Principal Investigator Dara Entekhabi
Co-investigator John Lienhard
Project Website http://web.mit.edu/erc-report/
As the world’s population continues to expand, our natural resources will become increasingly strained. In an effort to find sustainable solutions for the planet’s growing population while minimizing environmental impacts, MIT’s Environmental Research Council (ERC) has put forward a detailed implementation plan to establish a Global Environmental Initiative to complement the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI).
The interdisciplinary, faculty-led council presented the plan to the MIT community last Thursday in a forum held at the Kirsch Auditorium in the Stata Center. Council members outlined an initiative that would bring together MIT’s “core strengths” across campus to help solve the world’s pressing environmental challenges, from mitigating climate change to curbing contamination and maintaining fresh water supplies.
Once launched, the Global Environment Initiative is expected to focus on cultivating six key areas of academic research throughout MIT: climate, oceans, water, ecological resilience, contamination mitigation and sustainable societies.
Going forward, the Global Environment Initiative would work to strengthen these existing efforts and identify new research priorities. For example, in the climate arena, the plan proposes increasing work devoted to reducing uncertainty in climate predictions. In the case of oceanic studies, the initiative would boost efforts to harness the potential of new data collection and analysis technologies to monitor the impacts of human activity.