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      in Energy

      At Sustainability Connect 2024, a look at how MIT is decarbonizing its campus

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      How is MIT working to meet its goal of decarbonizing the campus by 2050? How are local journalists communicating climate impacts and solutions to diverse audiences? What can each of us do to bring our unique skills and insight to tackle the challenges of climate and sustainability?

      These are all questions asked — and answered — at Sustainability Connect, the yearly forum hosted by the MIT Office of Sustainability that offers an inside look at this transformative and comprehensive work that is the foundation for MIT’s climate and sustainability leadership on campus. The event invites individuals in every role at MIT to learn more about the sustainability and climate work happening on campus and to share their ideas, highlight important work, and find new ways to plug into ongoing efforts. “This event is a reminder of the remarkable, diverse, and committed group of colleagues we are all part of at MIT,” said Director of Sustainability Julie Newman as the event kicked off alongside Interfaith Chaplain and Spiritual Advisor to the Indigenous Community Nina Lytton, who offered a moment of connection to attendees. At the event, that diverse and committed group was made up of more than 130 community members representing more than 70 departments, labs, and centers.

      This year, Sustainability Connect was timed with announcement of the new Climate Project at MIT, with Vice Provost Richard Lester joining the event to expound on MIT’s deep commitment to tackling the climate challenge over the next 10 years through a series of climate missions — many of which build upon the ongoing research taking place across campus already. In introducing the Climate Project at MIT, Lester echoed the theme of connection and collaboration. “This plan is about helping bridge the gap between what we would accomplish as a collection of energetic, talented, ambitious individuals, and what we’re capable of if we act together,” he said.

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      Sustainability Connect 2024: Decarbonizing the Campus Video: MIT Office of Sustainability

      Highlighting one of the many collaborative efforts to address MIT’s contributions to climate change was the Decarbonizing the Campus panel, which provided a real-time look at MIT’s work to eliminate carbon emissions from campus by 2050. Newman and Vice President for Campus Services and Stewardship Joe Higgins, along with Senior Campus Planner Vasso Mathes, Senior Sustainability Project Manager Steve Lanou, and PhD student Chenhan Shao, shared the many ways MIT is working to decarbonize its campus now and respond to evolving technologies and policies in the future. “A third of MIT’s faculty and researchers … are working to identify ways in which MIT can amplify its contributions to addressing the world’s climate crisis. But part and parcel to that goal is we’re putting significant effort into decarbonizing MIT’S own carbon footprint here on our campus,” Higgins said before highlighting how MIT continues to work on projects focused on building efficiency, renewable energy on campus and off, and support of a cleaner grid, among many decarbonization strategies.

      Newman shared the way in which climate education and research play an important role through the Decarbonization Working Group research streams, and courses like class 4.s42 (Carbon Reduction Pathways for the MIT Campus) offered by Professor Christoph Reinhart. Lanou and Shao also showcased how MIT is optimizing its response to Cambridge’s Building Energy Use Disclosure Ordinance, which is aimed at tracking and reducing emissions from large commercial properties in the city with a goal of net-zero buildings by 2035. “We’ve been able [create] pathways that would be practical, innovative, have a high degree of accountability, and that could work well within the structures and the limitations that we have,” Lanou said before debuting a dashboard he and Shao developed during Independent Activities Period to track and forecast work to meet the Cambridge goal. 

      MIT’s robust commitment to decarbonize its campus goes beyond energy systems, as highlighted by the work of many staff members who led roundtables as part of Sustainability in Motion, where attendees were invited to sit down with colleagues from across campus responsible for implementing the numerous climate and sustainability commitments. Teams reported out on progress to date on a range of efforts including sustainable food systems, safe and sustainable labs, and procurement. “Tackling the unprecedented challenges of a changing planet in and around MIT takes the support of individuals and teams from all corners of the Institute,” said Assistant Director of Sustainability Brian Goldberg in leading the session. “Whether folks have sustainability or climate in their job title, or they’ve contributed countless volunteer hours to the cause, our community members are leading many meaningful efforts to transform MIT.”

      Play video

      Sustainability Connect 2024: Climate in the Media PanelVideo: Office of Sustainability

      The day culminated with a panel on climate in the media, taking the excitement from the room and putting it in context — how do you translate this work, these solutions, and these challenges for a diverse audience with an ever-changing appetite for these kinds of stories? Laur Hesse Fisher, program director for the Environmental Solutions Initiate (ESI); Barbara Moran, climate and environment reporter at WBUR radio; and independent climate journalist Annie Ropeik joined the panel moderated by Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT Director Deborah Blum. Blum spoke of the current mistrust of not only the media but of news stories of climate impacts and even solutions. “To those of us telling the story of climate change, how do we reach resistant audiences? How do we gain their trust?” she asked.

      Fisher, who hosts the TIL Climate podcast and leads the ESI Journalism Fellowship, explained how she shifts her approach depending on her audience. “[With TIL Climate], a lot of what we do is, we try to understand what kinds of questions people have,” she said. “We have people submit questions to us, and then we answer them in language that they can understand.”

      For Moran, reaching audiences relies on finding the right topic to bridge to deeper issues. On a recent story about solar arrays and their impact on forests and the landscape around them, Moran saw bees and pollinators as the way in. “I can talk about bees and flowers. And that will hook people enough to get in. And then through that, we can address this issue of forest versus commercial solar and this tension, and what can be done to address that, and what’s working and what’s not,” she said.

      The panel highlighted that even as climate solutions and challenges become clearer, communicating them can remain a challenge. “Sustainability Connect is invaluable when it comes to sharing our work and bringing more people in, but over the years, it’s become clear how many people are still outside of these conversations,” said Newman. “Capping the day off with this conversation on climate in the media served as a jumping-off point for all of us to think how we can better communicate our efforts and tackle the challenges that keep us from bringing everyone to the table to help us find and share solutions for addressing climate change. It’s just the beginning of this conversation.” More

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      in Environment

      Anushree Chaudhuri: Involving local communities in renewable energy planning

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      Anushree Chaudhuri has a history of making bold decisions. In fifth grade, she biked across her home state of California with little prior experience. In her first year at MIT, she advocated for student recommendations in the preparation of the Institute’s Climate Action Plan for the Decade. And recently, she led a field research project throughout California to document the perspectives of rural and Indigenous populations affected by climate change and clean energy projects.

      “It doesn’t matter who you are or how young you are, you can get involved with something and inspire others to do so,” the senior says.

      Initially a materials science and engineering major, Chaudhuri was quickly drawn to environmental policy issues and later decided to double-major in urban studies and planning and in economics. Chaudhuri will receive her bachelor’s degrees this month, followed by a master’s degree in city planning in the spring.

      The importance of community engagement in policymaking has become one of Chaudhuri’s core interests. A 2024 Marshall Scholar, she is headed to the U.K. next year to pursue a PhD related to environment and development. She hopes to build on her work in California and continue to bring attention to impacts that energy transitions can have on local communities, which tend to be rural and low-income. Addressing resistance to these projects can be challenging, but “ignoring it leaves these communities in the dust and widens the urban-rural divide,” she says.

      Silliness and sustainability 

      Chaudhuri classifies her many activities into two groups: those that help her unwind, like her living community, Conner Two, and those that require intensive deliberation, like her sustainability-related organizing.

      Conner Two, in the Burton-Conner residence hall, is where Chaudhuri feels most at home on campus. She describes the group’s activities as “silly” and emphasizes their love of jokes, even in the floor’s nickname, “the British Floor,” which is intentionally absurd, as the residents are rarely British.

      Chaudhuri’s first involvement with sustainability issues on campus was during the preparation of MIT’s Fast Forward Climate Action Plan in the 2020-2021 academic year. As a co-lead of one of several student working groups, she helped organize key discussions between the administration, climate experts, and student government to push for six main goals in the plan, including an ethical investing framework. Being involved with a significant student movement so early on in her undergraduate career was a learning opportunity for Chaudhuri and impressed upon her that young people can play critical roles in making far-reaching structural changes.

      The experience also made her realize how many organizations on campus shared similar goals even if their perspectives varied, and she saw the potential for more synergy among them.

      Chaudhuri went on to co-lead the Student Sustainability Coalition to help build community across the sustainability-related organizations on campus and create a centralized system that would make it easier for outsiders and group members to access information and work together. Through the coalition, students have collaborated on efforts including campus events, and off-campus matters such as the Cambridge Green New Deal hearings.

      Another benefit to such a network: It creates a support system that recognizes even small-scale victories. “Community is so important to avoid burnout when you’re working on something that can be very frustrating and an uphill battle like negotiating with leadership or seeking policy changes,” Chaudhuri says.

      Fieldwork

      For the past year, Chaudhuri has been doing independent research in California with the support of several advisory organizations to host conversations with groups affected by renewable energy projects, which, as she has documented, are often concentrated in rural, low-income, and Indigenous communities. The introduction of renewable energy facilities, such as wind and solar farms, can perpetuate existing inequities if they ignore serious community concerns, Chaudhuri says.

      As state or federal policymakers and private developers carry out the permitting process for these projects, “they can repeat histories of extraction, sometimes infringing on the rights of a local or Tribal government to decide what happens with their land,” she says.

      In her site visits, she is documenting community opposition to controversial solar and wind proposals and collecting oral histories. Doing fieldwork for the first time as an outsider was difficult for Chaudhuri, as she dealt with distrust, unpredictability, and needing to be completely flexible for her sources. “A lot of it was just being willing to drop everything and go and be a little bit adventurous and take some risks,” she says.

      Role models and reading

      Chaudhuri is quick to credit many of the role models and other formative influences in her life.

      After working on the Climate Action Plan, Chaudhuri attended a public narrative workshop at Harvard University led by Marshall Ganz, a grassroots community organizer who worked with Cesar Chavez and on the 2008 Obama presidential campaign. “That was a big inspiration and kind of shaped how I viewed leadership in, for example, campus advocacy, but also in other projects and internships.”

      Reading has also influenced Chaudhuri’s perspective on community organizing, “After the Climate Action Plan campaign, I realized that a lot of what made the campaign successful or not could track well with organizing and social change theories, and histories of social movements. So, that was a good experience for me, being able to critically reflect on it and tie it into these other things I was learning about.”

      Since beginning her studies at MIT, Chaudhuri has become especially interested in social theory and political philosophy, starting with ancient forms of Western and Eastern ethic, and up to 20th and 21st century philosophers who inspire her. Chaudhuri cites Amartya Sen and Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò as particularly influential. “I think [they’ve] provided a really compelling framework to guide a lot of my own values,” she says.

      Another role model is Brenda Mallory, the current chair of the U.S. Council on Environmental Quality, who Chaudhuri was grateful to meet at the United Nations COP27 Climate Conference. As an intern at the U.S. Department of Energy, Chaudhuri worked within a team on implementing the federal administration’s Justice40 initiative, which commits 40 percent of federal climate investments to disadvantaged communities. This initiative was largely directed by Mallory, and Chaudhuri admires how Mallory was able to make an impact at different levels of government through her leadership. Chaudhuri hopes to follow in Mallory’s footsteps someday, as a public official committed to just policies and programs.

       “Good leaders are those who empower good leadership in others,” Chaudhuri says. More

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      in Environment

      Study measures the psychological toll of wildfires

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      Wildfires in Southeast Asia significantly affect peoples’ moods, especially if the fires originate outside a person’s own country, according to a new study.

      The study, which measures sentiment by analyzing large amounts of social media data, helps show the psychological toll of wildfires that result in substantial air pollution, at a time when such fires are becoming a high-profile marker of climate change.  

      “It has a substantial negative impact on people’s subjective well-being,” says Siqi Zheng, an MIT professor and co-author of a new paper detailing the results. “This is a big effect.”

      The magnitude of the effect is about the same as another shift uncovered through large-scale studies of sentiment expressed online: When the weekend ends and the work week starts, people’s online postings reflect a sharp drop in mood. The new study finds that daily exposure to typical wildfire smoke levels in the region produces an equivalently large change in sentiment.

      “People feel anxious or sad when they have to go to work on Monday, and what we find with the fires is that this is, in fact, comparable to a Sunday-to-Monday sentiment drop,” says co-author Rui Du, a former MIT postdoct who is now an economist at Oklahoma State University.

      The paper, “Transboundary Vegetation Fire Smoke and Expressed Sentiment: Evidence from Twitter,” has been published online in the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management.

      The authors are Zheng, who is the STL Champion Professor of Urban and Real Estate Sustainability in the Center for Real Estate and the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT; Du, an assistant professor of economics at Oklahoma State University’s Spears School of Business; Ajkel Mino, of the Department of Data Science and Knowledge Engineering at Maastricht University; and Jianghao Wang, of the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

      The research is based on an examination of the events of 2019 in Southeast Asia, in which a huge series of Indonesian wildfires, seemingly related to climate change and deforestation for the palm oil industry, produced a massive amount of haze in the region. The air-quality problems affected seven countries: Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam.

      To conduct the study, the scholars produced a large-scale analysis of postings from 2019 on X (formerly known as Twitter) to sample public sentiment. The study involved 1,270,927 tweets from 378,300 users who agreed to have their locations made available. The researchers compiled the data with a web crawler program and multilingual natural language processing applications that review the content of tweets and rate them in affective terms based on the vocabulary used. They also used satellite data from NASA and NOAA to create a map of wildfires and haze over time, linking that to the social media data.

      Using this method creates an advantage that regular public-opinion polling does not have: It creates a measurement of mood that is effectively a real-time metric rather than an after-the-fact assessment. Moreover, substantial wind shifts in the region at the time in 2019 essentially randomize which countries were exposed to more haze at various points, making the results less likely to be influenced by other factors.

      The researchers also made a point to disentangle the sentiment change due to wildfire smoke and that due to other factors. After all, people experience mood changes all the time from various natural and socioeconomic events. Wildfires may be correlated with some of them, which makes it hard to tease out the singular effect of the smoke. By comparing only the difference in exposure to wildfire smoke, blown in by wind, within the same locations over time, this study is able to isolate the impact of local wildfire haze on mood, filtering out nonpollution influences.

      “What we are seeing from our estimates is really just the pure causal effect of the transboundary wildfire smoke,” Du says.

      The study also revealed that people living near international borders are much more likely to be upset when affected by wildfire smoke that comes from a neighboring country. When similar conditions originate in their own country, there is a considerably more muted reaction.

      “Notably, individuals do not seem to respond to domestically produced fire plumes,” the authors write in the paper. The small size of many countries in the region, coupled with a fire-prone climate, make this an ongoing source of concern, however.

      “In Southeast Asia this is really a big problem, with small countries clustered together,” Zheng observes.

      Zheng also co-authored a 2022 study using a related methodology to study the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the moods of residents in about 100 countries. In that case, the research showed that the global pandemic depressed sentiment about 4.7 times as much as the normal Sunday-to-Monday shift.

      “There was a huge toll of Covid on people’s sentiment, and while the impact of the wildfires was about one-fifth of Covid, that’s still quite large,” Du says.

      In policy terms, Zheng suggests that the global implications of cross-border smoke pollution could give countries a shared incentive to cooperate further. If one country’s fires become another country’s problem, they may all have reason to limit them. Scientists warn of a rising number of wildfires globally, fueled by climate change conditions in which more fires can proliferate, posing a persistent threat across societies.

      “If they don’t work on this collaboratively, it could be damaging to everyone,” Zheng says.

      The research at MIT was supported, in part, by the MIT Sustainable Urbanization Lab. Jianghao Wang was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China. More

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      in Environment

      Co-creating climate futures with real-time data and spatial storytelling

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      Virtual story worlds and game engines aren’t just for video games anymore. They are now tools for scientists and storytellers to digitally twin existing physical spaces and then turn them into vessels to dream up speculative climate stories and build collective designs of the future. That’s the theory and practice behind the MIT WORLDING initiative.

      Twice this year, WORLDING matched world-class climate story teams working in XR (extended reality) with relevant labs and researchers across MIT. One global group returned for a virtual gathering online in partnership with Unity for Humanity, while another met for one weekend in person, hosted at the MIT Media Lab.

      “We are witnessing the birth of an emergent field that fuses climate science, urban planning, real-time 3D engines, nonfiction storytelling, and speculative fiction, and it is all fueled by the urgency of the climate crises,” says Katerina Cizek, lead designer of the WORLDING initiative at the Co-Creation Studio of MIT Open Documentary Lab. “Interdisciplinary teams are forming and blossoming around the planet to collectively imagine and tell stories of healthy, livable worlds in virtual 3D spaces and then finding direct ways to translate that back to earth, literally.”

      At this year’s virtual version of WORLDING, five multidisciplinary teams were selected from an open call. In a week-long series of research and development gatherings, the teams met with MIT scientists, staff, fellows, students, and graduates, as well as other leading figures in the field. Guests ranged from curators at film festivals such as Sundance and Venice, climate policy specialists, and award-winning media creators to software engineers and renowned Earth and atmosphere scientists. The teams heard from MIT scholars in diverse domains, including geomorphology, urban planning as acts of democracy, and climate researchers at MIT Media Lab.

      Mapping climate data

      “We are measuring the Earth’s environment in increasingly data-driven ways. Hundreds of terabytes of data are taken every day about our planet in order to study the Earth as a holistic system, so we can address key questions about global climate change,” explains Rachel Connolly, an MIT Media Lab research scientist focused in the “Future Worlds” research theme, in a talk to the group. “Why is this important for your work and storytelling in general? Having the capacity to understand and leverage this data is critical for those who wish to design for and successfully operate in the dynamic Earth environment.”

      Making sense of billions of data points was a key theme during this year’s sessions. In another talk, Taylor Perron, an MIT professor of Earth, atmospheric and planetary sciences, shared how his team uses computational modeling combined with many other scientific processes to better understand how geology, climate, and life intertwine to shape the surfaces of Earth and other planets. His work resonated with one WORLDING team in particular, one aiming to digitally reconstruct the pre-Hispanic Lake Texcoco — where current day Mexico City is now situated — as a way to contrast and examine the region’s current water crisis.

      Democratizing the future

      While WORLDING approaches rely on rigorous science and the interrogation of large datasets, they are also founded on democratizing community-led approaches.

      MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning graduate Lafayette Cruise MCP ’19 met with the teams to discuss how he moved his own practice as a trained urban planner to include a futurist component involving participatory methods. “I felt we were asking the same limited questions in regards to the future we were wanting to produce. We’re very limited, very constrained, as to whose values and comforts are being centered. There are so many possibilities for how the future could be.”

      Scaling to reach billions

      This work scales from the very local to massive global populations. Climate policymakers are concerned with reaching billions of people in the line of fire. “We have a goal to reach 1 billion people with climate resilience solutions,” says Nidhi Upadhyaya, deputy director at Atlantic Council’s Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center. To get that reach, Upadhyaya is turning to games. “There are 3.3 billion-plus people playing video games across the world. Half of these players are women. This industry is worth $300 billion. Africa is currently among the fastest-growing gaming markets in the world, and 55 percent of the global players are in the Asia Pacific region.” She reminded the group that this conversation is about policy and how formats of mass communication can be used for policymaking, bringing about change, changing behavior, and creating empathy within audiences.

      Socially engaged game development is also connected to education at Unity Technologies, a game engine company. “We brought together our education and social impact work because we really see it as a critical flywheel for our business,” said Jessica Lindl, vice president and global head of social impact/education at Unity Technologies, in the opening talk of WORLDING. “We upscale about 900,000 students, in university and high school programs around the world, and about 800,000 adults who are actively learning and reskilling and upskilling in Unity. Ultimately resulting in our mission of the ‘world is a better place with more creators in it,’ millions of creators who reach billions of consumers — telling the world stories, and fostering a more inclusive, sustainable, and equitable world.”

      Access to these technologies is key, especially the hardware. “Accessibility has been missing in XR,” explains Reginé Gilbert, who studies and teaches accessibility and disability in user experience design at New York University. “XR is being used in artificial intelligence, assistive technology, business, retail, communications, education, empathy, entertainment, recreation, events, gaming, health, rehabilitation meetings, navigation, therapy, training, video programming, virtual assistance wayfinding, and so many other uses. This is a fun fact for folks: 97.8 percent of the world hasn’t tried VR [virtual reality] yet, actually.”

      Meanwhile, new hardware is on its way. The WORLDING group got early insights into the highly anticipated Apple Vision Pro headset, which promises to integrate many forms of XR and personal computing in one device. “They’re really pushing this kind of pass-through or mixed reality,” said Dan Miller, a Unity engineer on the poly spatial team, collaborating with Apple, who described the experience of the device as “You are viewing the real world. You’re pulling up windows, you’re interacting with content. It’s a kind of spatial computing device where you have multiple apps open, whether it’s your email client next to your messaging client with a 3D game in the middle. You’re interacting with all these things in the same space and at different times.”

      “WORLDING combines our passion for social-impact storytelling and incredible innovative storytelling,” said Paisley Smith of the Unity for Humanity Program at Unity Technologies. She added, “This is an opportunity for creators to incubate their game-changing projects and connect with experts across climate, story, and technology.”

      Meeting at MIT

      In a new in-person iteration of WORLDING this year, organizers collaborated closely with Connolly at the MIT Media Lab to co-design an in-person weekend conference Oct. 25 – Nov. 7 with 45 scholars and professionals who visualize climate data at NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, planetariums, and museums across the United States.

      A participant said of the event, “An incredible workshop that had had a profound effect on my understanding of climate data storytelling and how to combine different components together for a more [holistic] solution.”

      “With this gathering under our new Future Worlds banner,” says Dava Newman, director of the MIT Media Lab and Apollo Program Professor of Astronautics chair, “the Media Lab seeks to affect human behavior and help societies everywhere to improve life here on Earth and in worlds beyond, so that all — the sentient, natural, and cosmic — worlds may flourish.” 

      “WORLDING’s virtual-only component has been our biggest strength because it has enabled a true, international cohort to gather, build, and create together. But this year, an in-person version showed broader opportunities that spatial interactivity generates — informal Q&As, physical worksheets, and larger-scale ideation, all leading to deeper trust-building,” says WORLDING producer Srushti Kamat SM ’23.

      The future and potential of WORLDING lies in the ongoing dialogue between the virtual and physical, both in the work itself and in the format of the workshops. More

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      in Environment

      Climate action, here and now

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      A few years ago, David Hsu started taking a keen interest in some apartment buildings in Brooklyn and the Bronx — but not because he was looking for a place to live. Hsu, an associate professor at MIT, works on urban climate change solutions. The property owners were retrofitting their buildings to make them net-zero emitters of carbon dioxide via better insulation, ventilation, and electric heating and appliances. They also wanted to see the effect on interior air quality.

      In the process, the owners started working with Hsu and an MIT team to assess the results using top-grade air quality sensors. They found that beyond its climate benefits, retrofitting lowered indoor pollutants from high levels to almost-undetectable levels. It is a win-win outcome.

      “Not only are those buildings cleaner and use less energy and do not emit greenhouse gases, they also have better air quality,” Hsu says. “The hopeful thing is that as we remake our buildings for decarbonization, a lot of technologies are so superior that our lives will be better, too.”

      Hsu’s projects frequently yield practical, concrete steps for climate action. In New York City, Hsu found, mandating the measurement of energy use lowered consumption 13 to 14 percent over four years. In a 2017 paper, he and his co-authors studied which climate actions would most reduce carbon emissions in 11 major U.S. cities. Cleveland and Denver can greatly reduce use of fossil fuels, for example, while better energy efficiency in new homes would make a big difference in Houston and Phoenix.

      “You have to figure out what works and doesn’t work,” Hsu says. “I try to figure out how we can have cleaner and healthier cities that will be more sustainable, equitable, and more just.”

      Significantly, Hsu does not just prescribe climate action elsewhere, he also works for change at MIT. He helped create a zero-emissions roadmap for MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning as well as the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, where he is an associate professor of urban and environmental planning and is part of Fast Forward: MIT’s Climate Action Plan for the Decade, serving in the Climate Education Working Group.

      “People can get depressed about how you tackle this large, civilization-wide problem, and then you realize lots of other people care about this. Lots of smart people at MIT and other places are working on it, and there are lots of things we can do, individually and collectively,” Hsu says.

      And as Hsu’s work shows, lots of people tackle the climate crisis by working on local issues. For his research and teaching, Hsu was granted tenure at MIT this year.

      Urban planning by way of Amherst

      Hsu studies cities, but is not from one. Growing up in the college town of Amherst, Massachusetts, Hsu could walk out of his home and “be in the woods in a minute.” He attended Yale University as an undergraduate, majoring in physics, and started venturing into New York City with friends. After graduation, Hsu moved there and got a job.

      Or three jobs, really. Over the next 10 years, Hsu worked as an engineer, in real estate finance, and for the New York City government as a vice president at the NYC Economic Development Corporation, where he helped manage the city’s post-September 11 redevelopment of the East River waterfront. Eventually, he decided to pursue graduate studies in urban planning, building on his experience.

      “Engineering, finance, and government, you put those three things together and they’re basically urban planning,” Hsu says. “It took me a decade after school to realize urban planning is a thing I could do. I say to students, ‘You’re lucky, you have this major. I never had this in college.’”

      As a graduate student, Hsu received an MS from Cornell University in applied and engineering physics, then an MSc from the London School of Economics and Political Science in city design and social science, before getting his PhD in urban design and planning at the University of Washington in Seattle. He served on the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania before moving to MIT in 2015.

      Hsu studies an array of topics involving local governments and climate policy. He has published multiple papers on Philadelphia’s attempts to refurbish its stormwater infrastructure, for example. His studies about retrofitted apartment buildings are forthcoming as three papers. A 2022 Hsu paper, “Straight out of Cape Cod,” looked at the origins of Community Choice Aggregation, an approach to purchasing clean energy that started in a few Massachusetts communities and now involves 11 percent of the U.S. population.

      “I joke that the ideal reader of my articles is not a mayor and it’s not an academic, it’s a midcareer bureaucrat trying to implement a policy,” Hsu says.

      Actually, that’s no mere joke. At MIT, City of Cambridge officials have contacted Hsu to discuss his studies of New York and Philadelphia, something he welcomes. Even if not in local government himself, Hsu says, “I know I can do research that might move some of those projects along. It’s my way of trying to contribute to the world outside of academia.”

      “It’s all important”

      There is still another way Hsu contributes to climate action: by influencing what MIT does. He helped craft the climate policies of the School of Architecture and Planning and the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, which aim to produce net zero emissions for the department through the use of tools like carbon offsets for travel. As part of the Institute-wide Climate Education Working Group convened under the Fast Forward plan, Hsu is busy thinking about how to integrate climate studies into MIT education.

      “Our Fast Forward team does great work together. David McGee, Lisa Ghaffari, Kate Trimble, Antje Danielson, Curt Newton, they’re so engaged,” says Hsu. “Our students are terrifically hard-working and skilled and care about climate change, but don’t know how to affect it necessarily. We want to give them on-ramps and skills.”

      He is also chair of the fast-growing 11-6 major that combines urban studies and planning with computer science.

      “Climate change is happening so fast, and is so big, that every job could be climate-change related,” Hsu says. “If people leave MIT with a higher base understanding of climate change, then you can be a lawyer or consultant or work in finance or computer science and address the unsolved problems.”

      Indeed, Hsu thinks many students, who he believes increasingly recognize the severity of climate change, need to prioritize the battle against it when shaping their careers.

      “Our fight against climate change is not going to be over by 2050, but 25 years from now, we’re going to know if we transitioned to a net-zero-emitting society for the sake of humanity,” Hsu says. “The students are more aware than ever that climate change is going to dominate their lives. I want students to look back with satisfaction that they helped society.”

      More bluntly, he says: “Are you going to say, ‘Oh, I made some money and enhanced my career, but the planet’s going to be destroyed? Or ideally will you find a job that’s satisfying and can support your future hopes for yourself and your family, and also save the planet? Because I think there are a lot of [job] options like that out there.”

      Hsu adds, “We’re going to need people pulling in different directions. It’s all important. That’s the message to our students. Go find something you think is important and use your skills. We’re going to need that many people to work on climate change.” More

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      in Environment

      Forging climate connections across the Institute

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      Climate change is the ultimate cross-cutting issue: Not limited to any one discipline, it ranges across science, technology, policy, culture, human behavior, and well beyond. The response to it likewise requires an all-of-MIT effort.

      Now, to strengthen such an effort, a new grant program spearheaded by the Climate Nucleus, the faculty committee charged with the oversight and implementation of Fast Forward: MIT’s Climate Action Plan for the Decade, aims to build up MIT’s climate leadership capacity while also supporting innovative scholarship on diverse climate-related topics and forging new connections across the Institute.

      Called the Fast Forward Faculty Fund (F^4 for short), the program has named its first cohort of six faculty members after issuing its inaugural call for proposals in April 2023. The cohort will come together throughout the year for climate leadership development programming and networking. The program provides financial support for graduate students who will work with the faculty members on the projects — the students will also participate in leadership-building activities — as well as $50,000 in flexible, discretionary funding to be used to support related activities. 

      “Climate change is a crisis that truly touches every single person on the planet,” says Noelle Selin, co-chair of the nucleus and interim director of the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society. “It’s therefore essential that we build capacity for every member of the MIT community to make sense of the problem and help address it. Through the Fast Forward Faculty Fund, our aim is to have a cohort of climate ambassadors who can embed climate everywhere at the Institute.”

      F^4 supports both faculty who would like to begin doing climate-related work, as well as faculty members who are interested in deepening their work on climate. The program has the core goal of developing cohorts of F^4 faculty and graduate students who, in addition to conducting their own research, will become climate leaders at MIT, proactively looking for ways to forge new climate connections across schools, departments, and disciplines.

      One of the projects, “Climate Crisis and Real Estate: Science-based Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies,” led by Professor Siqi Zheng of the MIT Center for Real Estate in collaboration with colleagues from the MIT Sloan School of Management, focuses on the roughly 40 percent of carbon dioxide emissions that come from the buildings and real estate sector. Zheng notes that this sector has been slow to respond to climate change, but says that is starting to change, thanks in part to the rising awareness of climate risks and new local regulations aimed at reducing emissions from buildings.

      Using a data-driven approach, the project seeks to understand the efficient and equitable market incentives, technology solutions, and public policies that are most effective at transforming the real estate industry. Johnattan Ontiveros, a graduate student in the Technology and Policy Program, is working with Zheng on the project.

      “We were thrilled at the incredible response we received from the MIT faculty to our call for proposals, which speaks volumes about the depth and breadth of interest in climate at MIT,” says Anne White, nucleus co-chair and vice provost and associate vice president for research. “This program makes good on key commitments of the Fast Forward plan, supporting cutting-edge new work by faculty and graduate students while helping to deepen the bench of climate leaders at MIT.”

      During the 2023-24 academic year, the F^4 faculty and graduate student cohorts will come together to discuss their projects, explore opportunities for collaboration, participate in climate leadership development, and think proactively about how to deepen interdisciplinary connections among MIT community members interested in climate change.

      The six inaugural F^4 awardees are:

      Professor Tristan Brown, History Section: Humanistic Approaches to the Climate Crisis  

      With this project, Brown aims to create a new community of practice around narrative-centric approaches to environmental and climate issues. Part of a broader humanities initiative at MIT, it brings together a global working group of interdisciplinary scholars, including Serguei Saavedra (Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering) and Or Porath (Tel Aviv University; Religion), collectively focused on examining the historical and present links between sacred places and biodiversity for the purposes of helping governments and nongovernmental organizations formulate better sustainability goals. Boyd Ruamcharoen, a PhD student in the History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society (HASTS) program, will work with Brown on this project.

      Professor Kerri Cahoy, departments of Aeronautics and Astronautics and Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences (AeroAstro): Onboard Autonomous AI-driven Satellite Sensor Fusion for Coastal Region Monitoring

      The motivation for this project is the need for much better data collection from satellites, where technology can be “20 years behind,” says Cahoy. As part of this project, Cahoy will pursue research in the area of autonomous artificial intelligence-enabled rapid sensor fusion (which combines data from different sensors, such as radar and cameras) onboard satellites to improve understanding of the impacts of climate change, specifically sea-level rise and hurricanes and flooding in coastal regions. Graduate students Madeline Anderson, a PhD student in electrical engineering and computer science (EECS), and Mary Dahl, a PhD student in AeroAstro, will work with Cahoy on this project.

      Professor Priya Donti, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science: Robust Reinforcement Learning for High-Renewables Power Grids 

      With renewables like wind and solar making up a growing share of electricity generation on power grids, Donti’s project focuses on improving control methods for these distributed sources of electricity. The research will aim to create a realistic representation of the characteristics of power grid operations, and eventually inform scalable operational improvements in power systems. It will “give power systems operators faith that, OK, this conceptually is good, but it also actually works on this grid,” says Donti. PhD candidate Ana Rivera from EECS is the F^4 graduate student on the project.

      Professor Jason Jackson, Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP): Political Economy of the Climate Crisis: Institutions, Power and Global Governance

      This project takes a political economy approach to the climate crisis, offering a distinct lens to examine, first, the political governance challenge of mobilizing climate action and designing new institutional mechanisms to address the global and intergenerational distributional aspects of climate change; second, the economic challenge of devising new institutional approaches to equitably finance climate action; and third, the cultural challenge — and opportunity — of empowering an adaptive socio-cultural ecology through traditional knowledge and local-level social networks to achieve environmental resilience. Graduate students Chen Chu and Mrinalini Penumaka, both PhD students in DUSP, are working with Jackson on the project.

      Professor Haruko Wainwright, departments of Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE) and Civil and Environmental Engineering: Low-cost Environmental Monitoring Network Technologies in Rural Communities for Addressing Climate Justice 

      This project will establish a community-based climate and environmental monitoring network in addition to a data visualization and analysis infrastructure in rural marginalized communities to better understand and address climate justice issues. The project team plans to work with rural communities in Alaska to install low-cost air and water quality, weather, and soil sensors. Graduate students Kay Whiteaker, an MS candidate in NSE, and Amandeep Singh, and MS candidate in System Design and Management at Sloan, are working with Wainwright on the project, as is David McGee, professor in earth, atmospheric, and planetary sciences.

      Professor Siqi Zheng, MIT Center for Real Estate and DUSP: Climate Crisis and Real Estate: Science-based Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies 

      See the text above for the details on this project. More

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      in Environment

      Technologies for water conservation and treatment move closer to commercialization

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      The Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS) provides Solutions Grants to help MIT researchers launch startup companies or products to commercialize breakthrough technologies in water and food systems. The Solutions Grant Program began in 2015 and is supported by Community Jameel. In addition to one-year, renewable grants of up to $150,000, the program also matches grantees with industry mentors and facilitates introductions to potential investors. Since its inception, the J-WAFS Solutions Program has awarded over $3 million in funding to the MIT community. Numerous startups and products, including a portable desalination device and a company commercializing a novel food safety sensor, have spun out of this support.

      The 2023 J-WAFS Solutions Grantees are Professor C. Cem Tasan of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and Professor Andrew Whittle of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Tasan’s project involves reducing water use in steel manufacturing and Whittle’s project tackles harmful algal blooms in water. Project work commences this September.

      “This year’s Solutions Grants are being award to professors Tasan and Whittle to help commercialize technologies they have been developing at MIT,” says J-WAFS executive director Renee J. Robins. “With J-WAFS’ support, we hope to see the teams move their technologies from the lab to the market, so they can have a beneficial impact on water use and water quality challenges,” Robins adds.

      Reducing water consumption by solid-state steelmaking

      Water is a major requirement for steel production. The steel industry ranks fourth in industrial freshwater consumption worldwide, since large amounts of water are needed mainly for cooling purposes in the process. Unfortunately, a strong correlation has also been shown to exist between freshwater use in steelmaking and water contamination. As the global demand for steel increases and freshwater availability decreases due to climate change, improved methods for more sustainable steel production are needed.

      A strategy to reduce the water footprint of steelmaking is to explore steel recycling processes that avoid liquid metal processing. With this motivation, Cem Tasan, the Thomas B. King Associate Professor of Metallurgy in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, and postdoc Onur Guvenc PhD created a new process called Scrap Metal Consolidation (SMC). SMC is based on a well-established metal forming process known as roll bonding. Conventionally, roll bonding requires intensive prior surface treatment of the raw material, specific atmospheric conditions, and high deformation levels. Tasan and Guvenc’s research revealed that SMC can overcome these restrictions by enabling the solid-state bonding of scrap into a sheet metal form, even when the surface quality, atmospheric conditions, and deformation levels are suboptimal. Through lab-scale proof-of-principle investigations, they have already identified SMC process conditions and validated the mechanical formability of resulting steel sheets, focusing on mild steel, the most common sheet metal scrap.

      The J-WAFS Solutions Grant will help the team to build customer product prototypes, design the processing unit, and develop a scale-up strategy and business model. By simultaneously decreasing water usage, energy demand, contamination risk, and carbon dioxide burden, SMC has the potential to decrease the energy need for steel recycling by up to 86 percent, as well as reduce the linked carbon dioxide emissions and safeguard the freshwater resources that would otherwise be directed to industrial consumption. 

      Detecting harmful algal blooms in water before it’s too late

      Harmful algal blooms (HABs) are a growing problem in both freshwater and saltwater environments worldwide, causing an estimated $13 billion in annual damage to drinking water, water for recreational use, commercial fishing areas, and desalination activities. HABs pose a threat to both human health and aquaculture, thereby threatening the food supply. Toxins in HABs are produced by some cyanobacteria, or blue-green algae, whose communities change in composition in response to eutrophication from agricultural runoff, sewer overflows, or other events. Mitigation of risks from HABs are most effective when there is advance warning of these changes in algal communities. 

      Most in situ measurements of algae are based on fluorescence spectroscopy that is conducted with LED-induced fluorescence (LEDIF) devices, or probes that induce fluorescence of specific algal pigments using LED light sources. While LEDIFs provide reasonable estimates of concentrations of individual pigments, they lack resolution to discriminate algal classes within complex mixtures found in natural water bodies. In prior research, Andrew Whittle, the Edmund K. Turner Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, worked with colleagues to design REMORA, a low-cost, field-deployable prototype spectrofluorometer for measuring induced fluorescence. This research was part of a collaboration between MIT and the AMS Institute. Whittle and the team successfully trained a machine learning model to discriminate and quantify cell concentrations for mixtures of different algal groups in water samples through an extensive laboratory calibration program using various algae cultures. The group demonstrated these capabilities in a series of field measurements at locations in Boston and Amsterdam. 

      Whittle will work with Fábio Duarte of the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, the Senseable City Lab, and MIT’s Center for Real Estate to refine the design of REMORA. They will develop software for autonomous operation of the sensor that can be deployed remotely on mobile vessels or platforms to enable high-resolution spatiotemporal monitoring for harmful algae. Sensor commercialization will hopefully be able to exploit the unique capabilities of REMORA for long-term monitoring applications by water utilities, environmental regulatory agencies, and water-intensive industries.  More

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      in Environment

      3 Questions: How are cities managing record-setting temperatures?

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      July 2023 was the hottest month globally since humans began keeping records. People all over the U.S. experienced punishingly high temperatures this summer. In Phoenix, there were a record-setting 31 consecutive days with a high temperature of 110 degrees Fahrenheit or more. July was the hottest month on record in Miami. A scan of high temperatures around the country often yielded some startlingly high numbers: Dallas, 110 F; Reno, 108 F; Salt Lake City, 106 F; Portland, 105 F.

      Climate change is a global and national crisis that cannot be solved by city governments alone, but cities suffering from it can try to enact new policies reducing emissions and adapting its effects. MIT’s David Hsu, an associate professor of urban and environmental planning, is an expert on metropolitan and regional climate policy. In one 2017 paper, Hsu and some colleagues estimated how 11 major U.S. cities could best reduce their carbon dioxide emissions, through energy-efficient home construction and retrofitting, improvements in vehicle gas mileage, more housing density, robust transit systems, and more. As we near the end of this historically hot summer, MIT News talked to Hsu about what cities are now doing in response to record heat, and the possibilities for new policy measures.

      Q: We’ve had record-setting temperatures in many cities across the U.S. this summer. Dealing with climate change certainly isn’t just the responsibility of those cities, but what have they been doing to make a difference, to the extent they can?

      A: I think this is a very top-of-mind question because even 10 or 15 years ago, we talked about adapting to a changed climate future, which seemed further off. But literally every week this summer we can refer to [dramatic] things that are already happening, clearly linked to climate change, and are going to get worse. We had wildfire smoke in the Northeast and throughout the Eastern Seaboard in June, this tragic wildfire in Hawaii that led to more deaths than any other wildfire in the U.S., [plus record high temperatures]. A lot of city leaders face climate challenges they thought were maybe 20 or 30 years in the future, and didn’t expect to see happen with this severity and intensity.

      One thing you’re seeing is changes in governance. A lot of cities have recently appointed a chief heat officer. Miami and Phoenix have them now, and this is someone responsible for coordinating response to heat waves, which turn out to be one of the biggest killers among climatological effects. There is an increasing realization not only among local governments, but insurance companies and the building industry, that flooding is going to affect many places. We have already seen flooding in the seaport area in Boston, the most recently built part of our city. In some sense just the realization among local governments, insurers, building owners, and residents, that some risks are here and now, already is changing how people think about those risks.

      Q: To what extent does a city being active about climate change at least signal to everyone, at the state or national level, that we have to do more? At the same time, some states are reacting against cities that are trying to institute climate initiatives and trying to prevent clean energy advances. What is possible at this point?

      A: We have this very large, heterogeneous and polarized country, and we have differences between states and within states in how they’re approaching climate change. You’ve got some cities trying to enact things like natural gas bans, or trying to limit greenhouse gas emissions, with some state governments trying to preempt them entirely. I think cities have a role in showing leadership. But one thing I harp on, having worked in city government myself, is that sometimes in cities we can be complacent. While we pride ourselves on being centers of innovation and less per-capita emissions — we’re using less than rural areas, and you’ll see people celebrating New York City as the greenest in the world — cities are responsible for consumption that produces a majority of emissions in most countries. If we’re going to decarbonize society, we have to get to zero altogether, and that requires cities to act much more aggressively.

      There is not only a pessimistic narrative. With the Inflation Reduction Act, which is rapidly accelerating the production of renewable energy, you see many of those subsidies going to build new manufacturing in red states. There’s a possibility people will see there are plenty of better paying, less dangerous jobs in [clean energy]. People don’t like monopolies wherever they live, so even places people consider fairly conservative would like local control [of energy], and that might mean greener jobs and lower prices. Yes, there is a doomscrolling loop of thinking polarization is insurmountable, but I feel surprisingly optimistic sometimes.

      Large parts of the Midwest, even in places people think of as being more conservative, have chosen to build a lot of wind energy, partly because it’s profitable. Historically, some farmers were self-reliant and had wind power before the electrical grid came. Even now in some places where people don’t want to address climate change, they’re more than happy to have wind power.

      Q: You’ve published work on which cities can pursue which policies to reduce emissions the most: better housing construction, more transit, more fuel-efficient vehicles, possibly higher housing density, and more. The exact recipe varies from place to place. But what are the common threads people can think about?

      A: It’s important to think about what the status quo is, and what we should be preparing for. The status quo simply doesn’t serve large parts of the population right now. Heat risk, flooding, and wildfires all disproportionately affect populations that are already vulnerable. If you’re elderly, or lack access to mobility, information, or warnings, you probably have a lower risk of surviving a wildfire. Many people do not have high-quality housing, and may be more exposed to heat or smoke. We know the climate has already changed, and is going to change more, but we have failed to prepare for foreseeable changes that already here. Lots of things that are climate-related but not only about climate change, like affordable housing, transportation, energy access for everyone so they can have services like cooking and the internet — those are things that we can change going forward. The hopeful message is: Cities are always changing and being built, so we should make them better. The urgent message is: We shouldn’t accept the status quo. More