Climate change

Metropolis reporter Anthony Paletta details how MIT’s inaugural Future Fest “brought together visionary leaders across design, technology, and art to address the world’s most pressing problems,” and also featured the public debut of the redesigned Metropolitan Warehouse. The festival featured discussions, exhibits and demonstrations on architecture, design and technology, including a new technique that utilizes knitted fibers as a flexible formwork for concrete, a discussion on how AI could be used to increase sustainability in construction and exploration of how “reef legos” can rebuild beaches and combat costal erosion. “There are no shortage of things going wrong in the world, and others likely to follow,” writes Paletta, “but MIT’s Future Fest offered reassuring proof that we’ve not run out of means to address these problems.” 

Using AI, satellite, and ocean current data, MIT spinout Coastal Assembly constructs artificial reefs designed to help rebuild beaches restore shrinking beaches, writes Fast Company’s Adele Peters. “We take 10 years of data, and we say, where do we predict the critical areas of erosion will be in the coming months to year,” says Prof. Skylar Tibbits, co-founder of Coastal Assembly. “That tells me where the best place is to intervene—what’s the part that is most critical, where we should focus our time, effort, and money.” 

During Climate Week NYC, Evelyn Wang, MIT’s Vice President for Energy and Climate, emphasized the importance of utilizing AI to help tackle climate change, write Seth Borenstein and Jennifer McDermott for The Associated Press. Data centers adding to climate and water problems ‘is not forever,’ according to Wang, who told The Associated Press that data centers are about five years away from being water neutral and about a decade away from no longer adding to planet-warming emissions. 

Quanta Magazine’s Marlowe Starling highlights a 2014 study by MIT researchers that found that coral cilia “interact with the boundary layer by rapidly whipping about to generate swirls of fresh, oxygenated seawater.” The researchers “not only modeled the tiny vortices created by the cilia for the first time, but also revealed the cilia’s importance for survival and metabolism,” notes Starling. 

New York Times reporter Quinn Glabicki highlights Coastal Assembly, an MIT spinout that uses AI, satellite and ocean current data to monitor communities threatened by coastal erosion and create underwater structures to regrow beaches at nearly 900 coastal sites. “We can go to any community around the world and understand what has happened and then propose a solution that is very precisely tailored to them,” says Prof. Skylar Tibbits, one of Coastal Assembly’s founders.  

Prof. John Sterman speaks with The Boston Globe Editorial Board about the potential impacts of AI on a variety of fields. The Editorial Board writes that Sterman sees “outcomes where AI can be harnessed to solve societal problems such as climate change, but, he said, first and foremost, that will take smarter government policies and incentives. A new simulator he helped develop, En-ROADS, allows users to explore AI’s potential impacts on climate change, positive and negative, depending on which path we choose.” 

Prof. Susan Solomon joins Cleo Abram’s “HUGE* If True,” to discuss her 1985 research uncovering how chlorofluorocarbons, were depleting the ozone layer, which led to the Montreal Protocol that banned the use of those chemicals. “It was an interesting feeling being under the ozone hole, knowing that half a world away an incredible change [the Montreal Protocol] had just occurred that really had a lot of potential to change things in the future—and indeed it did,” says Solomon.  

In an episode of GBH’s “The Curiosity Desk” focused on powering the future, host Edgar B. Herwick III learns from Prof. Christopher Knittel about “power flexibility,” and explores nuclear fusion and fission power with MIT’s Nuclear Reactor Laboratory Managing Director Gordon Kohse. “We can be more efficient in several ways; we could use more efficient appliances. We can change when we consume electricity. There’s a lot of levers that we can pull that would keep costs down, while at the same time growing demand,” says Knittel. Kohse notes: “Right now, we have a crisis with climate change. And so, for me, right now we need to develop everything that we possibly can.”  

Assil Halimi PhD ‘25 speaks to TechCrunch’s Tim De Chant about his company Apollo Atomics, which is shrinking the steam generator component of a reactor to streamline nuclear power. “We don’t want to be incremental in nuclear and just improve a small thing,” says Halimi. “Our target is to beat natural gas.” 

MIT researchers have developed a low temperature process to extract battery-grade lithium from spodumene, the most common type of mineral containing lithium, using a reusable liquid reagent, writes Electronic Design’s Lee Goldberg. “The new process uses a liquid reagent to dissolve the rock into the useful forms of its constituent parts — not just battery-ready lithium salts, but also smelter-grade alumina and cement-ready silica,” writes Goldberg. “After the minerals are extracted, the solvent and reagent can be recovered and used again so that waste levels approach zero.”  

MIT researchers have created a new building design model that could enable engineers to construct buildings and bridges that use less materials, writes Tech Briefs’ Andrew Corselli. “Traditional topology optimization essentially starts with a blank space and tries to figure out at each point in this blank space: ‘Should there be material,’ ‘should there not be material’ from an efficiency standpoint,” says Prof. Josephine Carstensen. “Our approach populates the space with a bunch of lines that are instead candidates for ‘should there be material’ or ‘should there not be material.’ By using this line approach, we have the opportunity to have more control.” 

In a Forbes opinion piece, Joseph Coughlin, director of the MIT AgeLab, emphasizes the importance of place planning, which includes factoring climate risks in retirement decisions, and considering whether a community will work for an individual in the future. “If where we live increasingly shapes our health, mobility, access to care, social connection, and resilience, then retirement planning needs another dimension beyond financial preparedness,” writes Coughlin. “It is no longer simply, ‘Is this where I want to grow old?’ It is, ‘Will this place continue to support me as I grow older?’"

A study by MIT researchers has found evidence that the first signs of ozone depletion appeared in 1957 in the upper tropical stratosphere, driven by carbon tetrachloride, an industrial chemical introduced in the 1930s and widely used as a dry-cleaning and degreasing agent, writes Gizmodo reporter Ellyn Lapointe. “This finding underscores the importance of long-term atmospheric monitoring so that we can fully understand how it responds to chemical pollution,” Lapointe notes.

In a Gizmodo article, reporter Ellyn Lapointe features a new study, co-authored by Prof. Christopher Knittel and Prof. Catherine Wolfram, that reveals American households are spending an additional $400 to $900 per year due to extreme weather conditions. “U.S. households are experiencing the financial effects of climate change in ways that aren’t always obvious,” says Knittel. “These costs show up across different parts of people’s budgets, and over time they can become pretty significant.”

Time reporter Simmone Shah highlights a study co-authored by Prof. Christopher Knittel and Prof. Catherine Wolfram that reveals extreme weather caused by climate change is costing Americans an average of $400 and $900 a year. “Even if you don't live in tornado alley, you might be seeing your insurance rates go up to cover the cost for people who are in the more danger-prone areas,” says Wolfram.