Two recent online events related to MIT's ambitious new climate action plan highlighted several areas of progress, including uses of the campus as a real-life testbed for climate impact research, the creation of new planning bodies with opportunities for input from all parts of the MIT community, and a variety of moves toward reducing the Institute's own carbon footprint in ways that may also provide a useful model for others.
To unite climate efforts, maximize their impact, and identify new ways for MIT to contribute climate solutions, MIT has appointed more than a dozen faculty to its new Climate Nucleus, a committee established by the Institute’s “Fast Forward” climate action plan. The committee will be co-chaired by professors Noelle Selin and Anne White.
MIT’s second climate action plan, titled Fast Forward: MIT’s Climate Action Plan for the Decade, was announced by President L. Rafael Reif, Vice President for Research Maria Zuber, Associate Provost Richard Lester, Dean of Engineering Anantha Chandrakasan, and Executive Vice President and Treasurer Glen Shor in a May 12 email to MIT community members.
The email writes that MIT is in a position “to set a standard of climate leadership” and that with the plan, it commits to “a coordinated set of leadership actions to spur innovation, accelerate action, and deliver impact.”
The development of the new plan was led by Zuber, Lester, and Chandrakasan, who also engaged with community members and solicited feedback for the plan through various meetings, engagement sessions, climate symposia, and fora with faculty, staff, students, alumni, and external partners.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
MIT has released an ambitious new plan for action to address the world’s accelerating climate crisis. The plan, titled “Fast Forward: MIT’s Climate Action Plan for the Decade,” includes a broad array of new initiatives and significant expansions of existing programs, to address the needs for new technologies, new policies, and new kinds of outreach to bring the Institute’s expertise to bear on this critical global issue.
As MIT President L. Rafael Reif and other senior leaders have written in a letter to the MIT community announcing the new plan, “Humanity must find affordable, equitable ways to bring every sector of the global economy to net-zero carbon emissions no later than 2050.” And in order to do that, “we must go as far as we can, as fast as we can, with the tools and methods we have now.” But that alone, they stress, will not be enough to meet that essential goal. Significant investments will also be needed to invent
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MIT has released an ambitious new plan for action to address the world’s accelerating climate crisis. The plan, titled “Fast Forward: MIT’s Climate Action Plan for the Decade,” includes a broad array of new initiatives and significant expansions of existing programs, to address the needs for new technologies, new policies, and new kinds of outreach to bring the Institute’s expertise to bear on this critical global issue.
As MIT President L. Rafael Reif and other senior leaders have written in a letter to the MIT community announcing the new plan, “Humanity must find affordable, equitable ways to bring every sector of the global economy to net-zero carbon emissions no later than 2050.” And in order to do that, “we must go as far as we can, as fast as we can, with the tools and methods we have now.” But that alone, they stress, will not be enough to meet that essential goal. Significa