The Climate Project at MIT

As an institution with a history of rising to meet serious challenges, MIT is mounting a bold, tenacious new response to the global threat posed by climate change. Introducing the Climate Project at MIT, a whole-Institute mobilization through which MIT will become one of the world’s most prolific and collaborative sources of technological, behavioral, and policy solutions for the global climate challenge within the next decade. The Climate Project is a nimble organizational approach that represents a new model of university-led innovation to achieve fast, practical impact at scale. Three interconnected, discipline-spanning components– Climate Missions, Climate Frontier Projects, and the Climate HQ–will make it possible for the people of MIT to identify critical gaps in the global climate response and experiment with novel ways to deploy our intellectual resources and engage external partners to tackle them. The initiative will be guided and shaped by the vice president for climate at MIT, a newly created role.

The Climate Project at MIT is designed so the MIT community and our local and international partners can rapidly develop solutions to some of the toughest problems standing in the way of an effective global climate response.

MIT-based problem-solving communities will be organized around critical Climate Missions. Each will address a broad domain for which solutions are required for effective climate response and where excellent research capabilities exist at MIT. Led by a faculty director and an executive director, the Climate Missions will assess national and global progress; identify critical gaps and bottlenecks as well as promising new pathways for action; and select, launch, and support projects to accelerate progress. At the launch of the Climate Project at MIT, the Climate Missions areas will be:

• Decarbonizing Energy and Industry
• Restoring the Atmosphere, Protecting the Land and Oceans
• Empowering Frontline Communities
• Building and Adapting Healthy, Resilient Cities
• Inventing New Policy Approaches
• Wild Cards

Launched by and funded through the Climate Missions, Climate Frontier Projects will take on hard problems that are either roadblocks to climate progress or whose resolution will create important new pathways for climate action. These projects will have clear milestones, deliverables, and accountability. In all cases, the focus will be on accelerating impact, whether by developing and testing prototypes, collecting data, testing and evaluating the impact of new policy implementations, and supporting large-scale deployment of industrial technologies and systems.

The Climate HQ will support fundamental research in the core scientific and humanistic disciplines related to climate and promote engagement between researchers in these disciplines and the Climate Missions. It will allocate Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program students, graduate and postdoc fellowships, junior faculty seed funds, and senior climate innovation fellowships and will ensure MIT’s departments, laboratories, centers, and initiatives (DLCIs) are equipped to engage in climate-related research and education. Leadership of the Climate HQ will work with the DLCIs on climate-related faculty recruiting and hiring.