Launched in 2023, the MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative’s (ESI’s) Climate Justice Program serves as a cross-Institute platform for climate justice research and action. 

Our work takes up the challenges of equity and justice that lie at the heart of the society-wide transitions needed to mitigate climate change impacts and adapt collectively. We employ multidisciplinary, situated, and culturally specific approaches in order to illuminate the particularities of burdens and possibilities and enact alternatives to current trajectories. 

We operationalize and further develop the Imperative of Justice introduced in MIT’s Fast Forward Climate Action Plan for the Decade with a strategy that weaves throughout the six missions of MIT’s Climate Project. In addition to the moral and political necessity of climate justice noted in the Fast Forward Plan, we recognize the potential for positive impacts in combining the research capacities of MIT with the situated expertise held by Indigenous and other frontline communities. 

By establishing ongoing relays across traditional disciplinary boundaries and forging research codesign models with frontline climate justice communities, the ESI’s Climate Justice Program addresses climate justice-related topics through three interrelated strategies: 

1. Institutional capacity-building 

This includes offering resources to the MIT community in climate justice theory and emerging topics through symposia, training events, invited experts, collaborative workshops, and ongoing networking — as well as consultation services on timely research topics, community codesigned research, research design, and research outputs.

2. Advancing scholarship 

We aim to accomplish this by engaging in climate justice theory, participatory research methods, and specific climate justice issues. These include just energy transitions, nature-based solutions to climate change, and urban precarity and resilience.

3. Partnering with frontline communities

The people living most closely with climate and environmental struggles and injustices are especially well-equipped to lead the way towards more just and sustainable ways of living. Research agendas built through community-led partnerships will be best positioned to create meaningful positive impacts. The ESI supports long-standing relationships with frontline climate justice communities and relays of knowledge between MIT researchers and our partners, which include grassroots and Indigenous-led organizations across the United States, Europe, and South America. 

Contact: Briana Meier, Postdoctoral Associate (bkmeier@mit.edu)

Recent publications

The ESI’s Rapid Response Group Engages Climate Justice Issues in the Snake River Region (MIT ESI, Sept. 2, 2023)

Our trip to Coast Salish ancestral land with Se’Si’Le (MIT ESI, June 21, 2023)

Legacies of Coal (Living Climate Futures, June 19, 2023)