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      in Environment

      Tracking emissions to help companies reduce their environmental footprint

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      Amidst a global wave of corporate pledges to decarbonize or reach net-zero emissions, a system for verifying actual greenhouse gas reductions has never been more important. Context Labs, founded by former MIT Sloan Fellow and serial entrepreneur Dan Harple SM ’13, is rising to meet that challenge with an analytics platform that brings more transparency to emissions data.The company’s platform adds context to data from sources like equipment sensors and satellites, provides third-party verification, and records all that information on a blockchain. Context Labs also provides an interactive view of emissions across every aspect of a company’s operations, allowing leaders to pinpoint the dirtiest parts of their business.“There’s an old adage: Unless you measure something, you can’t change it,” says Harple, who is the firm’s CEO. “I think of what we’re doing as an AI-driven digital lens into what’s happening across organizations. Our goal is to help the planet get better, faster.”Context Labs is already working with some of the largest energy companies in the world — including EQT, Williams Companies, and Coterra Energy — to verify emissions reductions. A partnership with Microsoft, announced at last year’s COP28 United Nations climate summit, allows any organization on Microsoft’s Azure cloud to integrate their sensor data into Context Lab’s platform to get a granular view of their environmental impact.Harple says the progress enables more informed sustainability initiatives at scale. He also sees the work as a way to combat overly vague statements about sustainable practices that don’t lead to actual emissions reductions, or what’s known as “greenwashing.”“Just producing data isn’t good enough, and our customers realize that, because they know even if they have good intentions to reduce emissions, no one is going to believe them,” Harple says. “One way to think about our platform is as antigreenwashing insurance, because if you get attacked for your emissions, we unbundle the data like it’s in shrink-wrap and roll it back through time on the blockchain. You can click on it and see exactly where and how it was measured, monitored, timestamped, its serial number, everything. It’s really the gold standard of proof.”An unconventional master’sHarple came to MIT as a serial founder whose companies had pioneered several foundational internet technologies, including real-time video streaming technology still used in applications like Zoom and Netflix, as well as some of the core technology for the popular Chinese microblogging website Weibo.Harple’s introduction to MIT started with a paper he wrote for his venture capital contacts in the U.S. to make the case for investment in the Netherlands, where he was living with his family. The paper caught the attention of MIT Professor Stuart Madnick, the John Norris Maguire Professor of Information Technology at the MIT Sloan School of Management, who suggested Harple come to MIT as a Sloan Fellow to further develop his ideas about what makes a strong innovation ecosystem.Having successfully founded and exited multiple companies, Harple was not a typical MIT student when he began the Sloan Fellows program in 2011. At one point, he held a summit at MIT for a group of leading Dutch entrepreneurs and government officials that included tours of major labs and a meeting with former MIT President L. Rafael Reif.“Everyone was super enamored with MIT, and that kicked off what became a course that I started at MIT called REAL, Regional Entrepreneurial Acceleration Lab,” Harple says. REAL was eventually absorbed by what is now REAP — the Regional Entrepreneurship Acceleration Program, which has worked with communities around the world.Harple describes REAL as a framework vehicle to put his theories on supporting innovation into action. Over his time at MIT, which also included collaborating with the Media Lab, he systematized those theories into what he calls pentalytics, which is a way to measure and predict the resilience of innovation ecosystems.“My sense was MIT should be analytical and data-driven,” Harple says. “The thesis I wrote was a framework for AI-driven network graph analytics. So, you can model things using analytics, and you can use AI to do predictive analytics to see where the innovation ecosystem is going to thrive.”Once Harple’s pentalytics theory was established, he wanted to put it to the test with a company. His initial idea for Context Labs was to build a verification platform to combat fake news, deepfakes, and other misinformation on the internet. Around 2018, Harple met climate investor Jeremy Grantham, who he says helped him realize the most important data are about the planet. Harple began to believe that U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) emissions estimates for things like driving a car or operating an oil rig were just that — estimates — and left room for improvement.“Our approach was very MIT-ish,” Harple says. “We said, ‘Let’s, measure it and let’s monitor it, and then let’s contextualize that data so you can never go back and say they faked it. I think there’s a lot of fakery that’s happened, and that’s why the voluntary carbon markets cratered in the last year. Our view is they cratered because the data wasn’t empirical enough.”Context Labs’ solution starts with a technology platform it calls Immutably that continuously combines disparate data streams, encrypts that information, and records it on a blockchain. Immutably also verifies the information with one or more third parties. (Context Labs has partnered with the global accounting firm KPMG.)On top of Immutably, Context Labs has built applications, including a product called Decarbonization-as-a-Service (DaaS), which uses Immutably’s data to give companies a digital twin of their entire operations. Customers can use DaaS to explore the emissions of their assets and create a certificate of verified CO2-equivalent emissions, which can be used in carbon credit markets.Putting emissions data into contextContext Labs is working with oil and gas companies, utilities, data centers, and large industrial operators, some using the platform to analyze more than 3 billion data points each day. For instance, EQT, the largest natural gas producer in the U.S., uses Context Labs to verify its lower-emission products and create carbon credits. Other customers include the nonprofits Rocky Mountain Institute and the Environmental Defense Fund.“I often get asked how big the total addressable market is,” Harple says. “My view is it’s the largest market in history. Why? Because every country needs a decarbonization plan, along with instrumentation and a digital platform to execute, as does every company.”With its headquarters in Kendall Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Context Labs is also serving as a test for Harple’s pentalytics theory for innovation ecosystems. It also has operations in Houston and Amsterdam.“This company is a living lab for pentalytics,” Harple says. “I believe Kendall Square 1.0 was factory buildings, Kendall Square 2.0 is biotech, and Kendall Square 3.0 will be climate tech.” More

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      MIT School of Science launches Center for Sustainability Science and Strategy

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      The MIT School of Science is launching a center to advance knowledge and computational capabilities in the field of sustainability science, and support decision-makers in government, industry, and civil society to achieve sustainable development goals. Aligned with the Climate Project at MIT, researchers at the MIT Center for Sustainability Science and Strategy will develop and apply expertise from across the Institute to improve understanding of sustainability challenges, and thereby provide actionable knowledge and insight to inform strategies for improving human well-being for current and future generations.Noelle Selin, professor at MIT’s Institute for Data, Systems and Society and the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, will serve as the center’s inaugural faculty director. C. Adam Schlosser and Sergey Paltsev, senior research scientists at MIT, will serve as deputy directors, with Anne Slinn as executive director.Incorporating and succeeding both the Center for Global Change Science and Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change while adding new capabilities, the center aims to produce leading-edge research to help guide societal transitions toward a more sustainable future. Drawing on the long history of MIT’s efforts to address global change and its integrated environmental and human dimensions, the center is well-positioned to lead burgeoning global efforts to advance the field of sustainability science, which seeks to understand nature-society systems in their full complexity. This understanding is designed to be relevant and actionable for decision-makers in government, industry, and civil society in their efforts to develop viable pathways to improve quality of life for multiple stakeholders.“As critical challenges such as climate, health, energy, and food security increasingly affect people’s lives around the world, decision-makers need a better understanding of the earth in its full complexity — and that includes people, technologies, and institutions as well as environmental processes,” says Selin. “Better knowledge of these systems and how they interact can lead to more effective strategies that avoid unintended consequences and ensure an improved quality of life for all.”    Advancing knowledge, computational capability, and decision supportTo produce more precise and comprehensive knowledge of sustainability challenges and guide decision-makers to formulate more effective strategies, the center has set the following goals:Advance fundamental understanding of the complex interconnected physical and socio-economic systems that affect human well-being. As new policies and technologies are developed amid climate and other global changes, they interact with environmental processes and institutions in ways that can alter the earth’s critical life-support systems. Fundamental mechanisms that determine many of these systems’ behaviors, including those related to interacting climate, water, food, and socio-economic systems, remain largely unknown and poorly quantified. Better understanding can help society mitigate the risks of abrupt changes and “tipping points” in these systems.Develop, establish and disseminate new computational tools toward better understanding earth systems, including both environmental and human dimensions. The center’s work will integrate modeling and data analysis across disciplines in an era of increasing volumes of observational data. MIT multi-system models and data products will provide robust information to inform decision-making and shape the next generation of sustainability science and strategy.Produce actionable science that supports equity and justice within and across generations. The center’s research will be designed to inform action associated with measurable outcomes aligned with supporting human well-being across generations. This requires engaging a broad range of stakeholders, including not only nations and companies, but also nongovernmental organizations and communities that take action to promote sustainable development — with special attention to those who have historically borne the brunt of environmental injustice.“The center’s work will advance fundamental understanding in sustainability science, leverage leading-edge computing and data, and promote engagement and impact,” says Selin. “Our researchers will help lead scientists and strategists across the globe who share MIT’s commitment to mobilizing knowledge to inform action toward a more sustainable world.”Building a better world at MITBuilding on existing MIT capabilities in sustainability, science, and strategy, the center aims to: focus research, education, and outreach under a theme that reflects a comprehensive state of the field and international research directions, fostering a dynamic community of students, researchers, and faculty;raise the visibility of sustainability science at MIT, emphasizing links between science and action, in the context of existing Institute goals and other efforts on climate and sustainability, and in a way that reflects the vital contributions of a range of natural and social science disciplines to understanding human-environment systems; andre-emphasize MIT’s long-standing expertise in integrated systems modeling while leveraging the Institute’s concurrent leading-edge strengths in data and computing, establishing leadership that harnesses recent innovations, including those in machine learning and artificial intelligence, toward addressing the science challenges of global change and sustainability.“The Center for Sustainability Science and Strategy will provide the necessary synergy for our MIT researchers to develop, deploy, and scale up serious solutions to climate change and other critical sustainability challenges,” says Nergis Mavalvala, the Curtis and Kathleen Marble Professor of Astrophysics and dean of the MIT School of Science. “With Professor Selin at its helm, the center will also ensure that these solutions are created in concert with the people who are directly affected now and in the future.”The center builds on more than three decades of achievements by the Center for Global Change Science and the Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, both of which were directed or co-directed by professor of atmospheric science Ronald Prinn. 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      in Environment

      A bright and airy hub for climate at MIT

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      Seen from a distance, MIT’s Cecil and Ida Green Building (Building 54) — designed by renowned architect and MIT alumnus I.M. Pei ’40 — is one of the most iconic buildings on the Cambridge, Massachusetts, skyline. Home to the MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS), the 21-story concrete structure soars over campus, topped with its distinctive spherical radar dome. Close up, however, it was a different story.A sunless, two-story, open-air plaza beneath the tower previously served as a nondescript gateway to the department’s offices, labs, and classrooms above. “It was cold and windy — probably the windiest place on campus,” EAPS department head Robert van der Hilst, the Schlumberger Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences, told a packed auditorium inside the building in March. “You would pass through the elevators and disappear into the corridors, never to be seen again until the end of the day.”Van der Hilst was speaking at a dedication event to celebrate the opening of the renovated and expanded space, 60 years after the Green Building’s original dedication in 1964. In a dramatic transformation, the perpetually-shaded expanse beneath the tower has been filled with an airy, glassed-in structure that is as inviting as the previous space was forbidding.Designed to meet LEED-platinum certification, the newly-constructed Tina and Hamid Moghadam Building (Building 55) seems to float next to the Brutalist tower, its glass façade both opening up the interior and reflecting the sunlight and green space outside. The 300-seat auditorium within the original tower has been similarly transformed, bringing light and space to the newly dubbed Dixie Lee Bryant (1891) Lecture Hall, named after the first person to earn a geology degree at MIT.Catalyzing collaborationThe project is about more than updating an overlooked space. “The building we’re here to celebrate today does something else,” MIT President Sally Kornbluth said at the dedication.“In its lightness, in its transparency, it calls attention not to itself, but to the people gathered inside it. In its warmth, its openness, it makes room for culture and community. And it welcomes in those who don’t yet belong … as we take on the immense challenges of climate together,” she continued, referencing the recent launch of The Climate Project at MIT — a whole-of-MIT initiative to innovate bold solutions to climate change. In MIT’s famously decentralized structure, the Moghadam Building provides a new physical hub for students, scientists, and engineers interested in climate and the environment to congregate and share ideas.From the start, fostering this kind of multidisciplinary collaboration was part of Van der Hilst’s vision. In addition to serving as the flagship location for EAPS, Building 54 has long been the administrative home of the MIT-WHOI Joint Program in Oceanography/Applied Ocean Science and Engineering — a graduate program in partnership with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. With the addition of Building 55, EAPS has now been joined by the MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative (ESI) — a campus-wide program fostering education, outreach, and innovation in earth system science, urban infrastructure, and sustainability — and will welcome closer collaboration with Terrascope — a first-year learning community which invites its students to take on real-world environmental challenges.A shared vision comes to lifeThe building project dovetailed with the long-overdue refurbishment of the Green Building. After a multi-year fundraising campaign where Van der Hilst spearheaded the department’s efforts, the project received a major boost from lead donors Tina and Hamid Moghadam ’77, SM ’78, allowing the department to break ground in November 2021.In Moghadam, chair and CEO of Prologis, which owns 1.2 billion square feet of warehouses and other logistics infrastructure worldwide, EAPS found a fellow champion for climate and environmental innovation. By putting solar panels on the roofs of Prologis buildings, the company is now the second largest on-site producer of solar energy in the United States. “I don’t think there needs to be a trade-off between good sound economics and return on investment and solving climate change problems,” Moghadam said at the dedication. “The solutions that really work are the ones that actually make sense in a market economy.”Architectural firm AW-ARCH designed the Moghadam Building with a light touch, emphasizing spaciousness in contrast to the heavy concrete buildings that surround it. “The kind of delicacy and fragility of the thing is in some ways a depiction of what happens here,” said architect and co-founding partner Alex Anmahian at the dedication reception, giving a nod to the study of the delicate balance of the earth system itself. The sense is further illustrated by the responsiveness of the façade to the surrounding environment, which, depending on the time of day and quality of light, makes the glass alternately reflective and transparent.Inside, the 11,900-square foot pavilion is highly flexible and serves as a showcase for the science that happens in the labs and offices above. Central to the space is a 16-foot by 9-foot video wall featuring vivid footage of field work, lab research, data visualizations, and natural phenomena — visible even to passers-by outside. The video wall is counterposed to an unpretentious set of stair-step bleachers leading to the second floor that could play host to anything from a scientific lecture to a community pizza-and-movie night.Van der Hilst has referred to his vision for the atrium as a “campus living room,” and the furniture throughout is intentionally chosen to allow for impromptu rearrangements, providing a valuable public space on campus for students to work and socialize.The second level is similarly adaptable, featuring three classrooms with state-of-the-art teaching technologies that can be transformed from a single large space for a hackathon to intimate rooms for discussion.“The space is really meant for a yet unforeseen experience,” Anmahian says. “The reason it is so open is to allow for any possibility.”The inviting, dynamic design of the pavilion has also become an instant point of pride for the building’s inhabitants. At the dedication, School of Science dean Nergis Mavalvala quipped that anyone walking into the space “gains two inches in height.”Van der Hilst quoted a colleague with a similar observation: “Now, when I come into this space, I feel respected by it.”The perfect complementAnother significant feature of the project is the List Visual Arts Center Percent-for-Art Program installation by conceptual artist Julian Charrière, entitled “Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More.”Consisting of three interrelated works, the commission includes: “Not All Who Wander Are Lost,” three glacial erratic boulders which sit atop their own core samples in the surrounding green space; “We Are All Astronauts,” a trio of glass pillars containing vintage globes with distinctions between nations, land, and sea removed; and “Pure Waste,” a synthetic diamond embedded in the foundation, created from carbon captured from the air and the breath of researchers who work in the building.Known for themes that explore the transformation of the natural world over time and humanity’s complex relationship with our environment, Charrière was a perfect fit to complement the new Building 55 — offering a thought-provoking perspective on our current environmental challenges while underscoring the value of the research that happens within its walls. 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      in Environment

      Balancing economic development with natural resources protection

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      It’s one of the paradoxes of economic development: Many countries currently offer large subsidies to their industrial fishing fleets, even though the harms of overfishing are well-known. Governments might be willing to end this practice, if they saw that its costs outweighed its benefits. But each country, acting individually, faces an incentive to keep subsidies in place.This trap evokes the classic “tragedy of the commons” that economists have studied for generations. But despite the familiarity of the problem in theory, they don’t yet have a lot of hard evidence to offer policymakers about solutions, especially on a global scale. PhD student Aaron Berman is working on a set of projects that may change that.“Our goal is to get some empirical traction on the problem,” he says.Berman and his collaborators are combining a variety of datasets — not only economic data but also projections from ecological models — to identify how these subsidies are impacting fish stocks. They also hope to determine whether countries might benefit instead from sustainability measures to help rebuild fisheries, say through new trade arrangements or other international policy agreements.As a fourth-year doctoral candidate in MIT’s Department of Economics, Berman has a variety of other research projects underway as well, all connected by the central question of how to balance economic development with the pressure it puts on the environment and natural resources. While his study of fishing subsidies is global in scope, other projects are distinctly local: He is studying air pollution generated by road infrastructure in Pakistan, groundwater irrigation in Texas, the scallop fishing industry in New England, and industrial carbon-reduction measures in Turkey. For all of these projects, Berman and his collaborators are bringing data and models from many fields of science to bear on economic questions, from seafloor images taken by NOAA to atmospheric models of pollution dispersion.“One thing I find really exciting and joyful about the work I’m doing in environmental economics is that all of these projects involve some kind of crossover into the natural sciences,” he says.Several of Berman’s projects are so ambitious that he hopes to continue working on them even after completing his PhD. He acknowledges that keeping so many irons in the fire is a lot of work, but says he finds motivation in the knowledge that his research could shape policy and benefit society in a concrete way.“Something that MIT has really instilled in me is the value of going into the field and learning about how the research you’re doing connects to real-world issues,” he says. “You want your findings as a researcher to ultimately be useful to someone.”Testing the watersThe son of two public school teachers, Berman grew up in Maryland and then attended Yale University, where he majored in global affairs as an undergraduate, then stayed to get his master’s in public health, concentrating on global health in both programs.A pivotal moment came while taking an undergraduate class in development economics. “That class helped me realize the same questions I cared a lot about from a public health standpoint were also being studied by economists using very rigorous methods,” Berman says. “Economics has a lot to say about very pressing societal issues.”After reading the work of MIT economists and Nobel laureates Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee in that same class, he decided to pivot and “test the waters of economics a little bit more seriously.” The professor teaching that class also played an important role, by encouraging Berman to pursue a predoctoral research position as a first step toward a graduate degree in economics.Following that advice, Berman landed at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Evidence for Policy Design, a research initiative seeking to foster economic development by improving the policy design process. His time with this organization included five months in Jakarta, Indonesia, where he collaborated with professors Rema Hanna and Ben Olken — of Harvard and MIT, respectively — on a portfolio of projects focused on analyzing social protection and poverty alleviation.The work, which included working closely with government partners, “required me to think creatively about how to talk about economics research to several different types of audiences,” he says. “This also gave me experience thinking about the intersection between what is academically interesting and what is a policy priority.”The experience also gave him the skills and confidence to apply to the economics PhD program at MIT.(Re)discovering teachingAs an economist, Berman is now channeling his interests in global affairs to exploring the relationship between economic development and protecting the natural environment. (He’s aided by an affinity for languages — he speaks five, with varying degrees of proficiency, in addition to English: Mandarin, Cantonese, Spanish, Portuguese, and Indonesian.) His interest in natural resource governance was piqued while co-authoring a paper on the economic drivers of climate-altering tropical deforestation.The review article, written alongside Olken and two professors from the London School of Economics, explored questions such as “What does the current state of the evidence tell us about what causes deforestation in the tropics, and what further evidence is needed?” and “What are the economic barriers to implementing policies to prevent deforestation?” — the kinds of questions he seeks to answer broadly in his ongoing dissertation work.“I gained an appreciation for the importance and complexity of natural resource governance, both in developing and developed countries,” he says. “It really was a launching point for a lot of the things that I’m doing now.”These days, when not doing research, Berman can be found playing on MIT’s club tennis team or working as a teaching assistant, which he particularly enjoys. He’s ever mindful of the Yale professor whose encouragement shaped his own path, and he hopes that he can pay that forward in his own teaching roles.“The fact that he saw I had the ability to make this transition and encouraged me to take a leap of faith is really meaningful to me. I would like to be able to do that for others,” Berman says.His interest in teaching also connects him further with his family: His father is a middle school science teacher and mother is a paraeducator for students with special needs. He says they’ve encouraged him throughout his academic journey, even though they initially didn’t know much about what a PhD in economics entailed. Berman jokes that the most common question people ask economists is what stocks they should invest in, and his family was no exception.“But they’ve always been very excited to hear about the kinds of things I’m working on and very supportive,” he says. “It’s been a really amazing learning experience thus far,” Berman says about his doctoral program. “One of the coolest parts of economics research is to have a sense that you’re tangibly doing something that’s going to have an impact in the world.” More

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      in Environment

      Q&A: “As long as you have a future, you can still change it”

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      Tristan Brown is the S.C. Fang Chinese Language and Culture Career Development Professor at MIT. He specializes in law, science, environment and religion of late imperial China, a period running from the 16th through early 20th centuries.In this Q&A, Brown discusses how his areas of historical research can be useful for examining today’s pressing environmental challenges. This is part of an ongoing series exploring how the MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences is addressing the climate crisis.Q: Why does this era of Chinese history resonate so much for you? How is it relevant to contemporary times and challenges?A: China has always been interesting to historians because it has a long-recorded history, with data showing how people have coped with environmental and climate changes over the centuries. We have tons of records of various kinds of ecological issues, environmental crises, and the associated outbreaks of calamities, famine, epidemics, and warfare. Historians of China have a lot to offer ongoing conversations about climate.More specifically, I research conflicts over land and resources that erupted when China was undergoing huge environmental, economic, demographic, and political pressures, and the role that feng shui played as local communities and the state tried to mediate those conflicts. [Feng shui is an ancient Chinese practice combining cosmology, spatial aesthetics, and measurement to divine the right balance between the natural and built environment.] Ultimately, the Qing (1644-1912) state was unable to manage these conflicts, and feng shui–based attempts to make decisions about conserving or exploiting certain areas blew up by the end of the 19th century in the face of pressures to industrialize. This is the subject of my first book, “Laws of the Land: Fengshui and the State in Qing Dynasty China.”Q: Can you give a sense of how feng shui was used to determine outcomes in environmental cases?A: We tend to think of feng shui as a popular design mechanism today. While this isn’t completely inaccurate, there was much more to it than that in Chinese history, when it evolved over many centuries. Specifically, there are lots of insights in feng shui that reflect the ways in which people recorded the natural world, explained how components in the environment related to one another, and understood why and how bad things happened. There is an interesting concept in feng shui that your environment affects your health,and specifically your children’s (i.e., descendants and progeny) health. That concept is found across premodern feng shui literature and is one of fundamental principles of the whole knowledge system.During the period I research, the Qing, the primary fuel energy sources in China came from timber and coal. There were legal cases where communities argued against efforts to mine a local mountain, saying that it could injure the feng shui (i.e., undermine the cosmological balance of natural forces and spatial integrity) of a mountain and hurt the fortunes of an entire region. People were suspicious of coal mining in their communities. They had seen or heard about mines collapsing and flooded mine shafts, they had watched runoff ruin good farmland, causing crops to fail, and even perhaps children to fall ill. Coal mining disturbed the human-earth connection, and thus the relationship between people and nature. People invoked feng shui to express an idea that the extraction of rocks and minerals from the land can have detrimental effects on living communities. Whether out of a sincere community-based concern or out of a more self-interested NIMBYism, feng shui was the primary discourse invoked in these cases.Not all efforts to conserve areas from mining succeeded, especially as foreign imperialism encroached on China, threatening government and local control over the economy. It became gradually clear to China’s elites that the country had to industrialize to survive, and this involved the difficult and even violent process of taking people from farm work and bringing them to cities, building railways, cutting millions of trees, and mining coal to power it all.Q: This makes it seem as if the Chinese swept away feng shui whenever it presented a hurdle, putting the country on the path to coal dependence, pollution, and a carbon-emitting future.A: Feng shui has not disappeared in China, but there’s no doubt about it that development in the form of industrialization took precedence in the 20th century, when it became officially labelled a “superstition” on the national stage. When I first went to China in 2007, city air was so polluted I couldn’t see the horizon. I was 18 years old and the air in some northern cities like Shijiazhuang honestly felt scary. I’ve returned many times since then, of course, and there has been great improvement in air quality, because the government made it a priority.Feng shui is a future-oriented knowledge, concerned with identifying events that have happened in the past that are related to things happening today, and using that information to influence future events. As Richard Smith of Rice University argues, Chinese have used history to order the past, ritual to order the present, and divination to order the future. Consider, for instance, Xiong’an, a new development area outside of Beijing that is physically marking the era of Xi Jinping’s tenure as paramount leader. As soon as the site was selected, people in China started talking about its feng shui, both out of potential environmental concerns and as a subtle form of political commentary. MIT’s own Sol Andrew Stokols in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP) has a fantastic new dissertation examining that new area.In short, the feng shui masters of old said there will be floods and droughts and bad stuff happening in the future if a course correction isn’t made. But at the same time, in feng shui there’s never a situation that is hopeless; there is no lost cause. So, there is optimism in the knowledge and rhetoric of feng shui that I think might be applicable as time goes on with climate change. As long as you have a future, you can still change it. Q: In 2023, you were awarded one of the first grants of MIT’s Climate Nucleus, the faculty committee charged with seeing through the Institute’s climate action plan over the decade. What have you been up to courtesy of this fund?A: Well, it all started years ago, when I started thinking about great number of mountains in China associated with Buddhism or Daoism that have become national parks in recent decades. Some of these mountains host trees and plant species that are not found in any other part of China. For my grant, I wanted to find out how these mountains have managed to incubate such rare species for the last 2,000 years. And it’s not as simple as just saying, well, Buddhism, right? Because there are plenty of Buddhist mountains that have not fared as well ecologically. The religious landscape is part of the answer, but there’s also all the messiness of material history that surrounds such a mountain.With this grant, I am bringing together a group of scholars of religion, historians, as well as engineers working in conservation ecology, and we’re trying to figure out what makes some of these places religiously and environmentally distinctive. People come to the project with different approaches. My MIT colleague Serguei Saavedra in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering uses new models in system ecology to measure the resilience of environments under various stresses. My colleague in religious studies, Or Porath at Tel Aviv University, is asking when and how Asian religions have centered — or ignored — animals and animal welfare. Another collaboration with MIT’s Siqi Zheng in DUSP and Wen-Chi Liao at the National University of Singapore is looking at how we can use artificial intelligence, machine learning, and classical feng shui manuals to teach computers how to analyze the value of a property’s feng shui in Sinophone communities around the world. There’s a lot going on!Q: How do you bring China’s unique environmental history and law into your classroom, and make it immediate and relevant to the world students face today?A: History is always part of the answer. I mean, whether it’s for an economist, a political scientist, or an architect, history matters. Likewise, when you’re confronting climate change and all these struggles regarding the environment and various crises involving ecosystems, it’s always a good idea to look at how human beings in the past dealt with similar crises. It doesn’t give you a prediction on what would happen in the future, but it gives you some range of possibilities, many of which may at first appear counterintuitive or surprising.That’s exactly what the humanities do. My job is to make MIT undergraduates care about a people who are no longer alive, who walked the earth a thousand years ago, who confronted terrible times of conflict and hunger. Sometimes these people left behind a written record about their world, and sometimes they didn’t. But we try to hear them out regardless. I want students to develop empathy for these strangers and wonder what it would be like to walk in their shoes. Every one of those people is someone’s ancestor, and they very well could have been your ancestor.In my class 21H.186 (Nature and Environment in China), we look at the historical precedents that might be useful for today’s environmental challenges, ranging from urban pollution or domestic recycling systems. The fact we’re still here to ask historical questions is itself significant. When we feel despair about climate change, we can ask, “How did individuals endure the changed course of the Yellow River or the Little Ice Age?” Even when it is recording tragedies, history can be understood as an enduring form of hope.  More

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      in Environment

      Mission directors announced for the Climate Project at MIT

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      The Climate Project at MIT has appointed leaders for each of its six focal areas, or Climate Missions, President Sally Kornbluth announced in a letter to the MIT community today.Introduced in February, the Climate Project at MIT is a major new effort to change the trajectory of global climate outcomes for the better over the next decade. The project will focus MIT’s strengths on six broad climate-related areas where progress is urgently needed. The mission directors in these fields, representing diverse areas of expertise, will collaborate with faculty and researchers across MIT, as well as each other, to accelerate solutions that address climate change.“The mission directors will be absolutely central as the Climate Project seeks to marshal the Institute’s talent and resources to research, develop, deploy and scale up serious solutions to help change the planet’s climate trajectory,” Kornbluth wrote in her letter, adding: “To the faculty members taking on these pivotal roles: We could not be more grateful for your skill and commitment, or more enthusiastic about what you can help us all achieve, together.”The Climate Project will expand and accelerate MIT’s efforts to both reduce greenhouse gas emissions and respond to climate effects such as extreme heat, rising sea levels, and reduced crop yields. At the urgent pace needed, the project will help the Institute create new external collaborations and deepen existing ones to develop and scale climate solutions.The Institute has pledged an initial $75 million to the project, including $25 million from the MIT Sloan School of Management to launch a complementary effort, the new MIT Climate Policy Center. MIT has more than 300 faculty and senior researchers already working on climate issues, in collaboration with their students and staff. The Climate Project at MIT builds on their work and the Institute’s 2021 “Fast Forward” climate action plan.Richard Lester, MIT’s vice provost for international activities and the Japan Steel Industry Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering, has led the Climate Project’s formation; MIT will shortly hire a vice president for climate to oversee the project. The six Climate Missions and the new mission directors are as follows:Decarbonizing energy and industryThis mission supports advances in the electric power grid as well as the transition across all industry — including transportation, computing, heavy production, and manufacturing — to low-emissions pathways.The mission director is Elsa Olivetti PhD ’07, who is MIT’s associate dean of engineering, the Jerry McAfee Professor in Engineering, and a professor of materials science and engineering since 2014.Olivetti analyzes and improves the environmental sustainability of materials throughout the life cycle and across the supply chain, by linking physical and chemical processes to systems impact. She researches materials design and synthesis using natural language processing, builds models of material supply and technology demand, and assesses the potential for recovering value from industrial waste through experimental approaches. Olivetti has experience building partnerships across the Institute and working with industry to implement large-scale climate solutions through her role as co-director of the MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium (MCSC) and as faculty lead for PAIA, an industry consortium on the carbon footprinting of computing.Restoring the atmosphere, protecting the land and oceansThis mission is centered on removing or storing greenhouse gases that have already been emitted into the atmosphere, such as carbon dioxide and methane, and on protecting ocean and land ecosystems, including food and water systems.MIT has chosen two mission directors: Andrew Babbin and Jesse Kroll. The two bring together research expertise from two critical domains of the Earth system, oceans and the atmosphere, as well as backgrounds in both the science and engineering underlying our understanding of Earth’s climate. As co-directors, they jointly link MIT’s School of Science and School of Engineering in this domain.Babbin is the Cecil and Ida Green Career Development Professor in MIT’s Program in Atmospheres, Oceans, and Climate. He is a marine biogeochemist whose specialty is studying the carbon and nitrogen cycle of the oceans, work that is related to evaluating the ocean’s capacity for carbon storage, an essential element of this mission’s work. He has been at MIT since 2017.Kroll is a professor in MIT’s Department of of Civil and Environmental Engineering, a professor of chemical engineering, and the director of the Ralph M. Parsons Laboratory. He is a chemist who studies organic compounds and particulate matter in the atmosphere, in order to better understand how perturbations to the atmosphere, both intentional and unintentional, can affect air pollution and climate.Empowering frontline communitiesThis mission focuses on the development of new climate solutions in support of the world’s most vulnerable populations, in areas ranging from health effects to food security, emergency planning, and risk forecasting.The mission director is Miho Mazereeuw, an associate professor of architecture and urbanism in MIT’s Department of Architecture in the School of Architecture and Planning, and director of MIT’s Urban Risk Lab. Mazereeuw researches disaster resilience, climate change, and coastal strategies. Her lab has engaged in design projects ranging from physical objects to software, while exploring methods of engaging communities and governments in preparedness efforts, skills she brings to bear on building strong collaborations with a broad range of stakeholders.Mazereeuw is also co-lead of one of the five projects selected in MIT’s Climate Grand Challenges competition in 2022, an effort to help communities prepare by understanding the risk of extreme weather events for specific locations.Building and adapting healthy, resilient citiesA majority of the world’s population lives in cities, so urban design and planning is a crucial part of climate work, involving transportation, infrastructure, finance, government, and more.Christoph Reinhart, the Alan and Terri Spoon Professor of Architecture and Climate and director of MIT’s Building Technology Program in the School of Architecture and Planning, is the mission director in this area. The Sustainable Design Lab that Reinhart founded when he joined MIT in 2012 has launched several technology startups, including Mapdwell Solar System, now part of Palmetto Clean Technology, as well as Solemma, makers of an environmental building design software used in architectural practice and education worldwide. Reinhart’s online course on Sustainable Building Design has an enrollment of over 55,000 individuals and forms part of MIT’s XSeries Program in Future Energy Systems.Inventing new policy approachesClimate change is a unique crisis. With that in mind, this mission aims to develop new institutional structures and incentives — in carbon markets, finance, trade policy, and more — along with decision support tools and systems for scaling up climate efforts.Christopher Knittel brings extensive knowledge of these topics to the mission director role. The George P. Shultz Professor and Professor of Applied Economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management, Knittel has produced high-impact research in multiple areas; his studies on emissions and the automobile industry have evaluated fuel-efficiency standards, changes in vehicle fuel efficiency, market responses to fuel-price changes, and the health impact of automobiles.Beyond that, Knittel has also studied the impact of the energy transition on jobs, conducted high-level evaluations of climate policies, and examined energy market structures. He joined the MIT faculty in 2011. He also serves as the director of the MIT Climate Policy Center, which will work closely with all six missions.Wild cardsThis mission consists of what the Climate Project at MIT calls “unconventional solutions outside the scope of the other missions,” and will have a broad portfolio for innovation.While all the missions will be charged with encouraging unorthodox approaches within their domains, this mission will seek out unconventional solutions outside the scope of the others, and has a broad mandate for promoting them.The mission director in this case is Benedetto Marelli, the Paul M. Cook Career Development Associate Professor in MIT’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Marelli’s research group develops biopolymers and bioinspired materials with reduced environmental impact compared to traditional technologies. He engages with research at multiple scales, including nanofabrication, and the research group has conducted extensive work on food security and safety while exploring new techniques to reduce waste through enhanced food preservation and to precisely deliver agrochemicals in plants and in soil.As Lester and other MIT leaders have noted, the Climate Project at MIT is still being shaped, and will have the flexibility to accommodate a wide range of projects, partnerships, and approaches needed for thoughtful, fast-moving change. By filling out the leadership structure, today’s announcement is a major milestone in making the project operational.In addition to the six Climate Missions, the Climate Project at MIT includes Climate Frontier Projects, which are efforts launched by these missions, and a Climate HQ, which will support fundamental research, education, and outreach, as well as new resources to connect research to the practical work of climate response. More

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      in Energy

      Proton-conducting materials could enable new green energy technologies

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      As the name suggests, most electronic devices today work through the movement of electrons. But materials that can efficiently conduct protons — the nucleus of the hydrogen atom — could be key to a number of important technologies for combating global climate change.Most proton-conducting inorganic materials available now require undesirably high temperatures to achieve sufficiently high conductivity. However, lower-temperature alternatives could enable a variety of technologies, such as more efficient and durable fuel cells to produce clean electricity from hydrogen, electrolyzers to make clean fuels such as hydrogen for transportation, solid-state proton batteries, and even new kinds of computing devices based on iono-electronic effects.In order to advance the development of proton conductors, MIT engineers have identified certain traits of materials that give rise to fast proton conduction. Using those traits quantitatively, the team identified a half-dozen new candidates that show promise as fast proton conductors. Simulations suggest these candidates will perform far better than existing materials, although they still need to be conformed experimentally. In addition to uncovering potential new materials, the research also provides a deeper understanding at the atomic level of how such materials work.The new findings are described in the journal Energy and Environmental Sciences, in a paper by MIT professors Bilge Yildiz and Ju Li, postdocs Pjotrs Zguns and Konstantin Klyukin, and their collaborator Sossina Haile and her students from Northwestern University. Yildiz is the Breene M. Kerr Professor in the departments of Nuclear Science and Engineering, and Materials Science and Engineering.“Proton conductors are needed in clean energy conversion applications such as fuel cells, where we use hydrogen to produce carbon dioxide-free electricity,” Yildiz explains. “We want to do this process efficiently, and therefore we need materials that can transport protons very fast through such devices.”Present methods of producing hydrogen, for example steam methane reforming, emit a great deal of carbon dioxide. “One way to eliminate that is to electrochemically produce hydrogen from water vapor, and that needs very good proton conductors,” Yildiz says. Production of other important industrial chemicals and potential fuels, such as ammonia, can also be carried out through efficient electrochemical systems that require good proton conductors.But most inorganic materials that conduct protons can only operate at temperatures of 200 to 600 degrees Celsius (roughly 450 to 1,100 Fahrenheit), or even higher. Such temperatures require energy to maintain and can cause degradation of materials. “Going to higher temperatures is not desirable because that makes the whole system more challenging, and the material durability becomes an issue,” Yildiz says. “There is no good inorganic proton conductor at room temperature.” Today, the only known room-temperature proton conductor is a polymeric material that is not practical for applications in computing devices because it can’t easily be scaled down to the nanometer regime, she says.To tackle the problem, the team first needed to develop a basic and quantitative understanding of exactly how proton conduction works, taking a class of inorganic proton conductors, called solid acids. “One has to first understand what governs proton conduction in these inorganic compounds,” she says. While looking at the materials’ atomic configurations, the researchers identified a pair of characteristics that directly relates to the materials’ proton-carrying potential.As Yildiz explains, proton conduction first involves a proton “hopping from a donor oxygen atom to an acceptor oxygen. And then the environment has to reorganize and take the accepted proton away, so that it can hop to another neighboring acceptor, enabling long-range proton diffusion.” This process happens in many inorganic solids, she says. Figuring out how that last part works — how the atomic lattice gets reorganized to take the accepted proton away from the original donor atom — was a key part of this research, she says.The researchers used computer simulations to study a class of materials called solid acids that become good proton conductors above 200 degrees Celsius. This class of materials has a substructure called the polyanion group sublattice, and these groups have to rotate and take the proton away from its original site so it can then transfer to other sites. The researchers were able to identify the phonons that contribute to the flexibility of this sublattice, which is essential for proton conduction. Then they used this information to comb through vast databases of theoretically and experimentally possible compounds, in search of better proton conducting materials.As a result, they found solid acid compounds that are promising proton conductors and that have been developed and produced for a variety of different applications but never before studied as proton conductors; these compounds turned out to have just the right characteristics of lattice flexibility. The team then carried out computer simulations of how the specific materials they identified in their initial screening would perform under relevant temperatures, to confirm their suitability as proton conductors for fuel cells or other uses. Sure enough, they found six promising materials, with predicted proton conduction speeds faster than the best existing solid acid proton conductors.“There are uncertainties in these simulations,” Yildiz cautions. “I don’t want to say exactly how much higher the conductivity will be, but these look very promising. Hopefully this motivates the experimental field to try to synthesize them in different forms and make use of these compounds as proton conductors.”Translating these theoretical findings into practical devices could take some years, she says. The likely first applications would be for electrochemical cells to produce fuels and chemical feedstocks such as hydrogen and ammonia, she says.The work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, the Wallenberg Foundation, and the U.S. National Science Foundation. More

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      in Environment

      Collaborative effort supports an MIT resilient to the impacts of extreme heat

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      Warmer weather can be a welcome change for many across the MIT community. But as climate impacts intensify, warm days are often becoming hot days with increased severity and frequency. Already this summer, heat waves in June and July brought daily highs of over 90 degrees Fahrenheit. According to the Resilient Cambridge report published in 2021, from the 1970s to 2000, data from the Boston Logan International Airport weather station reported an average of 10 days of 90-plus temperatures each year. Now, simulations are predicting that, in the current time frame of 2015-44, the number of days above 90 F could be triple the 1970-2000 average. While the increasing heat is all but certain, how institutions like MIT will be affected and how they respond continues to evolve. “We know what the science is showing, but how will this heat impact the ability of MIT to fulfill its mission and support its community?” asks Brian Goldberg, assistant director of the MIT Office of Sustainability. “What will be the real feel of these temperatures on campus?” These questions and more are guiding staff, researchers, faculty, and students working collaboratively to understand these impacts to MIT and inform decisions and action plans in response.This work is part of developing MIT’s forthcoming Climate Resiliency and Adaptation Roadmap, which is called for in MIT’s climate action plan, and is co-led by Goldberg; Laura Tenny, senior campus planner; and William Colehower, senior advisor to the vice president for campus services and stewardship. This effort is also supported by researchers in the departments of Urban Studies and Planning, Architecture, and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), in the Urban Risk Lab and the Senseable City Lab, as well as by staff in MIT Emergency Management and Housing and Residential Services. The roadmap — which builds upon years of resiliency planning and research at MIT — will include an assessment of current and future conditions on campus as well as strategies and proposed interventions to support MIT’s community and campus in the face of increasing climate impacts.A key piece of the resiliency puzzleWhen the City of Cambridge released their Climate Change Vulnerability Assessment in 2015, the report identified flooding and heat as primary resiliency risks to the city. In response, Institute staff worked together with the city to create a full picture of potential flood risks to both Cambridge and the campus, with the latter becoming the MIT Climate Resiliency Dashboard. The dashboard, published in the MIT Sustainability DataPool, has played an important role in campus planning and resiliency efforts since its debut in 2021, but heat has been a missing piece of the tool. This is largely because for heat, unlike flooding, few data exist relative to building-level impacts. The original assessment from Cambridge showed a model of temperature averages that could be expected in portions of the city, but understanding the measured heat impacts down to the building level is essential because impacts of heat can vary so greatly. “Heat also doesn’t conform to topography like flooding, making it harder to map it with localized specificity,” notes Tenny. “Microclimates, humidity levels, shade or sun aspect, and other factors contribute to heat risk.”Collection efforts have been underway for the past three years to fill in this gap in baseline data. Members of the Climate and Resiliency Adaptation Roadmap team and partners have helped build and place heat sensors to record and analyze data. The current heat sensors, which are shoebox-shaped devices on tripods, can be found at multiple outdoor locations on campus during the summer, capturing and recording temperatures multiple times each hour. “Urban environmental phenomena are hyperlocal. While National Weather Service readouts at locations like Logan Airport are extremely valuable, this gives us a more high-resolution understanding of the urban microclimate on our campus,” notes Sanjana Paul, past technical associate with Senseable City and current graduate student in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning who helps oversee data collection and analysis.After collection, temperature data are analyzed and mapped. The data will soon be published in the updated Climate Resiliency Dashboard and will help inform actions through the Climate Resiliency and Adaptation Roadmap, but in the meantime, the information has already provided some important insights. “There were some parts of campus that were much hotter than I expected,” explains Paul. “Some of the temperature readings across campus were regularly going over 100 degrees during heat waves. It’s a bit surprising to see three digits on a temperature reading in Cambridge.” Some strategies are also already being put into action, including planting more trees to support the urban campus forest and launching cooling locations around campus to open during days of extreme heat.As data gathering enters its fourth summer, partners continue to expand. Senseable City first began capturing data in 2021 using sensors placed on MIT Recycling trucks, and the Urban Risk Lab has offered community-centered temperature data collection with the help of its director and associate professor of architecture, Miho Mazereeuw. More recently, students in course 6.900 (Engineering for Impact) worked to design heat sensors to aid in the data collection and grow the fleet of sensors on campus. Co-instructed by EECS senior lecturer Joe Steinmeyer and EECS professor Joel Voldman, students in the course were tasked with developing technology to solve challenges close at hand. “One of the goals of the class is to tackle real-world problems so students emerge with confidence as an engineer,” explains Voldman. “Having them work on a challenge that is outside their comfort zone and impacts them really helps to engage and inspire them.” Centering on peopleWhile the temperature data offer one piece of the resiliency planning puzzle, knowing how these temperatures will affect community members is another. “When we look at impacts to our campus from heat, people are the focus,” explains Goldberg. “While stress on campus infrastructure is one factor we are evaluating, our primary focus is the vulnerability of people to extreme heat.” Impacts to community members can range from disrupted nights of sleep to heat-related illnesses.As the team looked at the data and spoke with individuals across campus, it became clear that some community members might be more vulnerable than others to the impact of extreme heat days, including ground, janitorial, and maintenance crews who work outside; kitchen staff who work close to hot equipment; and student athletes exerting themselves on hot days. “We know that people on our campus are already experiencing these extreme heat days differently,” explains Susy Jones, senior sustainability project manager in the Office of Sustainability who focuses on environmental and climate justice. “We need to design strategies and augment existing interventions with equity in mind, ensuring everyone on campus can fulfill their role at MIT.”To support those strategy decisions, the resiliency team is seeking additional input from the MIT community. One hoped-for outcome of the roadmap and dashboard is for community members to review them and offer their own insight and experiences of heat conditions on campus. “These plans need to work at the campus level and the individual,” says Goldberg. “The data tells an important story, but individuals help us complete the picture.”A model for othersAs the dashboard update nears completion and the broader resiliency and adaptation roadmap of strategies launches, their purpose is twofold: help MIT develop and inform plans and procedures for mitigating and addressing heat on campus, and serve as a model for other universities and communities grappling with the same challenges. “This approach is the center of how we operate at MIT,” explains Director of Sustainability Julie Newman. “We seek to identify solutions for our own campus in a manner that others can learn from and potentially adapt for their own resiliency and climate planning purposes. We’re also looking to align with efforts at the city and state level.” By publishing the roadmap broadly, universities and municipalities can apply lessons and processes to their own spaces.When the updated Climate Resiliency Dashboard and Climate Resiliency and Adaptation Roadmap go live, it will mark the beginning of the next phase of work, rather than an end. “The dashboard is designed to present these impacts in a way everyone can understand so people across campus can respond and help us understand what is needed for them to continue to fulfill their role at MIT,” says Goldberg. Uncertainty plays a big role in resiliency planning, and the dashboard will reflect that. “This work is not something you ever say is done,” says Goldberg. “As information and data evolves, so does our work.”  More