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      in Energy

      Bringing sustainable and affordable electricity to all

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      When MIT electrical engineer Reja Amatya PhD ’12 arrived in Rwanda in 2015, she was whisked off to a village. She saw that diesel generators provided power to the local health center, bank, and shops, but like most of rural Rwanda, Karambi’s 200 homes did not have electricity. Amatya knew the hilly terrain would make it challenging to connect the village to high-voltage lines from the capital, Kigali, 50 kilometers away.

      While many consider electricity a basic human right, there are places where people have never flipped a light switch. Among the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals is global access to affordable, reliable, and sustainable energy by 2030. Recently, the U.N. reported that progress in global electrification had slowed due to the challenge of reaching those hardest to reach.

      Researchers from the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) and Comillas Pontifical University in Madrid created Waya Energy Inc., a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based startup commercializing MIT-developed planning and analysis software, to help governments determine the most cost-effective ways to provide electricity to all their citizens.

      The researchers’ 2015 trip to Rwanda marked the beginning of four years of phone calls, Zoom meetings, and international travel to help the east African country — still reeling from the 1994 genocide that killed more than a million people — develop a national electrification strategy and extend its power infrastructure.

      Amatya, Waya president and one of five Waya co-founders, knew that electrifying Karambi and the rest of the country would provide new opportunities for work, education, and connections — and the ability to charge cellphones, often an expensive and inconvenient undertaking.

      To date, Waya — with funding from the Asian Development Bank, the African Development Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank for Latin America, and the World Bank — has helped governments develop electrification plans in 22 countries on almost every continent, including in refugee camps in sub-Saharan Africa’s Sahel and Chad regions, where violence has led to 3 million internally displaced people.

      “With a modeling and visualization tool like ours, we are able to look at the entire spectrum of need and demand and say, ‘OK, what might be the most optimized solution?’” Amatya says.

      More than 15 graduate students and researchers from MIT and Comillas contributed to the development of Waya’s software under the supervision of Robert Stoner, the interim director at MITEI, and Ignacio Pérez-Arriaga, a visiting professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management from Comillas. Pérez-Arriaga looks at how changing electricity use patterns have forced utilities worldwide to rethink antiquated business models.

      The team’s Reference Electrification Model (REM) software pulls information from population density maps, satellite images, infrastructure data, and geospatial points of interest to determine where extending the grid will be most cost-effective and where other solutions would be more practical.

      “I always say we are agnostic to the technology,” Amatya says. “Traditionally, the only way to provide long-term reliable access was through the grid, but that’s changing. In many developing countries, there are many more challenges for utilities to provide reliable service.”

      Off-grid solutions

      Waya co-founder Stoner, who is also the founding director of the MIT Tata Center for Technology and Design, recognized early on that connecting homes to existing infrastructure was not always economically feasible. What’s more, billions of people with grid connections had unreliable access due to uneven regulation and challenging terrain.

      With Waya co-founders Andres Gonzalez-Garcia, a MITEI affiliate researcher, and Professor Fernando de Cuadra Garcia of Comillas, Pérez-Arriaga and Stoner led a team that developed a set of principles to guide universal regional electrification. Their approach — which they dubbed the Integrated Distribution Framework — incorporates elements of optimal planning as well as novel business models and regulation. Getting all three right is “necessary,” Stoner says, “if you want a viable long-term outcome.”

      Amatya says, “Initially, we designed REM to understand what the level of demand is in these countries with very rural and poor populations, and what the system should look like to serve it. We took a lot of that input into developing the model.” In 2019, Waya was created to commercialize the software and add consulting to the package of services the team provides.

      Now, in addition to advising governments and regulators on how to expand existing grids, Waya proposes options such as a mini-grid, powered by renewables like wind, hydropower, or solar, to serve single villages or large-scale mini-grid solutions for larger areas. In some cases, an even more localized, scalable solution is a mesh grid, which might consist of a single solar panel for a few houses that, over time, can be expanded and ultimately connected to the main grid.

      The REM software has been used to design off-grid systems for remote and mountainous regions in Uganda, Peru, Nigeria, Cambodia, Indonesia, India, and elsewhere. When Tata Power, India’s largest integrated power company, saw how well mini-grids would serve parts of east India, the company created a mini-grid division called Tata Renewables.

      Amatya notes that the REM software enables her to come up with an entire national electrification plan from her workspace in Cambridge. But site visits and on-the-ground partners are critical in helping the Waya team understand existing systems, engage with clients to assess demand, and identify stakeholders. In Haiti, an energy consultant reported that the existing grid had typically been operational only six out of every 24 hours. In Karambi, University of Rwanda students surveyed the village’s 200 families and helped lead a community-wide meeting.

      Waya connects with on-the-ground experts and agencies “who can engage directly with the government and other stakeholders, because many times those are the doors that we knock on,” Amatya says. “Local energy ministries, utilities, and regulators have to be open to regulatory change. They have to be open to working with financial institutions and new technology.”

      The goals of regulators, energy providers, funding agencies, and government officials must align in real time “to provide reliable access to energy for a billion people,” she says.

      Moving past challenges

      Growing up in Kathmandu, Amatya used to travel to remote villages with her father, an electrical engineer who designed cable systems for landlines for Nepal Telecom. She remembers being fascinated by the high-voltage lines crisscrossing Nepal on these trips. Now, she points out utility poles to her children and explains how the distribution lines carry power from local substations to customers.

      After majoring in engineering science and physics at Smith College, Amatya completed her PhD in electrical engineering at MIT in 2012. Within two years, she was traveling to off-grid communities in India as a research scientist exploring potential technologies for providing access. There were unexpected challenges: At the time, digitized geospatial data didn’t exist for many regions. In India in 2013, the team used phones to take pictures of paper maps spread out on tables. Team members now scour digital data available through Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and other sources for useful geographical information. 

      It’s one thing to create a plan, Amatya says, but how it gets utilized and implemented becomes a big question. With all the players involved — funding agencies, elected officials, utilities, private companies, and regulators within the countries themselves — it’s sometimes hard to know who’s responsible for next steps.

      “Besides providing technical expertise, our team engages with governments to, let’s say, develop a financial plan or an implementation plan,” she says. Ideally, Waya hopes to stay involved with each project long enough to ensure that its proposal becomes the national electrification strategy of the country. That’s no small feat, given the multiple players, the opaque nature of government, and the need to enact a regulatory framework where none may have existed.

      For Rwanda, Waya identified areas without service, estimated future demand, and proposed the most cost-effective ways to meet that demand with a mix of grid and off-grid solutions. Based on the electrification plan developed by the Waya team, officials have said they hope to have the entire country electrified by 2024.

      In 2017, by the time the team submitted its master plan, which included an off-grid solution for Karambi, Amatya was surprised to learn that electrification in the village had already occurred — an example, she says, of the challenging nature of local planning.

      Perhaps because of Waya’s focus and outreach efforts, Karambi had become a priority. However it happened, Amatya is happy that Karambi’s 200 families finally have access to electricity. More

    • 175 Shares159 Views

      in Environment

      Q&A: Gabriela Sá Pessoa on Brazilian politics, human rights in the Amazon, and AI

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      Gabriela Sá Pessoa is a journalist passionate about the intersection of human rights and climate change. She came to MIT from The Washington Post, where she worked from her home country of Brazil as a news researcher reporting on the Amazon, human rights violations, and environmental crimes. Before that, she held roles at two of the most influential media outlets in Brazil: Folha de S.Paulo, covering local and national politics, and UOL, where she was assigned to coronavirus coverage and later joined the investigative desk.

      Sá Pessoa was awarded the 2023 Elizabeth Neuffer Fellowship by the International Women’s Media Foundation, which supports its recipient with research opportunities at MIT and further training at The Boston Globe and The New York Times. She is currently based at the MIT Center for International Studies. Recently, she sat down to talk about her work on the Amazon, recent changes in Brazilian politics, and her experience at MIT.

      Q: One focus of your reporting is human rights and environmental issues in the Amazon. As part of your fellowship, you contributed to a recent editorial in The Boston Globe on fighting deforestation in the region. Why is reporting on this topic important?

      A: For many Brazilians, the Amazon is a remote and distant territory, and people living in other parts of the country aren’t fully aware of all of its problems and all of its potential. This is similar to the United States — like many people here, they don’t see how they could be related to the human rights violations and the destruction of the rainforest that are happening.

      But, we are all complicit in the destruction in some ways because the economic forces driving the deforestation of the rainforest all have a market, and these markets are everywhere, in Brazil and here in the U.S. I think it is part of journalism to show people in the U.S., Brazil, and elsewhere that we are part of the problem, and as part of the problem, we should be part of the solution by being aware of it, caring about it, and taking actions that are within our power.

      In the U.S., for example, voters can influence policy like the current negotiations for financial support for fighting deforestation in the Amazon. And as consumers, we can be more aware — is the beef we are consuming related to deforestation? Is the timber on our construction sites coming from the Amazon?

      Truth is, in Brazil, we have turned our backs to the Amazon for so long. It’s our duty to protect it for the sake of climate change. If we don’t take care of it, there will be serious consequences to our local climate, our local communities, and for the whole world. It’s a huge matter of human rights because our living depends on that, both locally and globally.

      Q: Before coming to MIT, you were at The Washington Post in São Paulo, where you contributed to reporting on the recent presidential election. What changes do you expect to see with the new Lula administration?

      A: To climate and environment, the first signs were positive. But the optimism did not last a semester, as politics is imposing itself. Lula is facing increasing difficulty building a majority in a conservative Congress, over which agribusiness holds tremendous power and influence. As we speak, environmental policy is under Congress’s attack. A committee in the House has just passed a ruling drowning power from the environmental minister, Marina Silva, and from the recently created National Indigenous People Ministry, led by Sonia Guajajara. Both Marina and Sonia are global ecological and human rights champions, and I wonder what the impact would be if Congress ratifies these changes. It is still unclear how it would impact the efforts to fight deforestation.

      In addition, there is an internal dispute in the government between environmentalists and those in favor of mining and big infrastructure projects. Petrobras, the state-run oil company, is trying to get authorization to research and drill offshore oil reserves in the mouth of the Amazon River. The federal environmental protection agency did a conclusive report suspending the operation, saying it is critical and threatens the region’s sensitive environment and indigenous communities. And, of course, it would be another source of greenhouse gas emissions. ​

      That said, it’s not a denialist government. I should mention the quick response from the administration to the Yanomami genocide earlier this year. In January, an independent media organization named Sumaúma reported on the deaths of over five hundred indigenous children from the Yanomami community in the Amazon over the past four years. This was a huge shock in Brazil, and the administration responded immediately. They sent task forces to the region and are now expelling the illegal miners that were bringing diseases and were ultimately responsible for these humanitarian tragedies. To be clear: It is still a problem. It’s not solved. But this is already a good example of positive action.

      Fighting deforestation in the Amazon and the Cerrado, another biome critical to climate regulation in Brazil, will not be easy. Rebuilding the environmental policy will take time, and the agencies responsible for enforcement are understaffed. In addition, environmental crime has become more sophisticated, connecting with other major criminal organizations in the country. In April, for the first time, there was a reduction in deforestation in the Amazon after two consecutive months of higher numbers. These are still preliminary data, and it is still too early to confirm whether they signal a turning point and may indicate a tendency for deforestation to decrease. On the other hand, the Cerrado registered record deforestation in April.

      There are problems everywhere in the economy and politics that Lula will have to face. In the first week of the new term, on Jan. 8, we saw an insurrection in Brasília, the country’s capital, from Bolsonaro voters who wouldn’t accept the election results. The events resembled what Americans saw in the Capitol attacks in 2021. We also seem to have imported problems from the United States, like mass killings in schools. We never used to have them in Brazil, but we are seeing them now. I’m curious to see how the country will address those problems and if the U.S. can also inspire solutions to that. That’s something I’m thinking about, being here: Are there solutions here? What are they?

      Q: What have you learned so far from MIT and your fellowship?

      A: It’s hard to put everything into words! I’m mostly taking courses and attending lectures on pressing issues to humanity, like existential threats such as climate change, artificial intelligence, biosecurity, and more.

      I’m learning about all these issues, but also, as a journalist, I think that I’m learning more about how I can incorporate the scientific approach into my work; for example, being more pro-positive. I am already a rigorous journalist, but I am thinking about how I can be more rigorous and more transparent about my methods. Being in the academic and scientific environment is inspiring that way.

      I am also learning a lot about how to cover scientific topics and thinking about how technology can offer us solutions (and problems). I’m learning so much that I think I will need some time to digest and fully understand what this period means for me!

      Q: You mentioned artificial intelligence. Would you like to weigh in on this subject and what you have been learning?

      A: It has been a particularly good semester to be at MIT. Generative artificial intelligence, which became more popular after ChatGPT, has been a topic of intense discussion this semester, and I was able to attend many classes, seminars, and events about AI here, especially from a policy perspective.

      Algorithms have influenced the economy, society, and public health for many years. It has had great outcomes, but also injustice. Popular systems like ChatGPT have made this technology incredibly popular and accessible, even for those with no computer knowledge. This is scary and, at the same time, very exciting. Here, I learned that we need guardrails for artificial intelligence, just like other technologies. Think of the pharmaceutical or automobile industries, which have to meet safety criteria before putting a new product on the market. But with artificial intelligence, it’s going to be different; supply chains are very complex and sometimes not very transparent, and the speed at which new resources develop is so fast that it challenges the policymaker’s ability to respond.

      Artificial intelligence is changing the world radically. It’s exciting to have the privilege of being here and seeing these discussions take place. After all, I have a future to report on. At least, I hope so!

      Q: What are you working on going forward?

      A: After MIT, I am going to New York, where I’ll be working with The New York Times in their internship program. I’m really excited about that because it will be a different pace from MIT. I am also doing research on carbon credit markets and hope to continue that project, either in a reporting or academic environment. 

      Honestly, I feel inspired to keep studying. I would love to spend more time here at MIT. I would love to do a master’s or join any program here. I’m going to work on coming back to academia because I think that I need to learn more from the academic environment. I hope that it’s at MIT because honestly, it’s the most exciting environment that I’ve ever been in, with all the people here from different fields and different backgrounds. I’m not a scientist, but it’s inspiring to be with them, and if there’s a way that I could contribute to their work in a way that they’re contributing to my work, I’ll be thrilled to spend more time here. More

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      in Energy

      Mike Barrett: Climate goals may take longer, but we’ll get there

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      The Covid-19 pandemic, inflation, and the war in Ukraine have combined to cause unavoidable delays in implementation of Massachusetts’s ambitious goals to tackle climate change, state Senator Mike Barrett said during his April 19 presentation at the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) Earth Day Colloquium. But, he added, he remains optimistic that the goals will be reached, with a lag of perhaps two years.

      Barrett, who is senate chair of the state’s Joint Committee on Telecommunications, Utilities, and Energy, spoke on the topic of “Decarbonizing Massachusetts” at MIT’s Wong Auditorium as part of the Institute’s celebration of Earth Week. The event was accompanied by a poster session highlighting some the work of MIT students and faculty aimed at tackling aspects of the climate issue.

      Martha Broad, MITEI’s executive director, introduced Barrett by pointing out that he was largely responsible for the passage of two major climate-related bills by the Massachusetts legislature: the Roadmap Act in 2021 and the Drive Act in 2022, which together helped to place the state as one of the nation’s leaders in the implementation of measures to ratchet down greenhouse gas emissions.

      The two key pieces of legislation, Barrett said, were complicated bills that included many components, but a major feature of the Roadmap Act was to reduce the time between reassessments of the state’s climate plans from 10 years to five, and to divide the targets for emissions reductions into six separate categories instead of just a single overall number.

      The six sectors the bill delineated are transportation; commercial, industrial, and institutional buildings; residential buildings; industrial processes; natural gas infrastructure; and electricity generation. Each of these faces different challenges, and needs to be evaluated separately, he said.

      The second bill, the Drive Act, set specific targets for implementation of carbon-free electricity generation. “We prioritize offshore wind,” he pointed out, because that’s one resource where Massachusetts has a real edge over other states and regions. Because of especially shallow offshore waters and strong, steady offshore winds that tend to be strongest during the peak demand hours of late afternoon and evening, the state’s coastal waters are an especially promising site for offshore wind farms, he said.

      Whereas the majority of offshore wind installations around the world are in deep water, which precludes fixed foundations and adds significantly to construction costs, Massachusetts’s shallow waters can allow relatively inexpensive construction. “So you can see why offshore wind became a linchpin, not only to our cleaning up the grid, but to feeding it into the building system, and for that matter into transportation, through our electric vehicles,” he said.

      Massachusetts’s needs in addressing climate change are quite different from global averages, or even U.S. averages, he pointed out. Worldwide, agriculture accounts for some 22 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, and 11 percent nationally. In Massachusetts the figure is less than one-half of 1 percent. The industrial sector is also much smaller than the national average. Meanwhile, buildings account for only about 6 percent of U.S. emissions, but 13 percent in the state. That means that overall, “buildings, transportation, and power generation become the whole ballgame” for this state, “requiring a real focus in terms of our thinking,” he said.

      Because of that, in those climate bills “we really insisted on reducing emissions in the energy generation sector, and our primary way to get there … lies with wind, and most of that is offshore.” The law calls for emissions from power generation to be cut by 53 percent by 2025, and 70 percent by 2030. Meeting that goal depends heavily on offshore wind. “Clean power is critical because the transmission and transportation and buildings depend on clean power, and offshore wind is critical to that clean power strategy,” he said.

      At the time the bills passed, plans for new offshore wind farm installations showed that the state was well on target to meet these goals, Barrett said. “There was plenty of reason for Massachusetts to feel very optimistic about offshore wind … Everyone was bullish.” While Massachusetts is a small state — 44th out of 50 — because of its unusually favorable offshore conditions, “we are second in the United States in terms of plans to deploy offshore wind,” after New York, he said.

      But then the real world got in the way.

      As Europe and the U.K. quickly tried to pivot away from natural gas and oil in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the picture changed quickly. “Offshore wind suddenly had a lot of competition for the expertise, the equipment, and the materials,” he said.

      As just one example, he said, the ships needed for installation became unavailable. “Suddenly worldwide, there weren’t enough installation vessels to hold these very heavy components that have to be brought out to sea,” he said. About 20 to 40 such vessels are needed to install a single wind farm. “There are a limited number of these vessels capable of carrying these huge pieces of infrastructure in the world. And in the wake of stepped-up demand from Europe, and other places, including China, there was an enormous shortage of appropriate vessels.”

      That wasn’t the only obstacle. Prices of some key commodities also shot up, partly due to supply chain issues associated with the pandemic, and the resulting worldwide inflation. “The ramifications of these kinds of disruptions obviously have been felt worldwide,“ he said. For example, the Hornsea Project off the coast of the United Kingdom is the largest proposed offshore wind farm in the world, and one the U.K. was strongly dependent on to meet climate targets. But the developer of the project, Ørsted, said it could no longer proceed without a major government bailout. At this point, the project remains in limbo.

      In Massachusetts, the company Avangrid had a contract to build 60 offshore wind turbines to deliver 1,200 megawatts of power. But last month, in a highly unusual move for a major company, “they informed Massachusetts that they were terminating a contract they had signed.” That contract was a big part of the state’s overall clean energy strategy, he said. A second developer, that had also signed a contract for a 1,200-MW offshore farm, signaled that it too could not meet its contract.

      “We technically haven’t failed yet” in meeting the goals that were set for emissions reduction, Barrett said. “In theory, we have two years to recover from the setbacks that I’m describing.” Realistically, though, he said “it is quite likely that we’re not going to hit our 2025 and 2030 benchmarks.”

      But despite all this, Barrett ended his remarks on an essentially optimistic note. “I hate to see us fall off-pace in any way,” he said. But, he added, “the truth is that a short delay — and I think we’re looking at just a couple of years delay — is a speed bump, it’s not a roadblock. It is not the end of climate policy.”

      Worldwide demand for offshore wind power remains “extraordinary,” said Barrett, mainly as a result of the need to get off of Russian fossil fuel. As a result, “eventually supply will come into balance with this demand … The balance will be restored.”

      To monitor the process, Barrett said he has submitted legislation to create a new independent Climate Policy Commission, to examine in detail the data on performance in meeting the state’s climate goals and to make recommendations. The measure would provide open access to information for the public, allowing everyone to see the progress being made from an unbiased source.

      “Setbacks are going to happen,” he said. “This is a tough, tough job. While the real world is going to surprise us, persistence is critical.”

      He concluded that “I think we’re going to wind up building every windmill that we need for our emissions reduction policy. Just not on the timeline that we had hoped for.”

      The poster session was co-hosted by the MIT Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab and MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative. The full event was sponsored by the MIT Climate Nucleus. More

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      in Environment

      3 Questions: New MIT major and its role in fighting climate change

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      Launched this month, MIT’s new Bachelor of Science in climate system science and engineering is jointly offered by the departments of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) and Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS). As part of MIT’s commitment to aid the global response to climate change, the new degree program is designed to train the next generation of leaders, providing a foundational understanding of both the Earth system and engineering principles — as well as an understanding of human and institutional behavior as it relates to the climate challenge. Jadbabaie and Van der Hilst discuss the new Course 1-12 multidisciplinary major and why it’s needed now at MIT. 

      Q: What was the idea behind launching this new major at MIT?

      Jadbabaie: Climate change is an incredibly important issue that we must address, and time is of the essence. MIT is in a unique position to play a leadership role in this effort. We not only have the ability to advance the science of climate change and deepen our understanding of the climate system, but also to develop innovative engineering solutions for sustainability that can help us meet the climate goals set forth in the Paris Agreement. It is important that our educational approach also incorporates other aspects of this cross-cutting issue, ranging from climate justice, policy, to economics, and MIT is the perfect place to make this happen. With Course 1’s focus on sustainability across scales, from the nano to the global scale, and with Course 12 studying Earth system science in general, it was a natural fit for CEE and EAPS to tackle this challenge together. It is my belief that we can leverage our collective expertise and resources to make meaningful progress. There has never been a more crucial time for us to advance students’ understanding of both climate science and engineering, as well as their understanding of the societal implications of climate risk.

      Van der Hilst: Climate change is a global issue, and the solutions we urgently need for building a net-zero future must consider how everything is connected. The Earth’s climate is a complex web of cause and effect between the oceans, atmosphere, ecosystems, and processes that shape the surface and environmental systems of the planet. To truly understand climate risks, we need to understand the fundamental science that governs these interconnected systems — and we need to consider the ways that human activity influences their behavior. The types of large-scale engineering projects that we need to secure a sustainable future must take into consideration the Earth system itself. A systems approach to modeling is crucial if we are to succeed at inventing, designing, and implementing solutions that can reduce greenhouse gas emissions, build climate resilience, and mitigate the inevitable climate-related natural disasters that we’ll face. That’s why our two departments are collaborating on a degree program that equips students with foundational climate science knowledge alongside fundamental engineering principles in order to catalyze the innovation we’ll need to meet the world’s 2050 goals.

      Q: How is MIT uniquely positioned to lead undergraduate education in climate system science and engineering? 

      Jadbabaie: It’s a great example of how MIT is taking a leadership role and multidisciplinary approach to tackling climate change by combining engineering and climate system science in one undergraduate major. The program leverages MIT’s academic strengths, focusing on teaching hard analytical and computational skills while also providing a curriculum that includes courses in a wide range of topics, from climate economics and policy to ethics, climate justice, and even climate literature, to help students develop an understanding of the political and social issues that are tied to climate change. Given the strong ties between courses 1 and 12, we want the students in the program to be full members of both departments, as well as both the School of Engineering and the School of Science. And, being MIT, there is no shortage of opportunities for undergraduate research and entrepreneurship — in fact, we specifically encourage students to participate in the active research of the departments. The knowledge and skills our students gain will enable them to serve the nation and the world in a meaningful way as they tackle complex global-scale environmental problems. The students at MIT are among the most passionate and driven people out there. I’m really excited to see what kind of innovations and solutions will come out of this program in the years to come. I think this undergraduate major is a fantastic step in the right direction.

      Q: What opportunities will the major provide to students for addressing climate change?

      Van der Hilst: Both industry and government are actively seeking new talent to respond to the challenges — and opportunities — posed by climate change and our need to build a sustainable future. What’s exciting is that many of the best jobs in this field call for leaders who can combine the analytical skill of a scientist with the problem-solving mindset of an engineer. That’s exactly what this new degree program at MIT aims to prepare students for — in an expanding set of careers in areas like renewable energy, civil infrastructure, risk analysis, corporate sustainability, environmental advocacy, and policymaking. But it’s not just about career opportunities. It’s also about making a real difference and safeguarding our future. It’s not too late to prevent much more damaging changes to Earth’s climate. Indeed, whether in government, industry, or academia, MIT students are future leaders — as such it is critically important that all MIT students understand the basics of climate system science and engineering along with math, physics, chemistry, and biology. The new Course 1-12 degree was designed to forge students who are passionate about protecting our planet into the next generation of leaders who can fast-track high-impact, science-based solutions to aid the global response, with an eye toward addressing some of the uneven social impacts inherent in the climate crisis. More

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      in Environment

      Engaging enterprises with the climate crisis

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      Almost every large corporation is committed to achieving net zero carbon emissions by 2050 but lacks a roadmap to get there, says John Sterman, professor of management at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, co-director of the MIT Sloan Sustainability Initiative, and leader of its Climate Pathways Project. Sterman and colleagues offer a suite of well-honed strategies to smooth this journey, including a free global climate policy simulator called En-ROADS deployed in workshops that have educated more than 230,000 people, including thousands of senior elected officials and leaders in business and civil society around the world. 

      Running on ordinary laptops, En-ROADS examines how we can reduce carbon emissions to keep global warming under 2 degrees Celsius, Sterman says. Users, expert or not, can easily explore how dozens of policies, such as pricing carbon and electrifying vehicles, can affect hundreds of factors such as temperature, energy prices, and sea level rise. 

      En-ROADs and related work on climate change are just one thread in Sterman’s decades of research to integrate environmental sustainability with business decisions. 

      “There’s a fundamental alignment between a healthy environment, a healthy society, and a healthy economy,” he says. “Destroy the environment and you destroy the economy and society. Likewise, hungry, ill-housed, insecure people, lacking decent jobs and equity in opportunity, will catch the last fish and cut the last tree, destroying the environment and society. Unfortunately, a lot of businesses still see the issue as a trade-off — if we focus on the environment, it will hurt our bottom line; if we improve working conditions, it will raise our labor costs. That turns out not to be true in many, many cases. But how can we help people understand that fundamental alignment? That’s where simulation models can play a big role.”

      Play video

      Learning with management flight simulators 

      “My original field is system dynamics, a method for understanding the complex systems in which we’re embedded—whether those are organizations, companies, markets, society as a whole, or the climate system” Sterman says. “You can build these wonderful, complex simulation models that offer important insights and insight into high-leverage policies so that organizations can make significant improvements.” 

      “But those models don’t do any good at all unless the folks in those organizations can learn for themselves about what those high-leverage opportunities are,” he emphasizes. “You can show people the best scientific evidence, the best data, and it’s not necessarily going to change their minds about what they ought to be doing. You’ve got to create a process that helps smart but busy people learn how they can improve their organizations.” 

      Sterman and his colleagues pioneered management flight simulators — which, like aircraft flight simulators, offer an environment in which you can make decisions, seeing what works and what doesn’t, at low cost with no risk. 

      “People learn best from experience and experiment,” he points out. “But in many of the most important settings that we face today, experience comes too late to be useful, and experiments are impossible. In such settings, simulation becomes the only way people can learn for themselves and gain the confidence to change their behavior in the real world.” 

      “You can’t learn to fly a new jetliner by watching someone else; to learn, one must be at the controls,” Sterman emphasizes. “People don’t change deeply embedded beliefs and behaviors just because somebody tells them that what they’re doing is harmful and there are better options. People have to learn for themselves.”

      Play video

      Learning the business of sustainability 

      His longstanding “laboratory for sustainable business” course lets MIT Sloan School students learn the state of the art in sustainability challenges — not just climate change but microplastics, water shortages, toxins in our food and air, and other crises. As part of the course, students work in teams with organizations on real sustainability challenges. “We’ve had a very wide range of companies and other organizations participate, and many of them come back year after year,” Sterman says. 

      MIT Sloan also offers executive education in sustainability, in both open enrollment and customized programs. “We’ve had all kinds of folks, from all over the world and every industry” he says. 

      In his opening class for executive MBAs, he polls attendees to ask if sustainability is a material issue for their companies, and how actively those companies are addressing that issue. Almost all of the attendees agree that sustainability is a key issue, but nearly all say their companies are not doing enough, with many saying they “comply with all applicable laws and regulations.” 

      “So there’s a huge disconnect,” Sterman points out. “How do you close that gap? How do you take action? How do you break the idea that if you take action to be more sustainable it will hurt your business, when in fact it’s almost always the other way around? And then how can you make the change happen, so that what you’re doing will get implemented and stick?” 

      Simulating policies for sustainability 

      Management flight simulators that offer active learning can provide crucial guidance. In the case of climate change, En-ROADs presents a straightforward interface that lets users adjust sliders to experiment with actions to try to bring down carbon emissions. “Should we have a price on carbon?” Sterman asks. “Should we promote renewables? Should we work on methane? Stop deforestation? You can try anything you want. You get immediate feedback on the likely consequences of your decisions. Often people are surprised as favorite policies — say, planting trees — have only minor impact on global warming. (In the case of trees, because it takes so long for the trees to grow).”

      One En-ROADS alumnus works for a pharmaceutical company that set a target of zero net emissions by mid-century. But, as often observed, measures proposed at the senior corporate level were often resisted by the operating units. The alumnus attacked the problem by bringing workshops with simulations and other sustainability tools to front-line employees in a manufacturing plant he knew well. He asked these employees how they thought they could reduce carbon emissions and what they needed to do so. 

      “It turns out that they had a long list of opportunities to reduce the emissions from this plant,” Sterman says. “But they didn’t have any support to get it done. He helped their ideas get that support, get the resources, come up with ways to monitor their progress, and ways to look for quick wins. It’s been highly successful.” 

      En-ROADS helps people understand that process improvement activity takes resources; you might need to take some equipment offline temporarily, for example, to upgrade or improve it. “There’s a little bit of a worse-before-better trade-off,” he says. “You need to be prepared. The active learning, the use of the simulators, helps people prepare for that journey and overcome the barriers that they will face.” 

      Interactive workshops with En-ROADS and other sustainability tools also brought change to another large corporation, HSBC Bank U.S.A. Like many other financial institutions, HSBC has committed to significantly cut its emissions, but many employees and executives didn’t understand why or what that would entail. For instance, would the bank give up potential business in carbon-intensive industries? 

      Brought to more than 1,000 employees, the En-ROADS workshops let employees surface concerns they might have about continuing to be successful while addressing climate concerns. “It turns out in many cases, there isn’t that much of a trade-off,” Sterman remarks. “Fossil energy projects, for example, are extremely risky. And there are opportunities to improve margins in other businesses where you can help cut their carbon footprint.” 

      The free version of En-ROADS generally satisfies the needs of most organizations, but Sterman and his partners also can augment the model or develop customized workshops to address specific concerns. 

      People who take the workshops emerge with a greater understanding of climate change and its effects, and a deeper knowledge of the high-leverage opportunities to cut emissions. “Even more importantly, they come out with a greater sense of urgency,” he says. “But they also come out with an understanding that it’s not too late. Time is short, but what we do can still make a difference.”  More

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      Improving health outcomes by targeting climate and air pollution simultaneously

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      Climate policies are typically designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that result from human activities and drive climate change. The largest source of these emissions is the combustion of fossil fuels, which increases atmospheric concentrations of ozone, fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and other air pollutants that pose public health risks. While climate policies may result in lower concentrations of health-damaging air pollutants as a “co-benefit” of reducing greenhouse gas emissions-intensive activities, they are most effective at improving health outcomes when deployed in tandem with geographically targeted air-quality regulations.

      Yet the computer models typically used to assess the likely air quality/health impacts of proposed climate/air-quality policy combinations come with drawbacks for decision-makers. Atmospheric chemistry/climate models can produce high-resolution results, but they are expensive and time-consuming to run. Integrated assessment models can produce results for far less time and money, but produce results at global and regional scales, rendering them insufficiently precise to obtain accurate assessments of air quality/health impacts at the subnational level.

      To overcome these drawbacks, a team of researchers at MIT and the University of California at Davis has developed a climate/air-quality policy assessment tool that is both computationally efficient and location-specific. Described in a new study in the journal ACS Environmental Au, the tool could enable users to obtain rapid estimates of combined policy impacts on air quality/health at more than 1,500 locations around the globe — estimates precise enough to reveal the equity implications of proposed policy combinations within a particular region.

      “The modeling approach described in this study may ultimately allow decision-makers to assess the efficacy of multiple combinations of climate and air-quality policies in reducing the health impacts of air pollution, and to design more effective policies,” says Sebastian Eastham, the study’s lead author and a principal research scientist at the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change. “It may also be used to determine if a given policy combination would result in equitable health outcomes across a geographical area of interest.”

      To demonstrate the efficiency and accuracy of their policy assessment tool, the researchers showed that outcomes projected by the tool within seconds were consistent with region-specific results from detailed chemistry/climate models that took days or even months to run. While continuing to refine and develop their approaches, they are now working to embed the new tool into integrated assessment models for direct use by policymakers.

      “As decision-makers implement climate policies in the context of other sustainability challenges like air pollution, efficient modeling tools are important for assessment — and new computational techniques allow us to build faster and more accurate tools to provide credible, relevant information to a broader range of users,” says Noelle Selin, a professor at MIT’s Institute for Data, Systems and Society and Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, and supervising author of the study. “We are looking forward to further developing such approaches, and to working with stakeholders to ensure that they provide timely, targeted and useful assessments.”

      The study was funded, in part, by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Biogen Foundation. More

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      MIT Policy Hackathon produces new solutions for technology policy challenges

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      Almost three years ago, the Covid-19 pandemic changed the world. Many are still looking to uncover a “new normal.”

      “Instead of going back to normal, [there’s a new generation that] wants to build back something different, something better,” says Jorge Sandoval, a second-year graduate student in MIT’s Technology and Policy Program (TPP) at the Institute for Data, Systems and Society (IDSS). “How do we communicate this mindset to others, that the world cannot be the same as before?”

      This was the inspiration behind “A New (Re)generation,” this year’s theme for the IDSS-student-run MIT Policy Hackathon, which Sandoval helped to organize as the event chair. The Policy Hackathon is a weekend-long, interdisciplinary competition that brings together participants from around the globe to explore potential solutions to some of society’s greatest challenges. 

      Unlike other competitions of its kind, Sandoval says MIT’s event emphasizes a humanistic approach. “The idea of our hackathon is to promote applications of technology that are humanistic or human-centered,” he says. “We take the opportunity to examine aspects of technology in the spaces where they tend to interact with society and people, an opportunity most technical competitions don’t offer because their primary focus is on the technology.”

      The competition started with 50 teams spread across four challenge categories. This year’s categories included Internet and Cybersecurity, Environmental Justice, Logistics, and Housing and City Planning. While some people come into the challenge with friends, Sandoval said most teams form organically during an online networking meeting hosted by MIT.

      “We encourage people to pair up with others outside of their country and to form teams of different diverse backgrounds and ages,” Sandoval says. “We try to give people who are often not invited to the decision-making table the opportunity to be a policymaker, bringing in those with backgrounds in not only law, policy, or politics, but also medicine, and people who have careers in engineering or experience working in nonprofits.”

      Once an in-person event, the Policy Hackathon has gone through its own regeneration process these past three years, according to Sandoval. After going entirely online during the pandemic’s height, last year they successfully hosted the first hybrid version of the event, which served as their model again this year.

      “The hybrid version of the event gives us the opportunity to allow people to connect in a way that is lost if it is only online, while also keeping the wide range of accessibility, allowing people to join from anywhere in the world, regardless of nationality or income, to provide their input,” Sandoval says.

      For Swetha Tadisina, an undergraduate computer science major at Lafayette College and participant in the internet and cybersecurity category, the hackathon was a unique opportunity to meet and work with people much more advanced in their careers. “I was surprised how such a diverse team that had never met before was able to work so efficiently and creatively,” Tadisina says.

      Erika Spangler, a public high school teacher from Massachusetts and member of the environmental justice category’s winning team, says that while each member of “Team Slime Mold” came to the table with a different set of skills, they managed to be in sync from the start — even working across the nine-and-a-half-hour time difference the four-person team faced when working with policy advocate Shruti Nandy from Calcutta, India.

      “We divided the project into data, policy, and research and trusted each other’s expertise,” Spangler says, “Despite having separate areas of focus, we made sure to have regular check-ins to problem-solve and cross-pollinate ideas.”

      During the 48-hour period, her team proposed the creation of an algorithm to identify high-quality brownfields that could be cleaned up and used as sites for building renewable energy. Their corresponding policy sought to mandate additional requirements for renewable energy businesses seeking tax credits from the Inflation Reduction Act.

      “Their policy memo had the most in-depth technical assessment, including deep dives in a few key cities to show the impact of their proposed approach for site selection at a very granular level,” says Amanda Levin, director of policy analysis for the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). Levin acted as both a judge and challenge provider for the environmental justice category.

      “They also presented their policy recommendations in the memo in a well-thought-out way, clearly noting the relevant actor,” she adds. This clarity around what can be done, and who would be responsible for those actions, is highly valuable for those in policy.”

      Levin says the NRDC, one of the largest environmental nonprofits in the United States, provided five “challenge questions,” making it clear that teams did not need to address all of them. She notes that this gave teams significant leeway, bringing a wide variety of recommendations to the table. 

      “As a challenge partner, the work put together by all the teams is already being used to help inform discussions about the implementation of the Inflation Reduction Act,” Levin says. “Being able to tap into the collective intelligence of the hackathon helped uncover new perspectives and policy solutions that can help make an impact in addressing the important policy challenges we face today.”

      While having partners with experience in data science and policy definitely helped, fellow Team Slime Mold member Sara Sheffels, a PhD candidate in MIT’s biomaterials program, says she was surprised how much her experiences outside of science and policy were relevant to the challenge: “My experience organizing MIT’s Graduate Student Union shaped my ideas about more meaningful community involvement in renewables projects on brownfields. It is not meaningful to merely educate people about the importance of renewables or ask them to sign off on a pre-planned project without addressing their other needs.”

      “I wanted to test my limits, gain exposure, and expand my world,” Tadisina adds. “The exposure, friendships, and experiences you gain in such a short period of time are incredible.”

      For Willy R. Vasquez, an electrical and computer engineering PhD student at the University of Texas, the hackathon is not to be missed. “If you’re interested in the intersection of tech, society, and policy, then this is a must-do experience.” More

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      Coordinating climate and air-quality policies to improve public health

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      As America’s largest investment to fight climate change, the Inflation Reduction Act positions the country to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by an estimated 40 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. But as it edges the United States closer to achieving its international climate commitment, the legislation is also expected to yield significant — and more immediate — improvements in the nation’s health. If successful in accelerating the transition from fossil fuels to clean energy alternatives, the IRA will sharply reduce atmospheric concentrations of fine particulates known to exacerbate respiratory and cardiovascular disease and cause premature deaths, along with other air pollutants that degrade human health. One recent study shows that eliminating air pollution from fossil fuels in the contiguous United States would prevent more than 50,000 premature deaths and avoid more than $600 billion in health costs each year.

      While national climate policies such as those advanced by the IRA can simultaneously help mitigate climate change and improve air quality, their results may vary widely when it comes to improving public health. That’s because the potential health benefits associated with air quality improvements are much greater in some regions and economic sectors than in others. Those benefits can be maximized, however, through a prudent combination of climate and air-quality policies.

      Several past studies have evaluated the likely health impacts of various policy combinations, but their usefulness has been limited due to a reliance on a small set of standard policy scenarios. More versatile tools are needed to model a wide range of climate and air-quality policy combinations and assess their collective effects on air quality and human health. Now researchers at the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change and MIT Institute for Data, Systems and Society (IDSS) have developed a publicly available, flexible scenario tool that does just that.

      In a study published in the journal Geoscientific Model Development, the MIT team introduces its Tool for Air Pollution Scenarios (TAPS), which can be used to estimate the likely air-quality and health outcomes of a wide range of climate and air-quality policies at the regional, sectoral, and fuel-based level. 

      “This tool can help integrate the siloed sustainability issues of air pollution and climate action,” says the study’s lead author William Atkinson, who recently served as a Biogen Graduate Fellow and research assistant at the IDSS Technology and Policy Program’s (TPP) Research to Policy Engagement Initiative. “Climate action does not guarantee a clean air future, and vice versa — but the issues have similar sources that imply shared solutions if done right.”

      The study’s initial application of TAPS shows that with current air-quality policies and near-term Paris Agreement climate pledges alone, short-term pollution reductions give way to long-term increases — given the expected growth of emissions-intensive industrial and agricultural processes in developing regions. More ambitious climate and air-quality policies could be complementary, each reducing different pollutants substantially to give tremendous near- and long-term health benefits worldwide.

      “The significance of this work is that we can more confidently identify the long-term emission reduction strategies that also support air quality improvements,” says MIT Joint Program Deputy Director C. Adam Schlosser, a co-author of the study. “This is a win-win for setting climate targets that are also healthy targets.”

      TAPS projects air quality and health outcomes based on three integrated components: a recent global inventory of detailed emissions resulting from human activities (e.g., fossil fuel combustion, land-use change, industrial processes); multiple scenarios of emissions-generating human activities between now and the year 2100, produced by the MIT Economic Projection and Policy Analysis model; and emissions intensity (emissions per unit of activity) scenarios based on recent data from the Greenhouse Gas and Air Pollution Interactions and Synergies model.

      “We see the climate crisis as a health crisis, and believe that evidence-based approaches are key to making the most of this historic investment in the future, particularly for vulnerable communities,” says Johanna Jobin, global head of corporate reputation and responsibility at Biogen. “The scientific community has spoken with unanimity and alarm that not all climate-related actions deliver equal health benefits. We’re proud of our collaboration with the MIT Joint Program to develop this tool that can be used to bridge research-to-policy gaps, support policy decisions to promote health among vulnerable communities, and train the next generation of scientists and leaders for far-reaching impact.”

      The tool can inform decision-makers about a wide range of climate and air-quality policies. Policy scenarios can be applied to specific regions, sectors, or fuels to investigate policy combinations at a more granular level, or to target short-term actions with high-impact benefits.

      TAPS could be further developed to account for additional emissions sources and trends.

      “Our new tool could be used to examine a large range of both climate and air quality scenarios. As the framework is expanded, we can add detail for specific regions, as well as additional pollutants such as air toxics,” says study supervising co-author Noelle Selin, professor at IDSS and the MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, and director of TPP.    

      This research was supported by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and its Science to Achieve Results (STAR) program; Biogen; TPP’s Leading Technology and Policy Initiative; and TPP’s Research to Policy Engagement Initiative. More