Three Questions on Nature-Based Climate Solutions With ESI Research Affiliate Martin Camilo Pérez Lara
By: Sophia Apteker, Administrative and Communications Assistant
When I videocalled Martin Camilo Pérez Lara the other day to discuss his new position as a research affiliate of the MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative (ESI), two canvas paintings hung simply on a tan wall behind him. The one on the left was long and rectangular, depicting a person cutting through a wispy forest. The one on the right was square. It showed a marine ecosystem, a person swirled in a sea of blue and green.
Martin grew up in a family of artists. Earlier in his life, he thought maybe he’d be an artist, too.
“When I started to make many murals, I became very interested in — and I started to paint — environmental issues: animals, ecosystems, natural forests, ecosystem processes,” Martin explained of his work. “Afterwards, I decided to explore creative opportunities in natural sciences, and I also really liked math. So with this mix, I decided to study forestry engineering.”
Martin has since become a forestry engineer with a master’s degree in international affairs. His impressive resume features high-level positions with the Ministry of Environment in Colombia, the World Bank in Mexico, the United Nations in Latin America, the Center for Clean Air Policy, and currently, the WWF (World Wide Fund for Nature) US.
At the ESI, he will play an active role in facilitating discussions with various actors in the carbon market chain — including local communities, national governments, market developers, and standards accreditors — to identify how and where improvements can be implemented so that quality and social justice are centered. The ultimate goal? Applying insights from his team’s well-rounded research to inform future laws, public policies, and projects that promote ecosystem protection while prioritizing the people who live there.
To introduce Martin, I asked him three questions about nature-based climate solutions.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Currently, you work for the WWF US. What is the connection between the work you do there and the work that you do for the ESI?
The WWF US is the umbrella for the time I am dedicating to MIT research. This is the place where I am building the knowledge and activities in different landscapes in the world.
The work that I am doing for WWF US is as a Director for the Forest Climate Solutions Impact and Monitoring Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) program, where we create a system to monitor impact in different landscapes, including Brazil, Madagascar, Mexico, Peru, and Vietnam. Additionally, we are developing new market approaches in Colombia and other Latin American countries and supporting the creation of environmental integrity criteria in the US and international instances.
In these landscapes, I help teams create the best approach to monitoring the impact that NBS will have at both local and international levels.
You’ve previously mentioned that a key highlight of your career has been creating and promoting Fair Deals as a management framework for carbon markets, and that these efforts have significantly improved the inclusivity and effectiveness of climate finance solutions. Can you explain what these solutions looked like before, if any, and what they’ve looked like since implementing Fair Deals?
The carbon markets and biodiversity credits — but especially the carbon markets because they are a mechanism with a longer history — have two main problems.
The first problem is that some of those who establish the baselines in the carbon markets lack environmental integrity or quality in their work. Consequently, they sometimes inflate the baselines to secure more credits. This results in a significant issue: absence of quality.
The second one is that the agreement between the breakout companies that you need to write the documents to certify the carbon obtained by the local communities actions — that is, the people who are living with the forest and can change or maintain the relationship with the forest to reduce deforestation or degradation — these agreements are not just or equitable regarding the community’s efforts.
The community performs the work in the field: they plant the trees, they protect the forest, they do almost everything. And the technical company — the private company — many of them make the negotiations to generate the certificates. To do this technical work, they take between 20% to 50% of their results, normally, during the duration of the projects, which is 20 to 30 years. That is tons and tons not just of carbon dioxide, but of money: money that should be implemented in more actions in the field; money that should been directly received by the communities. The quality and long-term operation of forest mitigation projects are of interest to both the communities and other market actors who seek a viable operation in the long term.
To address the first problem, I collaborated with Ministries of Environment and climate change commissions across Latin America, as well as market actors, to create and implement carbon accounting and traceability systems. Currently, I am focused on implementing models that adhere to environmental integrity criteria on a landscape scale.
To solve the second problem, which in my view is the most important, we created the “just or fair agreements” concept where we build the capabilities within local communities. In this new model, the community is the center. The people interacting with forests don’t need to accept inequitable agreements. This increases their possibility of maximizing investments related to climate change mitigation, improving local livelihoods.
Local communities are pivotal to the work that you do. Why is it important that these communities are prioritized?
The main reason is that I have a lot of empathy for local communities, their livelihoods, and their needs. I am not part of these communities, but I believe that their forestry governance is the key for stability and durability in long-term climate mitigation results.
The other issue is that if we don’t work with these communities — the people who live with the ecosystems — and if we don’t invest in their development plans, we will only implement a project that produces short-term results, after which we will return to the starting point. In climate terms, “returning to the starting point” means putting the planet at risk.
So, the communities’ power in the environmental markets must be asserted.
Celebrating the Challenge: The ESI at 10 Years
The ESI was established in May 2014, and we are now celebrating our ten-year anniversary. This brief note is not intended to capture in any comprehensive way all that we have accomplished during this span of time. Instead, it attempts to delineate highlights in our trajectory, especially as we look toward the next chapter.
At its inception, the desire for a commitment to address multiple challenges facing the planet – climate change chief among many – had been in discussion at MIT for some time. A group of professors and researchers at the Institute had met regularly for years and discussed, wrote proposals and advocated to senior administration for an initiative focused on the environment. By way of their sustained efforts, the ESI was inaugurated with Prof. Susan Solomon as the founding director. I took over as director 18 months later in October 2015.
The ESI was launched with two first-order objectives: to establish a minor in environment and sustainability available to all MIT undergraduates and to launch a research effort across diverse topics in the environment, sustainability and climate change. The research portfolio was founded with two rounds of seed grants to multidisciplinary teams across departments at MIT. Today, ESI research is comprised of six programs including Mining and the Circular Economy; Natural Climate Solutions; Climate Justice; Cities and Climate Change; Plastics and the Environment; and Arts, Media and AI.
The ESI also created and expanded a major effort to engage the public and communicate all aspects of climate change beyond MIT. We refer to the fruits of this effort as the “three Ps” – the Climate Portal, the Climate Primer and the TILClimate podcast.
All three legs of the ESI – research, education and engagement – have become instrumental at MIT in offering varied and rich experiences to students, opportunities for research to the MIT faculty and understanding and learning to those beyond our campus and worldwide. Listing and describing all that we have done since our launch would constitute a very, very long article. I will simply note there is much to celebrate about the past ten years.
First-year MIT undergraduates at an ESI event featuring US Senator Sheldon Whitehouse in 2017. Photo courtesy of Stephanie McPherson.
I will also note that there is much left to do – more than many would have predicted ten years ago. While the rate of growth of global emissions has decreased, emissions are still increasing, 1.3% in 2022 and 1.1% in 2023, amounting to 410 million tonnes to a new record high of 37.4 billion tonnes. Global biodiversity loss – a much more difficult challenge to assess – likely increased greatly in the ten years since the ESI started operating. In the Living Planet Report 2022, the World Wildlife Fund asserts that global wildlife populations have been reduced by 69% since 1970. And recently, the Stockholm Resilience Center announced that six of nine Planetary Boundaries have been breached and are now at high risk.
While I could go on in this sobering way with many other markers of the enormous challenge that has grown ever more complex and seemingly difficult these past ten years, I risk creating ever greater despair that may contribute to ever greater stasis. In fact, for many years now there has been a concerted effort to adopt a decidedly positive and forward-looking attitude toward our environmental challenges. Many in the scientific, policy, business and advocacy communities have been focusing on communicating positive perspectives that are intended to drive action and momentum, from Katharine Hayhoe’s regular messages as Chief Scientist for the Nature Conservancy to Hannah Ritchie’s climate optimistic book, Not the End of the World.
I have been doing the same for some portion of the communications I engage in, whether speaking to an audience, writing articles or otherwise discussing climate change, biodiversity loss and other environmental issues. Yet, when I have done so I experience an almost imperceptible internal pause; it feels like something of a discontinuity of belief in my own words. Can we really be as optimistic as some, including myself, believe we should be?
This pause becomes a full-on break when I contend with messages that use a forward-thinking and self-consciously positive perspective to intentionally or unintentionally diminish the challenge and open the door to greenwashing. Can we really continue to expect “natural” gas – an extremely powerful greenhouse gas – to be managed responsibly and act as a “bridge” fuel to decarbonization? How much longer will people erroneously believe that wood for fuel (mostly in the form of wood pellets) is a carbon neutral or negative emissions heat source? Have we learned our lesson of rampant mismanagement and outright fraud in the carbon offset market? Does the current fossil fuel industry media blitz on carbon capture achieve anything more than open up a new tactic for climate action delay? This list of questions about miseducation and misinformation could go on and on.
Eight and a half years ago when I agreed to be the director of the ESI we used the slogan, “The Time is Now” to focus attention not on 2100 or 2050, but on research and actions that can deliver meaningful results now, or as soon as possible. Ten years later the time is still now, actually more now than ever.
This is where the ESI has landed, between the need for active optimism in light of enduring and often purposefully exacerbated challenges and the urgency for actions now. Frankly, we have no other pathway than to endeavor to expand our work and engage deeply in solutions across environmental challenges. The planet and life on Earth don’t really care whether we are optimistic or not. Our next chapter has to be as much about results as the first chapter has been. And now with the announcement of The Climate Project, the ESI is positioned as a key asset across research, education and engagement to accelerate the creation and deployment of solutions for best results as soon as possible.
In the early days of the ESI, we also had another oft-repeated mantra that went something like the following: “Possibly the most important and durable solution we can deliver to the world are a steady stream of well-educated and deeply motivated students.” This, because students leave MIT and continue their journey for decades to come. What they do in the world, hopefully motivated by a sense of accomplishment on environmental topics while at MIT, could be one of the more important game changers we can offer. I believe this more than ever because since ESI’s earliest days students tell me how much they value the initiative.
So, I leave you with a few words from a former MIT undergraduate from the class of 2020 who has been working in wind energy since she graduated. I had not heard from her for a couple of years. She wrote the following to me just a few days ago: “The initiative had a monumental impact on my time at MIT…and I’m glad it continues to be a resource for students trying to figure out how they could possibly contribute.”
J.E. Fernández, Director MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative
May 31, 2024
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Concluding the ESI’S Two-Year Pilot Project in Mocoa, Colombia
By: Danielle Baez, Research Assistant at Pratt Institute
In 2017, a devastating landslide in Mocoa, Colombia caused the death of over 300 people and affected 22,000 more, including over 2,900 indigenous people belonging to nine different communities, according to Mocoa’s reconstruction Plan CONPES 3904. Corpoamazonia, the regional environmental authority for the region, has estimated that approximately 30% of the urban area is still located in high-risk areas, as portions of the displaced population have not been resettled and efforts to build an early warning system remain limited.
Following a sequence of planning workshops organized in partnership with MIT DUSP, the ESI partnered with the aforementioned Corpoamazonia (Corporación Autónoma Regional para el Desarrollo de la Amazonia), Pratt Institute’s Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment, the Colombian Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development, and the Latin American Development Bank (CAF), among others, to launch the pilot project, “Drones for Equitable Climate Change Adaptation” (DECCA) in 2022. This pilot project aimed to develop an intervention model using an asset-based approach to community-based planning and participatory risk management with the development of technological tools for landslide monitoring.
The participatory monitoring model works through robust stakeholder engagement and the construction of a Community Researchers Network (CRN) that gives seven community leaders from varied backgrounds a seat at the table, with the ability to participate and drive much of the outreach strategy and community involvement with decision making. It pioneers new applications for unmanned aerial vehicles (drones) and integrates machine learning to process landslide susceptibility data. Ultimately, the goal of this work is to strengthen the community’s planning and risk management capacity and to build technology-enhanced strategies to monitor and respond to climate change impacts in areas facing structural challenges.
In March 2024 — after months of testing drone flights to map the middle part of the Rio Mulato watershed — the project partners convened in Mocoa to present the results of the pilot. Over the course of three days, the team facilitated and engaged in a series of workshops and public meetings to reflect on the use of the information to generate adaptation indicators and to introduce the prototype of the landslide susceptibility visualization platform to the community. Moreover, after gaining insight from this first phase, the team started delineating work areas for a potential second phase and its possibilities, including how to create a data service for financial institutions that could support data collection efforts in the future. Hosted by Corpoamazonia, the delegation included members from the ESI and project partners from Pratt Institute’s Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment, as well as representatives from CAF Development Bank of Latin America, the Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development, and the Community Researchers Network.
Combining technology development and community-based planning
While the project is ambitious both in its technological development and in its community engagement efforts, getting the drone in the hands of the local pilots and determining the ideal parameters for the data collection was not an easy feat. One of the primary reasons drones were chosen as the mechanism for mapping the watershed is the difficulty of the environment itself. The drone has to fly below the constant cloud cover characteristic to the Andean-Amazon piedmont region, but just above the dense forest cover in order to accurately create digital terrain models. It took an enormous amount of collaboration and calibration between teams in Mocoa; Bogotá; Cambridge, Mass.; New York City; and Panamá City to build the local technical capacities to fly the drones while honing in on exactly what speed, height, and even flight patterns were optimal to capture the highest quality crucial data in the steep slopes near Mocoa.
A staff member from Corpoamazonia’s data collection team works in the field. Photo credit: Duber Rosero
The project also explored different machine learning methods to better understand what factors most heavily contribute to landslide susceptibility in Mocoa and to develop the most accurate landslide susceptibility model based on collected data and key hydrological, geological, and geomorphological features. While a variety of machine learning models are still being tested and data continues to be integrated, a first model resulted in an accuracy upwards of 92% for landslide susceptibility monitoring.
”This model has potential applications in informing urban planning, including the identification of almost real-time changes in susceptibility, the identification of areas of priority for direct intervention and mitigation works, and the generation of data and outputs for the early warning system,” explained Maritza Garzon, project coordinator at Corpoamazonia. “But this requires increasing the coverage and frequency of the data collection efforts. The model is also determined by the availability of a detailed inventory of historical landslide data which can be hard to come by, robust local meteorological and seismic data, and the quality and resolution of the data collected, which can be difficult [to access] due to the environmental challenges of the cloud cover and density of the vegetation.”
Beyond the technical component, the project has devoted equal efforts to community engagement and strengthening local capacities for risk understanding and management, as exemplified through the aforementioned CRN.
“Technology development can only bring us so far,” said Juan Camilo Osorio, associate professor at Pratt’s Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment, and founding partner and co-investigator of the project. “At the heart of the project, DECCA has launched a Community Researchers Network to acknowledge and position grassroots leadership to guide the creation of a genuine community-based planning and risk management process. We are grateful for the opportunity to help strengthen local technical capacity to investigate, communicate, and imagine opportunities to address the risk of landslides and inundation in Mocoa.”
The CRN has been working to strengthen the alliance between the institutional and academic entities and the community of Mocoa itself to raise awareness on the landslide susceptibility and the risks and opportunities around landslide monitoring and community action.
As part of this visit, the CRN convened, presented the work, and co-facilitated a series of local events, including a public meeting and Q&A session; an adaptation indicators workshop with the municipality and other local, regional, and and national entities; and a roundtable with academic institutions to further understand how a partnership could expand opportunities and refine the understanding of landslide susceptibility in the area.
“The CRN has emerged as the driving force behind outreach and impact, increasing the interest of the community to engage with more sophisticated data in their understanding of risk,” said Lucy Milena Castillo Landazury, CRN member, during the public meeting. “This active engagement has guided the project, and hopefully subsequent planning decisions, that will make Mocoa more resilient to future disasters.”
Lucy Castillo, member of the CRN, presents the prototype susceptibility map at a public meeting.
Photo Credit: Danielle Baez
Envisioning the next phase
As a pilot project, this work represented a first attempt at mobilizing the expertise of the academic community and financial resources from the Global Environmental Facility through the CAF Development Bank of Latin America to promote knowledge of landslide risk awareness through a deeply participatory process in a context of contention, distrust, and high climate risks.
Despite encountering numerous obstacles, the team has gleaned invaluable insights from this first phase that have provided the proof of concept needed to define priorities for a second phase.
“Looking at the future of the project, we envision to build on the strengthened data collection capacities to start cultivating local data processing capabilities and improving the landslide susceptibility models with more frequent updates and broader coverage; to continue to empower the Community Researchers Network with greater autonomy; to enhance collaboration between technical elements and community stakeholders, alongside official advisors and newfound allies; and to broaden access to diverse risk information while enhancing interoperability with early warning systems” said Marcela Angel, research program director at the ESI.
This future phase could be focused on strengthening technical and technological capabilities for landslide susceptibility monitoring, developing actions that strengthen the capacities of vulnerable communities in Mocoa for risk preparedness and nature-based risk reduction actions, disseminating risk information with a focus on equitable access, and leveraging the technological infrastructure and network of partners for the implementation of nature-based solutions for climate adaptation.
The trip concluded with a workshop in Bogotá focused on opportunities to involve microfinance institutions and how to use landslide susceptibility data to catalyze financial inclusion for the region, and possibly fund the technological and human capacity that has been built out as a result of this project. Taken together, these actions set up a pathway for the continuation of a partnership that has been bridging the gaps in technology development and community engagement for climate risk monitoring in Colombia.
The DECCA project is supported by the Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development of Colombia, with the economic support of the Global Environmental Facility and implementation through CAF Development Bank of Latin America. Questions about DECCA can be directed to Marcela Angel at marcelaa@mit.edu.
How Do You Bridge Divides in Climate Change Conversations? A Q+A with Ben Stillerman, Deb Roy, and Laur Hesse Fisher
By: Sophia Apteker, Administrative and Communications Assistant
During Earth Month, the internet has been abuzz with a spectrum of conversations about the current and future state of our planet. And while the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication has categorized the majority of Americans as Alarmed or Concerned about global warming, roughly a third are still Disengaged, Doubtful, and Dismissive. This begs the question: How do we catalyze the latter audience to recognize what the climate fuss is all about and mobilize them for action?
On Tuesday, April 30, the MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative will be partnering with the MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric & Planetary Sciences (EAPS) to present a film screening of True False, Hot Cold. The documentary was shot in a county of Utah with the least belief in climate change in America. It weaves vignettes from farmers, ranchers, cowboys, coal miners, and other county residents together to build bridges — not divides — between people who have very different identities and beliefs.
The screening will be accompanied by a discussion with Ben Stillerman, filmmaker and founder of the Social Cohesion Lab; Deb Roy, faculty director of the MIT Center for Constructive Communication; and Laur Hesse Fisher, program director at MIT Climate and founder of the MIT Environmental Solutions Journalism Fellowship. These panelists, who are actively incorporating these bridge-building values and approaches into their work, will also have an open conversation with the audience.
This event is sponsored by the MIT Climate Nucleus.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
1. Ben and Laur: each of your projects — Ben with the film, Laur with the journalism fellowship — attempt to connect with hard-to-reach communities on climate change. Why is this topic important to you?
BS: Well here’s a simple way of thinking about that question, and it’s something I ask people who feel uncomfortable about giving airtime to people with wildly different opinions about a topic as big as climate change: How’s it working out for us right now, when we’re not able to talk to communities who disagree with us or are different from us? Doesn’t seem to be working that well, does it? The feeling of polarized animosity has stalled progress, so although a rural community might have different ideas about how to deal with climate, I think that the social value of connecting with them is greater than the risk of not hearing from them entirely.
LHF: Climate change has become a politically polarized issue in the United States. Yet a country free of carbon pollution requires the support of Americans across political parties and across the country – in the voting booth and also, critically, in the city halls and neighborhoods where the energy transition is happening. Still, opportunity exists, as an increasing number of Republicans, especially young Republicans, say that they are worried about climate change and many support the same climate solutions as Democrats. Building bipartisan support for climate solutions is within our grasp, but we need to approach it thoughtfully and humbly.
2. It seems like people might be hesitant to share their opinions if they don’t know how their words are going to be used. With this in mind, Ben, how did you convince people to let you interview them for the documentary?
BS: This might seem counterintuitive, but on big, controversial topics, I’ve found that people are eager to have their voices heard, especially when given the opportunity to share their beliefs in the context of their life experience. Everyone likes to feel that their story is worth hearing. In practice for our film, I showed up one afternoon at the Main Street gas station, introduced myself, and asked if people knew anyone worth talking to about some of these topics. Once I had done one interview and proved I wasn’t out to belittle or trick people, they were happy to suggest someone else worth chatting with, and because I now had the added validation from the first person, the door was already half open.
3. Deb, your expertise lies within using human-machine systems to develop deep systematic listening, which has applications in large scale social media ecosystems. What could we learn by using these listening techniques in the climate space?
DR: Our approach brings together facilitated dialogue, sensemaking, and digital technology to surface patterns of experience – rooted in personal stories – rather than opinions. This form of listening fosters a deeper understanding of what people value and how those values intersect with climate issues.
For example, through The Museum for the UN’s Global We initiative, we collected hundreds of conversations in 25 locations around the world and shared underheard local perspectives on climate directly with leaders at the UN COP28 summit. One of the questions that was asked was: “Imagine that the quietest voices on climate change were heard – what are they saying?” We also engaged 25 young people around the world to make sense of these conversations, building a transparent youth-owned process that activated and empowered local community members around climate.
4. Deb and Laur, we need to engage millions of people on climate change, yet in a way that’s personal to them. How can we effectively build connections at scale?
DR: We need to create opportunities for people to engage in meaningful personal actions. Meaningful because they are clearly connected to something bigger. Personal because they are actions that an individual has the power and agency to perform. In our work we seek to create scalable systems for dialogue and listening that create opportunities for people in communities from all walks of life to organize, design, facilitate, and analyze conversations they host with people in their trusted networks. Our main focus is to help communities build the capacity they need to surface and make sense of the voices of their peers using tools that are designed to empower them to analyze and interpret their own data.
LHF: Local news is the outlet that Americans rely on and trust the most, and studies show that localizing climate change is an effective way to open perspectives on the issue. Yet climate journalism is often limited to national and specialty news outlets. In order to engage Americans where climate change is disputed or underreported, we need to make it local — told by local messengers and centering local issues and values. This is the mission underlying the MIT Environmental Solutions journalism fellowship and a way we see we can help scale conversations about climate change in the parts of the country where it greatly matters.
5. What kinds of media do you consume and how does that shape your work?
BS: Is there a word for being addicted to Reddit? That’s what I am. I really love the weird feeling of always being one click away from devoted communities of people posting dozens of articles a day about things I sometimes totally disagree with, alongside reviews of lawn mowers or traffic reports from India. Although Reddit is often wrong, angry, or opinionated, it’s almost always passionate and fun, so it’s where I get a lot of the ideas which interest me for further investigation.
DR: I try to read news sources across a range of political perspectives, together with some news aggregators and public commentators that I trust.
LHF: This is a little cheesy but the media that is most effective for me are one-on-one conversations about climate change with people who don’t see what all the fuss is about. I learn what they’re hearing about climate change and solutions, what their concerns and frustrations are, and, when I can, where they get their information. It’s an incredible source of learning.
6. Who do each of you look to for inspiration?
BS: Two of my all-time heroes are Studs Terkel and Frederick Wiseman. Terkel, in his oral histories, was able to use deeply human narratives to ground his examination of massive topics like war or work. Wiseman, in his documentaries, is brave enough to let the people and institutions he profiles speak for themselves, without letting his own editorializing overshadow them.
DR: I am lucky to have an incredible network of mentors, advisors, colleagues, students, and family members who are constant sources of inspiration and who push me to aim higher while keeping grounded in real and practical progress.
LHF: Our journalism fellow alums are smart, thoughtful and committed to the audiences they serve. Their passion for tackling these issues with care and excellence is a great source of inspiration. I greatly admire the work and perspectives of Prof. Arlie Russell Hochschild, author of Strangers in their Own Land, and Prof. Katharine Hayhoe, a celebrated climate scientist and communicator. What brings me the most inspiration are the millions of people all around the world who are working boldly on reducing global emissions in their part of the world.
7. What kinds of projects can people expect to see from the Social Cohesion Lab (from which the True False, Hot Cold film emerged), the MIT Center for Constructive Communication, and this year’s journalism fellowship?
BS: We’re focused on two things: First, we’re planning on telling more stories about people and places with different ideas about right and wrong, true and false, in an effort to bridge divides through documentary. Second, we’re running “Depolarization Day” events using our documentaries, alongside guest speakers and a taught curriculum, as an engaging way to teach the skills of bridging to college students and interested communities.
DR: We have ambitious plans to advance and scale tools and methods for dialogue, listening, and deliberative decision-making. A first opportunity for some of this work will be right here at MIT where we are planning the launch of a dialogue and listening program for our undergraduate students this fall.
LHF: We’re accepting fellowship applications until April and the fellow stories will start dropping this summer! I’ll be reposting all the stories here, and you can also follow our media or sign up for our newsletter for updates. You can learn about the incredible impact of previous fellows.
8. What is one tip you have for people who want to respectfully engage in a discourse with someone that holds a different belief than them?
BS: Everyone holds their own belief with as much internal logic as you hold yours; no one is walking around thinking their beliefs are built on shabby reasoning. Remembering this really helps keep an open heart when someone holds a position that you think is totally wrong. And stay humble, because of the thousands of beliefs you hold big and small, the chance that you’re right about them all is almost certainly zilch.
DR: Start by asking them to share their personal experiences about the topic or issue rather than their opinions, be willing to do the same for them, and commit to truly listening.
LHF: I love Ben and Deb’s replies! I’ll add, be curious, find shared values, and set appropriate expectations. Regarding that last one, I wouldn’t expect that you will be able to change someone’s mind. But if you come out of the conversation understanding their values and perspectives — and they understand and respect yours — that is a big win.
Register for the ‘True False, Hot Cold’: Film Screening & Discussion here.
A Refreshed MIT Climate Primer to Better Serve Students, Educators, and the “Climate Curious”
This month, the MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative launched the first major update to Climate Science, Risk & Solutions, an online introduction to the science of climate change that won the Webby Award for Best Editorial Feature with its 2020 debut.
The Climate Science, Risk & Solutions website, also called the MIT Climate Primer, is an interactive digital journey written by Dr. Kerry Emanuel, professor emeritus of Atmospheric Science at MIT and a celebrated climate communicator and hurricane researcher. The eleven chapters are punctuated with quizzes, interactive graphics, and videos that allow high school, college, and adult learners with no prior background in climate science to explore how scientists came to realize that the climate is changing, and, with those evolved findings, what actions people can take today to adapt to and mitigate the impacts.
“At MIT’s climate communications program, we often get questions about how scientists know what they know about climate change,” says Laur Hesse Fisher, director of the climate communications and engagement program at the MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative. “In this Primer, Dr. Emanuel walks with readers, step-by-step, to unpack the scientific community’s emergent understanding of how the Earth’s climate is changing, with a level of skepticism and clarity that learners crave and deserve.”
As of this month, the Climate Primer is now informed by four more years of global climate research, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s sixth comprehensive assessment report (AR6) on the state of climate science. The updated Primer includes more precise estimates of future global warming and its effects on global temperatures and extreme weather events, important advances in climate modeling, new actions taken around the world to adapt to the impacts of climate change, and the latest data about the pace at which clean energy and other critical climate solutions are being deployed.
Left: a figure which shows three warming scenarios with varying levels of carbon mitigation, from when Climate Science, Risk & Solutions was first published in 2020. Right: the updated 2024 figure showing the latest modeling of climate scenarios, as well as how it compares to warming of the deep past.
The updated Primer is also enhanced by linked resources for further learning, drawing on four years of publications at MIT Climate explaining key climate topics and answering frequently asked questions about climate change. The other interactive elements were created in conjunction with MIT Open Learning to include best-in-show multimedia elements to reach all kinds of learners, including the “climate curious,” who are newly interested in climate change or in a new climate topic, and are searching for easy-to-understand answers from trustworthy sources.
To date, the MIT Climate Primer has been used by over 100 schools, universities, and educational sites — like ShareMyLesson, Climate Interactive, and EdX.
“The pace of climate science has never been faster,” says Hesse Fisher. “And the same is true for efforts to reduce climate pollution. It’s critical for students and adult learners to have the latest understanding of the predicted impacts of rising climate pollution – and how our actions now make all the difference in creating a clean, prosperous, and beautiful future.”
The ESI’s Angélica Mayolo Invited to Provide Technical Support as City Advisor for the Biodiversity COP (COP 16) in Cali, Colombia
By: Sophia Apteker, Administrative and Communications Assistant
When Angélica Mayolo was advocating for the city of Cali to host the Biodiversity COP (COP 16), her marketing was simple: “Choosing Cali means that you recognize the populations in the Colombian Pacific that are working toward the conservation of the environment.”
Here, the “you” refers to the Colombian government, with the implication that failure to integrate historically underrepresented voices into climate conversations would undermine any type of progress made at the international event.
The people of Cali, like those of other marginalized groups, have been innovating localized solutions for generations. The “Piangueras,” for example, are a group of women in the Colombian Chocó that collect a mollusk called Piangua from roots of mangroves. By protecting them, they also expand local gastronomy to include the Piangua, which guarantees local interest in mangrove preservation.
Yet, since these solutions like this haven’t been translated into scientific knowledge, they can, and have, gone overlooked by those in academic and governmental spaces.
With this in mind, Mayolo’s people-centric argument — supplemented by Cali’s wealth of biodiversity — made for a rather compelling case. And against all odds, it was enough.
See, Cali was an underdog, competing with roughly ten other Colombian cities for the hosting spot since December of last year, after Turkey withdrew from their position in August due to a series of devastating earthquakes. Shortly after Colombia was declared the hosting country, during the Climate Change COP 28 in Dubai, Mayolo began reaching out to various members of the national and local government to discuss the possibility of hosting the COP in Cali. Several organizations and key leaders from Cali quickly got on board with her proposal, and it evolved into a collaborative effort to present the city as a candidate.
Despite this surge of support, Cali wasn’t always seen as an immediate, clear winner. For example, when stacked against the other finalist city, Colombia’s capital of Bogotá, Cali had comparably less apt infrastructure and fewer resources to support the expected influx of 9,000 attendees, given Bogotá’s population of 7.1 million and Cali’s population of 2.8 million. It’s also worth noting that Cali has been riddled by cartels and gang-related violence, giving it the reputation as one of Colombia’s most violent urban centers.
To combat these weaker areas, Mayolo, who is an MIT MLK Fellow and a consultant for the MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative (ESI) leading the Afro-Interamerican Forum on Climate Change, had to lean heavily into the importance of recognizing the Biogeographic Choco region and the work of the local communities as stewards of biodiversity.
“To present the technical reason behind Cali’s candidacy, we brought together representatives of the hotel industry, local airport, local governments, academia, and others,” Mayolo said. “The proposal itself argued that aside from the role of local communities and biodiversity richness of Cali, we had, as a city, sufficient capacities to host the event, support all the activities related to it, attend all the needs presented by the UN, and emphatically, that the team behind the candidacy could rally several organizations and leaders in Cali, the State of Valle del Cauca, and the Pacific Region of Colombia in support of the event’s needs.”
On Feb. 20, Cali was officially recognized as the host city for the Biodiversity COP (COP 16), and Mayolo was invited to provide technical support as city advisor. She is now planning the event within a tight timeline, one that usually spans two years but is now compressed to eight months due to Turkey’s resignation. It will be held from Oct. 21 to Nov. 3 of this year, and will invite a range of attendees, including scientists and government representatives, from 180 countries.
“Receiving the news from the Minister of Environment that Cali had been selected was an incredible rush of energy for me personally, and for everyone involved in the candidacy for host,” Mayolo recounted. “As soon as we received news of our selection, the representatives of the organizations collaborating got together at the City Hall and started planning out the upcoming days of work towards COP.”
Since the starting gun has been fired, time has been of the essence.
In the upcoming months, Mayolo’s work will center around articulating the various needs and opportunities of the parties collaborating towards COP 16 by reaching out to the communities and leaders of the Pacific to help build an academic agenda for surrounding events. She will also be engaging the private sector and local governments to coordinate additional efforts.
Mayolo credits the ESI for providing her with tools and networks that have given her “an opportunity to grow [her] understanding of how vital and unique the ecosystems in the Americas are, as well as how local communities work tirelessly for their protection.”
“We recognize that choosing Cali as a host means the UN and the national government understand the importance of the Biogeographic Choco and all the species living there, so we seek to make the region the protagonist of the COP,” said Mayolo. “With side events and activities related to showcasing the biodiversity of our region, bolstering the work of our local communities to protect it, and expanding the understanding of local needs and opportunities by the countries participating, we believe that the COP can impact Cali, the Pacific Region, and Colombia beyond the scope of the event itself, reinforcing our identity as a beautiful and biodiverse destination.”
Science, Technology, and Environmental Justice: Addressing MIT’s Imperative of Justice in the Classroom
By: Madeline Schlegel, Co-op and Chris Rabe, Postdoctoral Associate
The environmental justice (EJ) movement arose in the early 1980s to better understand and address how people of color, low income groups, and Indigenous peoples experienced disproportionate environmental harms across the United States. This led to a multidisciplinary field of EJ studies that has evolved to include aspects of sociology, public health, human rights, geography, environmental science, history, and much more. From protests in Warren County, N.C. about PCB contaminated soil in a predominantly Black community to racial and economic gaps in recovering from Hurricane Katrina, the EJ field attempts to explore the ways in which historical social injustices are interconnected with ecological and environmental problems.
MIT recognizes this interconnectedness in The Imperative of Justice section of Fast Forward: MIT’s Climate Action Plan for the Decade. This section highlights the need to decarbonize the economy by centering justice and equity in the process. Furthermore, it asserts that solving issues of the climate and environment requires a simultaneous effort to solve issues of injustice and inequity.
However, despite increased recognition from the North American Association of Environmental Education (NAAEE) and the Association of Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE), research in higher education continues to demonstrate that EJ content knowledge isn’t sufficiently included in environmental and sustainability degree programs, and even less likely in STEM program contexts. The ESI recently published a white paper that reinforces this, highlighting an extreme dearth of climate and environmental justice (CEJ) content within MIT’s STEM departments. This means that students engaging in STEM related learning and research experiences aren’t being exposed to CEJ issues, which is problematic because it may cause a perpetuation of EJ issues in the field.
In an effort to address the lack of CEJ content knowledge in STEM courses and further MIT’s Imperative of Justice, the ESI and the Program in Media, Arts, and Sciences within the MIT Media Lab collaborated to offer a Science, Technology & Environmental Justice (ST&EJ) course during the 2024 IAP session. The course was originally created by Ufuoma Ovienmhada, a PhD candidate in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and was co-taught by Chris Rabe, a postdoctoral associate at the ESI.
ST&EJ students listen to a lecture. Photo credit: Madeline Schlegel
The initial interest form for this course garnered 64 responses from students across a wide range of schools and departments, which demonstrates a significant interest of MIT students in the inclusion of CEJ issues in STEM courses. Ultimately, 25 students participated in the course with 11 students taking the course for credit. The primary goal of the ST&EJ course was to experiment with environmental justice as a foundational framework to foster a meaningful, culturally relevant, and socially just context for STEM learning. More specifically, the course explored the question: How can science and technology be employed in the study of and fight against environmental injustice?
This past January, students engaged with this question by first examining the foundational history of the EJ movement; then by studying the role science and technology has played in exacerbating or ameliorating environmental inequalities; and finally by considering different theoretical frameworks, methodologies, and technological tools that contest (or produce) environmental injustice. Throughout the two weeks of instruction, several topics were discussed, including: engineering climate justice, environmental justice and AI, critical data science and environmental justice, community engagement, electronic waste, environmental justice, and energy justice. Students also gained knowledge of and experience using tools like ArcGIS Story Maps, EJ Screen, and EJ Atlas.
Another aspect of this course included participation from guest lecturers, including Bianca Bowman from a local EJ organization, GreenRoots; Alejandro Paz, an MIT librarian; and other EJ scholars and researchers working at the intersection of EJ, science, and technology.
ST&EJ students engage in a workshop using EJScreen, an environmental justice screening and mapping tool. Photo credit: Chris Rabe
The final project for the ST&EJ IAP course was to create a project proposal of an environmental justice artifact that discusses or presents analysis of an environmental justice issue. The goal was for students to practice applying environmental justice theory and methodology and engage with themes from the class related to science, technology, and environmental or climate justice. The students’ final project presentations focused on a wide variety of topics, like mountaintop removal mining in Appalachia, battery storage facilities, historical EJ issues in Cancer Alley, L.A. and global EJ issues in Honduras and India, among others.
An ST&EJ student gives a final project presentation on mountaintop removal mining in Appalachia. Photo credit: Madeline Schlegel
To further the ST&EJ course’s goal to experiment with environmental justice as a foundational framework to foster a meaningful, culturally relevant, and socially just context for STEM learning, the course will be adapted to a full, semester-long course and a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC). The semester-long course will be offered within the Department of Urban Studies and Planning in Spring 2025, but it will likely be cross registered within at least one engineering department. The MOOC (planned to launch in Fall 2024) will be free of charge and fully open to the public.
In both forms, the future iterations of the ST&EJ course will provide more space for both instructors and students to experiment with a collection of STEM tools and approaches for identifying, understanding, and exploring potential solutions to complex EJ issues across the globe.
For more on climate justice education, contact Chris Rabe at cjrabe@mit.edu.
Music Industry Leaders Tune in to Climate Solutions at Sustainability Summit
By: Sophia Apteker, Administrative and Communications Assistant
The inaugural Music Sustainability Summit in Los Angeles earlier this week was accompanied by record-breaking rainfall — more than half the average seasonal precipitation in just three days. Such extreme weather made conversations centered around human-induced climate change, and the responsibility that music industry stakeholders have to mitigate it, salient all at once.
“It’s not a solo sport,” said one speaker. “We need to get the ecosystem in this room, and that’s what we’re doing.”
(As noted in Billboard, the summit was held under the Chatham House Rule, which advises that anyone who comes to a meeting is able to use information from that meeting, but is not allowed to reveal who made any particular comment. This rule was enacted so that summit attendees could speak freely, allowing for a more impactful event.)
The music industry is a multifaceted landscape with a range of players, including, but not limited to, artists, managers, agents, venue owners, production teams, merchandisers, and catering vendors. Over 300 of these individuals attended the summit, from premiere companies like Live Nation Entertainment, ASM Global, Sony Music Group, and Warner Music Group to organizations with more specialized missions, like Support + Feed (founded by Maggie Baird, mother of Billie Eilish and FINNEAS) and the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.
The hosting Music Sustainability Alliance — which aims to be a central hub for these workers to convene for climate action — has created a shared knowledge base to assist this array of workers as they prioritize more eco-conscious decisions. Their resources are also available to general audiences.
An obscure carbon footprint
To address a problem, it must be defined. Yet, public data on the environmental impact of festivals and live events across the globe is slim, and it’s even more scarcely available for the United States. In 2007, a UK report found that emissions from the music industry accounted for a tenth of a percent of the country’s total emissions, with 73% coming from live music and 15.6% coming from festivals. While the industry itself may not have the largest sum of emissions, it is still deeply intertwined with leading emitters in the transportation, electric power, and agricultural sectors.
It helps that climate solutions being applied in these areas (more on those later) are transferable to the music industry. Moving forward, they must also be supported by policymakers, applied equitably, and prove to be capable of meeting the existing and growing demands of festivals and other live events.
To fill in the dearth of data, the ESI is partnering with Live Nation, Warner Music Group, and Coldplay to compile a comprehensive assessment of the US and UK markets that delves into the relationship between live music and climate change, identifies key areas where the industry and concert goers can drive planet-positive outcomes, and offers actionable solutions based on the latest developments in green technology and sustainable practices. It is expected to be completed in July 2024.
To be more green
But even without this in-depth evaluation, areas where urgent action is needed are still evident. Fan travel, for instance, accounts for 70 to 90% of the live music’s carbon emissions. This could be lowered by offering shuttle systems or holding festivals in areas more accessible by public transit. There is also 23,500 metric tons of waste accumulated by the millions of people who attend festivals in the US each year, which could be minimized by deploying recycling incentives or implementing reusable cups. Right now, only around 8% of plastic waste generated at festivals is recycled.
From the artist’s side, planning ahead and nailing down logistics — with regard to factors like freight transport, food, and waste — is imperative. A lack of lead times can cause bad decisions, and consequently, a regretful environmental impact.
Some questions for them and their team to consider include:
- How is freight being transported? (A bus or an airplane?)
- What is the source of electric power? (Diesel generators, batteries on site, or the grid?)
- How much gear is there to transport? (And could it be reduced?)
- During the show, how much renewable energy is available? And after the show, will the catered food be local? Will it be plant-based? Sustainably packaged?
- How will leftovers be handled? (Donated or disposed of?)
These discussions can be navigated with the aforementioned knowledge base.
Overviews of past climate reports have highlighted the crucial need to decarbonize globally by 7% annually to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. To get there, people must act collectively and intentionally, something that the Alliance hopes to facilitate through working groups and monthly webinars.
Looking ahead, the artist is at the forefront of it all. Their role is nuanced and requires a thoughtful approach when determining how to communicate their efforts to their fans. Even though they are the most visible embodiment of their brand and their approach to climate, they are most likely not a climate expert. And while fans often like hearing artists talk about climate change, there is also a fear of getting canceled, or accused of greenwashing.
Their best bet? Supporting climate actions with authenticity and the backup of science and scientists.
Today, the music industry is moving quickly to adopt a range of climate-positive recommendations, but it is still early days. At some point, hopefully soon, meaningful climate actions will become the standard — like LED lights or electric runner vehicles — and it will be easier to make a full transition to low and net-zero live music.
“Artists don’t always have to be the speaker,” said one panelist. “They can shine their light on experts and activists.”
For more on panelists and resources, visit the Music Sustainability Alliance website.
Local Journalism is a Critical “Gate” to Engage Americans on Climate Change
By: Sophia Apteker, Administrative and Communications Assistant
To get Americans to care about climate change, guide them to their gate. At first, it might not be clear where it is. But it exists.
That message was threaded through the Connecting with Americans on Climate Change webinar on Sept. 13, which featured a discussion with celebrated climate scientist and communicator Prof. Katharine Hayhoe and the five journalists who made up the 2023 cohort of the MIT Environmental Solutions Journalism Fellowship. Prof. Hayhoe referred to a “gate” as a conversational entry point about climate impacts and solutions. The catch? It doesn’t have to be climate-specific. Instead, it can focus on the things that people already hold close to their heart.
“If you show people…whether it’s a military veteran or a parent or a fiscal conservative or somebody who is in a rural farming area or somebody who loves kayaking or birds or who just loves their kids…how they’re the perfect person to care [about climate change], then it actually enhances their identity to advocate for and adopt climate solutions,” said Hayhoe. “It makes them a better parent, a more frugal fiscal conservative, somebody who’s more invested in the security of their country. It actually enhances who they already are instead of trying to turn them into someone else.”
Last year’s Pew Research Center data revealed that only 37% of Americans said that addressing climate change should be a top priority for the president and Congress. Furthermore, climate change was ranked 17th out of 21 national issues included in a Center survey.
But in reality, it’s not that Americans don’t care about climate change, Hayhoe argued. It’s that they don’t know that they already do.
The MIT Environmental Solutions Journalism Fellowship provides financial and technical support to journalists dedicated to connecting local stories to broader climate contexts, especially in parts of the country where climate change is disputed or underreported.
Climate journalism is typically limited to larger national news outlets who have the resources to employ dedicated climate reporters. And since many local papers are already struggling — with the country on track to lose a third of its papers by the end of next year, leaving over 50% of counties in the US with just one or no local news outlets — local climate beats can be neglected. This makes the work executed by the ESI’s Fellows all the more imperative. Because for many Americans, the relevance of these stories to their own community is their gate to climate action.
“This is the only climate journalism fellowship that focuses exclusively on local storytelling,” said Laur Hesse Fisher, program director at MIT ESI and founder of the fellowship. “It’s a model for engaging some of the hardest audiences to reach: people who don’t think they care much about climate change. These talented journalists tell powerful, impactful stories that resonate directly with these audiences.”
Narratives from across the nation
From March to June, the second cohort of ESI Journalism Fellows pursued local, high-impact climate reporting in Montana, Arizona, Maine, West Virginia, and Kentucky.
Collectively, their twenty-six stories had over 70,000 direct visits on their host outlets’ websites as of August 2023, gaining hundreds of responses from local voters, lawmakers, and citizen groups. Even though they targeted local audiences, they also had national appeal, as they were republished by forty-six outlets — including Vox, Grist, WNYC, WBUR, the NPR homepage, and three separate stories on NPR’s Here & Now program, which is broadcast by 45 additional partner radio stations across the country — with a collective reach in the hundreds of thousands.
Micah Drew published an eight-part series in The Flathead Beacon titled, “Montana’s Climate Change Lawsuit.” It followed a landmark case of 16 young people in Montana suing the state for violating their right to a “clean and healthful environment.” Of the plaintiffs, Drew said, “They were able to articulate very clearly what they’ve seen, what they’ve lived through in a pretty short amount of life. Some of them talked about wildfires — which we have a lot of here in Montana — and [how] wildfire smoke has canceled soccer games at the high school level. It cancels cross-country practice; it cancels sporting events. I mean, that’s a whole section of your livelihood when you’re that young that’s now being affected.”
Joan Meiners is a climate news reporter for the Arizona Republic. Her five-part series was situated at the intersection of Phoenix’s extreme heat and housing crises. “I found that we are building three times more sprawling, single-family detached homes…as the number of apartment building units,” she said. “And with an affordability crisis, with a climate crisis, we really need to rethink that. The good news, which I also found through research for this series…is that Arizona doesn’t have a statewide building code, so each municipality decides on what they’re going to require builders to follow… and there’s a lot that different municipalities can do just by showing up to their city council meetings [and] revising the building codes.”
For The Maine Monitor, freelance journalist Annie Ropeik generated a four-part series called, “Hooked on Heating Oil” on how Maine came to rely on oil for home heating more than any other state. When asked about solutions, Ropeik said, “Access to fossil fuel alternatives was really the central equity issue that I was looking at in my project, beyond just, ‘Maine is really relying on heating oil, that obviously has climate impacts, it’s really expensive.’ What does that mean for people in different financial situations, and what does that access to solutions look like for those different communities? What are the barriers there and how can we address those?”
Energy and environment reporter Mike Tony created a four-part series in The Charleston Gazette-Mail on West Virginia’s flood vulnerabilities and the state’s lack of climate action. On connecting with audiences, Tony said, “The idea was to pick a topic like flooding that really affects the whole state, and from there, use that as a sort of an inroad to collect perspectives from West Virginians on how it’s affecting them. And then use that as a springboard to scrutinizing the climate politics that are precluding more aggressive action.”
Finally, Ryan Van Velzer, Louisville Public Media’s Energy & Environment reporter, covered the decline of Kentucky’s fossil fuel industry and offered solutions for a sustainable future in a four-part series titled, “Coal’s Dying Light.” For him, it was “really difficult to convince people that climate change is real when the economy is fundamentally intertwined with fossil fuels. To a lot of these people, climate change, and the changes necessary to mitigate climate change, can cause real and perceived economic harm to these communities.”
With these projects in mind, someone’s gate to caring about climate change is probably nearby — in their own home, community, or greater region.
It’s likely closer than they think.
To be notified when applications open for the next fellowship cohort — which will support projects that report on climate solutions being implemented locally and how they reduce emissions while simultaneously solving pertinent local issues — sign up for the MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative newsletter.
Questions about the fellowship can be directed to Laur Hesse Fisher at climate@mit.edu.
The Climate, Environment, and Sustainability Infusion Fellowship (CESIF): An Interim Update with Initial Findings
By: Chris Rabe, Postdoctoral Associate
The ESI’s Climate, Environment, and Sustainability Infusion Fellowship (CESIF) launched in February 2023 to empower nine faculty members across seven MIT departments to cross their disciplinary boundaries and embed topics of climate science, the environment, and sustainability (CES) into the regular undergraduate curriculum.
As an ESI white paper explains, climate education is necessary for several reasons, including its ability to encourage critical and collective reflection on science and its implications on equity in order to break down disciplinary boundaries. This, in turn, provides students with the tools to “challenge technological and scientific advancement that can perpetuate the unjust status quo for more just solutions.”
Since we are nearing the halfway point of this two-year fellowship, let’s examine its structure and how research questions have been addressed thus far.
CESIF Structure
On the left-hand side of the figure below, individual faculty change is depicted through Hauk’s model for faculty readiness and change. This model includes domains of the professional change environment, as professors may be influenced by many factors including personal interest, disciplinary expertise, or institutional pressure.
Conceptual framework for CESIF individual, community, and institutional change. Figure courtesy of Chris Rabe
Moving to the center, CESIF’s components include three models that will create a faculty-centered, experiential community of practice where professors receive support from the CESIF staff and faculty peers through monthly meetings. These models are based on research that shows successful faculty development projects have a long-term duration, focus on shifting beliefs, and seek to create a community of practice. During this time, CES instructional frameworks will be presented to professors and include sustainability content knowledge/literacy areas (sustainability knowledge, systems thinking, social justice, futures thinking, and active citizenship) and sustainability instructional approaches (collaborative, small group learning, inquiry based learning, experiential learning, service learning, place-based learning, and culturally sustained learning), all of which are supported by an ESI white paper titled An Introduction to Sustainability Education. Professors will interpret and infuse these frameworks based on their disciplinary experience and expertise.
The central area also depicts how the CESIF community of practice interacts with the process of individual change. Work from Kim Kasten and Cathy Maluca highlights how communities of practice influence individual change, which can then reciprocally benefit changes to the community, something they refer to as “a reciprocal benefit feedback loop.”
The right side of the framework depicts a successful influence of CESIF on the faculty participants which includes changes in content knowledge, instructional approaches, and teaching philosophy. In addition, it highlights how faculty members can disseminate their changes to their departments and create new departmental course offerings, syllabi, units, or course modules that can be used by other faculty members. A critical goal of CESIF is to spur wider departmental and institutional integration of CES course content and pedagogical strategies.
Although this study builds on models for STEM transformation and communities of practice for instructional change and a framework for examining faculty instructional readiness for change in geosciences, the framework for CES infusion in STEM disciplines created for this study would be the first of its kind.
Research Questions & Initial Findings
What factors contribute to or inhibit instructional change?
Two challenges that have been noted often among faculty are (1) The need to cover a wide-range of discipline specific content and a limited amount of space to include new CES units or modules and (2) a lack of CES disciplinary expertise and a need for time and resources to engage in learning experiences to gain knowledge in this area.
To address this, some of our discussions have focused on the potential of infusing CES content as part of disciplinary content, rather than thinking about adding onto an already crowded syllabus. This is quite a challenge, especially when exploring ways to integrate CES content and teaching practices throughout a course’s syllabus, as opposed to merely adding a new lesson or unit.
Factors that contribute to change include varying levels of institutional support, the potential to share ideas with the CESIF community, and previous CES teaching experiences.
For example, in discussing community support, Mike Short, associate professor of nuclear engineering, explained that one reason why he joined CESIF was, “to be a part of this community because MIT is so decentralized that it’s hard to find who else resonates with you. You could find great friends hiding just in the next building that you’d never meet otherwise.”
In addition, Ariel Furst, Paul M. Career Development Professor of Chemical Engineering, believes that future support is possible. On this, she said, “I think the combo of teaching and sustainability is going to be important. And I am hoping that student evaluations will speak for themselves, that students will be more engaged in these classes. And then you can share that with deans and things like that and say, ‘This is working.’ We should encourage faculty to incorporate this.”
What kinds of instructional changes are in process?
Faculty members are still in the process of making modifications to current courses and exploring the creation of new courses.
For example, Katrina Lacurts, lecturer in electrical engineering and computer sciences (EECS), is investigating using CES as a context for subjective decision making processes and how it can be integrated within classroom content and assignments.
Betar Gallant, the American Bureau of Shipping Career Development Professor in Mechanical Engineering, is aiming to expand and refresh mechanical engineering courses (2.005/2.006 series Thermal Fluids and Engineering I and II) with new renewable energy based content.
Furst is working on changes to the 10.569 Polymer Synthesis course by adding new inquiry based and active learning opportunities for students to explore sustainable processes and polymers.
CESIF members meet for a presentation from Michael Short (associate professor of nuclear science and engineering) titled Anthro-Engineering Decarbonization at the Million-Person Scale. Photo credit: Sophia Apteker
Next Steps and Future Goals
By building a multidisciplinary framework for CES infusion in STEM disciplines, more undergraduate students will be exposed to innovative CES content and instructional approaches in STEM disciplines across institutions of higher education, which will provide them with a unique combination of competencies to address a wide-range of climate change problems that occur around the world.
As we move into the academic year 2024-25, faculty members will continue to refine and implement changes into their courses, and we will have the opportunity to learn more about the impacts of these changes on student learning experiences. In early 2025, we plan to have an event that will allow these faculty members to showcase their instructional innovations to the MIT community.
As discussions continue related to better integrating climate and sustainability within the General Institute Requirements (GIRs) at MIT, we believe the experiences and findings from the CESIF project can have a substantial impact on larger, institute-wide curricular change.
Learn more about CESIF.