then you could start to see trends, and we can try to relate those things to anything like changes in climate and policies.” More

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      in Energy

      3 Questions: The Climate Project at MIT

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      MIT is preparing a major campus-wide effort to develop technological, behavioral, and policy solutions to some of the toughest problems now impeding an effective global climate response. The Climate Project at MIT, as the new enterprise is known, includes new arrangements for promoting cross-Institute collaborations and new mechanisms for engaging with outside partners to speed the development and implementation of climate solutions.

      MIT News spoke with Richard K. Lester, MIT’s vice provost for international activities, who has helped oversee the development of the project.

      Q: What is the Climate Project at MIT?

      A: In her inaugural address last May, President Kornbluth called on the MIT community to join her in a “bold, tenacious response” to climate change. The Climate Project at MIT is a response to that call. It aims to mobilize every part of MIT to develop, deliver, and scale up practical climate solutions, as quickly as possible.

      Play video

      At MIT, well over 300 of our faculty are already working with their students and research staff members on different aspects of the climate problem. Almost all of our academic departments and more than a score of our interdepartmental labs and centers are involved in some way. What they are doing is remarkable, and this decentralized structure reflects the best traditions of MIT as a “bottom up,” entrepreneurial institution. But, as President Kornbluth said, we must do much more. We must be bolder in our research choices and more creative in how we organize ourselves to work with each other and with our partners. The purpose of the Climate Project is to support our community’s efforts to do bigger things faster in the climate domain. We will have succeeded if our work changes the trajectory of global climate outcomes for the better.

      I want to be clear that the clay is still wet here. The Climate Project will continue to take shape as more members of the MIT community bring their excellence, their energy, and their ambition to bear on the climate challenge. But I believe we have a vision and a framework for accelerating and amplifying MIT’s real-world climate impact, and I know that President Kornbluth is eager to share this progress report with the MIT community now to convey the breadth and ambition of what we’re planning.

      Q: How will the project be organized?

      A: The Climate Project will have three core components: the Climate Missions; their offshoots, the Climate Frontier Projects; and Climate HQ. A new vice president for climate will lead the enterprise.

      Initially there will be six missions, which you can read about in the plan. Each will address a different domain of climate impact where new solutions are required and where a critical mass of research excellence exists at MIT. One such mission, of course, is to decarbonize energy and industry, an area where we estimate that about 150 of our faculty are already working.

      The mission leaders will build multidisciplinary problem-solving communities reaching across the Institute and beyond. Each of these will be charged with roadmapping and assessing progress toward its mission, identifying critical gaps and bottlenecks, and launching applied research projects to accelerate progress where the MIT community and our partners are well-positioned to achieve impactful results. These projects — the climate frontier projects — will benefit from active, professional project management, with clear metrics and milestones. We are in a critical decade for responding to climate change, so it’s important that these research projects move quickly, with an eye on producing real-world results.

      The new Climate HQ will drive the overall vision for the Climate Project and support the work of the missions. We’ve talked about a core focus on impact-driven research, but much is still unknown about the Earth’s physical and biogeochemical systems, and there is also much to be learned about the behavior of the social and political systems that led us to the very difficult situation the world now faces. Climate HQ will support fundamental research in the scientific and humanistic disciplines related to climate, and will promote engagement between these disciplines and the missions. We must also advance climate-related education, led by departments and programs, as well as policy work, public outreach, and more, including an MIT-wide student-centric Climate Corps to elevate climate-related, community-focused service in MIT’s culture.

      Q: Why are partners a key part of this project?

      A: It is important to build strong partners right from the very start for our innovations, inventions, and discoveries to have any prospect of achieving scale. And in many cases, with climate change, it’s all about scale.

      One of the aims of this initiative is to strengthen MIT’s climate “scaffolding” — the people and processes connecting what we do on campus to the practical world of climate impact and response. We can build on MIT’s highly developed infrastructure for translation, innovation, and entrepreneurship, even as we promote other important pathways to scale involving communities, municipalities, and other not-for-profit organizations. Working with all these different organizations will help us build a broad infrastructure to help us get traction in the world. On a related note, the Sloan School of Management will be sharing details in the coming days of an exciting new effort to enhance MIT’s contributions in the climate policy arena.

      MIT is committing $75 million, including $25 million from Sloan, at the outset of the project. But we anticipate developing new partnerships, including philanthropic partnerships, to increase that scope dramatically. More

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      in Energy

      Reflecting on COP28 — and humanity’s progress toward meeting global climate goals

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      With 85,000 delegates, the 2023 United Nations climate change conference, known as COP28, was the largest U.N. climate conference in history. It was held at the end of the hottest year in recorded history. And after 12 days of negotiations, from Nov. 30 to Dec. 12, it produced a decision that included, for the first time, language calling for “transitioning away from fossil fuels,” though it stopped short of calling for their complete phase-out.

      U.N. Climate Change Executive Secretary Simon Stiell said the outcome in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, COP28’s host city, signaled “the beginning of the end” of the fossil fuel era. 

      COP stands for “conference of the parties” to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, held this year for the 28th time. Through the negotiations — and the immense conference and expo that takes place alongside them — a delegation of faculty, students, and staff from MIT was in Dubai to observe the negotiations, present new climate technologies, speak on panels, network, and conduct research.

      On Jan. 17, the MIT Center for International Studies (CIS) hosted a panel discussion with MIT delegates who shared their reflections on the experience. Asking what’s going on at COP is “like saying, ‘What’s going on in the city of Boston today?’” quipped Evan Lieberman, the Total Professor of Political Science and Contemporary Africa, director of CIS, and faculty director of MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives (MISTI). “The value added that all of us can provide for the MIT community is [to share] what we saw firsthand and how we experienced it.” 

      Phase-out, phase down, transition away?

      In the first week of COP28, over 100 countries issued a joint statement that included a call for “the global phase out of unabated fossil fuels.” The question of whether the COP28 decision — dubbed the “UAE Consensus” — would include this phase-out language animated much of the discussion in the days and weeks leading up to COP28. 

      Ultimately, the decision called for “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner.” It also called for “accelerating efforts towards the phase down of unabated coal power,” referring to the combustion of coal without efforts to capture and store its emissions.

      In Dubai to observe the negotiations, graduate student Alessandra Fabbri said she was “confronted” by the degree to which semantic differences could impose significant ramifications — for example, when negotiators referred to a “just transition,” or to “developed vs. developing nations” — particularly where evolution in recent scholarship has produced more nuanced understandings of the terms.

      COP28 also marked the conclusion of the first global stocktake, a core component of the 2015 Paris Agreement. The effort every five years to assess the world’s progress in responding to climate change is intended as a basis for encouraging countries to strengthen their climate goals over time, a process often referred to as the Paris Agreement’s “ratchet mechanism.” 

      The technical report of the first global stocktake, published in September 2023, found that while the world has taken actions that have reduced forecasts of future warming, they are not sufficient to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement, which aims to limit global average temperature increase to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius, while pursuing efforts to limit the increase to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels.

      “Despite minor, punctual advancements in climate action, parties are far from being on track to meet the long-term goals of the Paris Agreement,” said Fabbri, a graduate student in the School of Architecture and Planning and a fellow in MIT’s Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism. Citing a number of persistent challenges, including some parties’ fears that rapid economic transition may create or exacerbate vulnerabilities, she added, “There is a noted lack of accountability among certain countries in adhering to their commitments and responsibilities under international climate agreements.” 

      Climate and trade

      COP28 was the first climate summit to formally acknowledge the importance of international trade by featuring an official “Trade Day” on Dec. 4. Internationally traded goods account for about a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions, raising complex questions of accountability and concerns about offshoring of industrial manufacturing, a phenomenon known as “emissions leakage.” Addressing the nexus of climate and trade is therefore considered essential for successful decarbonization, and a growing number of countries are leveraging trade policies — such as carbon fees applied to imported goods — to secure climate benefits. 

      Members of the MIT delegation participated in several related activities, sharing research and informing decision-makers. Catherine Wolfram, professor of applied economics in the MIT Sloan School of Management, and Michael Mehling, deputy director of the MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research (CEEPR), presented options for international cooperation on such trade policies at side events, including ones hosted by the World Trade Organization and European Parliament. 

      “While COPs are often criticized for highlighting statements that don’t have any bite, they are also tremendous opportunities to get people from around the world who care about climate and think deeply about these issues in one place,” said Wolfram.

      Climate and health

      For the first time in the conference’s nearly 30-year history, COP28 included a thematic “Health Day” that featured talks on the relationship between climate and health. Researchers from MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) have been testing policy solutions in this area for years through research funds such as the King Climate Action Initiative (K-CAI). 

      “An important but often-neglected area where climate action can lead to improved health is combating air pollution,” said Andre Zollinger, K-CAI’s senior policy manager. “COP28’s announcement on reducing methane leaks is an important step because action in this area could translate to relatively quick, cost-effective ways to curb climate change while improving air quality, especially for people living near these industrial sites.” K-CAI has an ongoing project in Colorado investigating the use of machine learning to predict leaks and improve the framework for regulating industrial methane emissions, Zollinger noted.

      This was J-PAL’s third time at COP, which Zollinger said typically presented an opportunity for researchers to share new findings and analysis with government partners, nongovernmental organizations, and companies. This year, he said, “We have [also] been working with negotiators in the [Middle East and North Africa] region in the months preceding COP to plug them into the latest evidence on water conservation, on energy access, on different challenging areas of adaptation that could be useful for them during the conference.”

      Sharing knowledge, learning from others

      MIT student Runako Gentles described COP28 as a “springboard” to greater impact. A senior from Jamaica studying civil and environmental engineering, Gentles said it was exciting to introduce himself as an MIT undergraduate to U.N. employees and Jamaican delegates in Dubai. “There’s a lot of talk on mitigation and cutting carbon emissions, but there needs to be much more going into climate adaptation, especially for small-island developing states like those in the Caribbean,” he said. “One of the things I can do, while I still try to finish my degree, is communicate — get the story out there to raise awareness.”

      At an official side event at COP28 hosted by MIT, Pennsylvania State University, and the American Geophysical Union, Maria T. Zuber, MIT’s vice president for research, stressed the importance of opportunities to share knowledge and learn from people around the world.

      “The reason this two-way learning is so important for us is simple: The ideas we come up with in a university setting, whether they’re technological or policy or any other kind of innovations — they only matter in the practical world if they can be put to good use and scaled up,” said Zuber. “And the only way we can know that our work has practical relevance for addressing climate is by working hand-in-hand with communities, industries, governments, and others.”

      Marcela Angel, research program director at the Environmental Solutions Initiative, and Sergey Paltsev, deputy director of MIT’s Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, also spoke at the event, which was moderated by Bethany Patten, director of policy and engagement for sustainability at the MIT Sloan School of Management.  More

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      MADMEC winner creates “temporary tattoos” for T-shirts

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      Have you ever gotten a free T-shirt at an event that you never wear? What about a music or sports-themed shirt you wear to one event and then lose interest in entirely? Such one-off T-shirts — and the waste and pollution associated with them — are an unfortunately common part of our society.

      But what if you could change the designs on shirts after each use? The winners of this year’s MADMEC competition developed biodegradable “temporary tattoos” for T-shirts to make one-wear clothing more sustainable.

      Members of the winning team, called Me-Shirts, got their inspiration from the MADMEC event itself, which ordinarily makes a different T-shirt each year.

      “If you think about all the textile waste that’s produced for all these shirts, it’s insane,” team member and PhD candidate Isabella Caruso said in the winning presentation. “The main markets we are trying to address are for one-time T-shirts and custom T-shirts.”

      The problem is a big one. According to the team, the custom T-shirt market is a $4.3 billion industry. That doesn’t include trends like fast fashion that contribute to the 17 million tons of textile waste produced each year.

      “Our proposed solution is a temporary shirt tattoo made from biodegradable, nontoxic materials,” Caruso explained. “We wanted designs that are fully removable through washing, so that you can wear your T-shirt for your one-time event and then get a nice white T-shirt back afterward.”

      The team’s scalable design process mixes three simple ingredients: potato starch, glycerin, and water. The design can be imprinted on the shirt temporarily through ironing.

      The Me-Shirt team, which earned $10,000 with the win, plans to continue exploring material combinations to make the design more flexible and easier for people to apply at home. Future iterations could allow users to decide if they want the design to stay on the shirt during washes based on the settings of the washing machine.

      Hosted by MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE), the competition was the culmination of team projects that began in the fall and included a series of design challenges throughout the semester. Each team received guidance, access to equipment and labs, and up to $1,000 in funding to build and test their prototypes.

      “The main goal is that they gained some confidence in their ability to design and build devices and platforms that are different from their normal experiences,” Mike Tarkanian, a senior lecturer in DMSE and coordinator of MADMEC, said at the event. “If it’s a departure from their normal research and coursework activities that’s a win, I think, to make them better engineers.”

      The second-place, $6,000 prize went to Alkalyne, which is creating a carbon-neutral polymer for petrochemical production. The company is developing approaches for using electricity and inorganic carbon to generate a high-energy hydrocarbon precursor. If developed using renewable energy, the approach could be used to achieve carbon negative petrochemical production.

      “A lot of our research, and a lot of the research around MIT in general, has to do with sustainability, so we wanted to try an angle that we think looks promising but doesn’t seem to be investigated enough,” PhD candidate Christopher Mallia explained.

      The third-place prize went to Microbeco, which is exploring the use of microbial fuel cells for continuous water quality monitoring. Microbes have been proposed as a way to detect and measure contaminants in water for decades, but the team believes the varying responses of microbes to different contaminants has limited the effectiveness of the approach.

      To overcome that problem, the team is working to isolate microbial strains that respond more regularly to specific contaminants.

      Overall, Tarkanian believes this year’s program was a success not only because of the final results presented at the competition, but because of the experience the students got along the way using equipment like laser cutters, 3D printers, and soldering irons. Many participants said they had never used that type of equipment before. They also said by working to build physical prototypes, the program helped make their coursework come to life.

      “It was a chance to try something new by applying my skills to a different environment,” PhD candidate Zachary Adams said. “I can see a lot of the concepts I learn in my classes through this work.” More