2024 Annual Symposium

More details coming soon.

Heavy transport modes – trucking, shipping and aviation – are crucial drivers of the global economy, and today are predominantly powered by fossil fuels. Each mode faces unique challenges and opportunities in transitioning to low-carbon energy carriers, but can be expected to draw from shared fuel supply chains and leverage common technology solutions. In this session, we’ll consider these modes as a holistic system to discuss the range of transition solutions available across these modes and explore opportunities, constraints and trade-offs that arise when we consider global interactions between these modes and their supply chains in their respective decarbonization journeys. 

• Danika MacDonell (Moderator), MCSC Impact Fellow

Reception and poster session featuring the work of MCSC Impact Fellows, MCSC seed awardees, and others in the MIT community.

What does the physical economy, the flow of materials and energy between sectors, look like? There are few representations, but such an understanding of scale and connections is necessary for true decarbonization without shifting burdens. Here, we provide an interactive visualization to explore the major flows in the global economy, with a new version including CO2 emissions. We go into further detail to show how this framework can be used to make decisions to displace fossil fuels. As transportation is electrified, will more oil flow to petrochemicals instead? What impact could advanced recycling, electrification, bio-based plastics and CCUS have to decrease dependence on fossil fuels in the petrochemical industry, and how do other flows/burdens shift as a result? How does sustainable aviation fuel fit within this picture? We also show how this global picture can link to local considerations. We give an overview of the material and energy requirements for building the infrastructure behind a net-zero energy system. By linking to the geospatial mapping tool developed for long-haul trucking, we explore where there is excess electricity generation, and where grid and charging updates are most urgently needed as transportation electrifies.

• Katie Daehn (Moderator),Research Scientist, MIT Materials Research Laboratory
• Mary Kate Lane (Moderator), Impact Fellow, MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium

In this popular workshop participants will have the opportunity to learn about emerging social science research topics of relevance to the rapidly changing landscape of sustainability practice. Small table discussions invite peer-to-peer dialog on social sustainability in consultation with MIT academic experts from social sciences, planning, and community implementation. Topics will include climate justice, designing people-first sustainability solutions, bottom-up data collection, traditional ecological knowledge for climate adaptation, the equitable resilience framework, valuing the future, changing financial stakeholder demands, reputational risk, and the promises and pitfalls of net-zero for institutions.

• Laura Frye-Levine (Moderator), Research Scientist, MIT Department of Anthropology

Risk assessments for buildings, infrastructure, human health, and ecosystems rely on historical data to predict future performance. As the climate changes, new modeling approaches for evaluating system risk are needed that incorporate climate projections. An initiative at MIT named Bringing Computation to the Climate Challenge (BC3) seeks to do just that by providing accurate and actionable scientific information to decision-makers to inform the most effective mitigation and adaptation strategies. They are accomplishing this by leveraging advances in computational and data sciences to improve the accuracy of climate models, quantifying their uncertainty, and addressing the trade-off between performance and computation time with attention to industry and government stakeholder needs. This session will highlight the latest advances in this effort while exploring the needs of industry in climate risk assessment. Participants will explore the gap between modeling capabilities and industry needs and how the gap might be narrowed.

• Kevin Huang (Moderator), Research Scientist, MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering

Preserving soil health is crucial to maintaining our food systems. Microbes in soil, including bacteria and fungi, support crop growth and soil carbon storage but are often absent from discussions of terrestrial biodiversity. Agricultural inputs such as fertilizers and pesticides can reduce soil microorganism species and functional diversity. However, tracking soil microbial diversity at any scale, from global to individual farms, is challenging due to a lack of measurement tools that can be broadly deployed. This session will highlight the technology and models for tracking biodiversity over large areas using remote imaging. It will also explore farm-level measurement tools in development for tracking microbial diversity in soil. Synergies between the two and boundaries of possibility in predicting biodiversity outcomes will be examined. We will also workshop how this information can be used to set biodiversity metrics and goals.

• Amanda Bischoff (Moderator), Impact Fellow, MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium

The Climate Project is a catalyst that is accelerating interdisciplinary climate research and implementation at MIT. Leaders of climate initiatives at MIT will share their insights on the latest efforts and collaborations, along with the most exciting future activities.