Sustainability science: navigating the challenges of global change

Key points from the 47th MIT Global Change Forum

By Mark Dwortzan | MIT Center for Sustainability Science and Strategy

Hosted on March 27-28 by the MIT Center for Sustainability Science and Strategy (CS3) at the Samberg Conference Center on the MIT campus, the 47th MIT Global Change Forum drew more than 100 attendees from industry, academia, government and NGOs. Forum presenters and participants explored emerging research in the field of sustainability science and how decision-makers might translate that knowledge into action that advances sustainability goals.

In introductory remarks, MIT CS3 Director Noelle Selin set the stage for the Forum’s theme, Sustainability Science: Navigating the Challenge of Global Change. “Sustainability science encompasses a range of disciplines across nature and society systems,” said Selin, a professor at MIT’s Institute for Data, Systems, and Society and Department of Earth, Atmospheric & Planetary Sciences (EAPS). “We want to advance fundamental understanding of those integrated systems, develop the computational capabilities needed to model them effectively, and inform strategies that enable greater human well-being in current and future generations.”

Exploring sustainability from science to solutions, this year’s Forum comprised six sessions focused on integrated modeling of nature-society systems; institutions, markets and incentives; feedbacks, nonlinearities, and tipping points; Climate Missions of the MIT Climate Project; integrating equity in addressing global change; and sustainability strategy at global scale. 

Facilitated by MIT CS3 researchers and directors, each session consisted of the presentation of recent research results and insights on the topic, followed by a moderated, open discussion with all participants. In adherence to the “Chatham House Rule,” all sessions were off the record, with no press and no attribution of speakers’ comments without permission. Here, with permission from all speakers referenced below, we summarize key points from this year’s Forum presentations. 

Session 1: Sustainability Science: Integrated Modeling of Nature-Society Systems

Because nature and society are interconnected, co-evolving systems, we need to model those systems in an integrated way, said Selin in the session’s first presentation. She noted that integrated models can enable us to understand how these systems behave regionally, globally and sectorally; assess the consequences of potential interventions to nature/society phenomenon such as wildfire air-pollution exposure; and guide actions aimed at minimizing risk and maximizing human well-being. Citing examples of new methods and modeling techniques that are advancing sustainability science and its application, Selin observed that the field is moving away from comprehensive platforms that model everything and toward more efficient, flexible, reconfigurable modeling systems that include only necessary components and interactions. 

Rebecca Saari, Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Waterloo in Canada, advanced four key components for integrated nature-society models of air-pollution-related health impacts: cooperation (the effect of working together to protect health), climate (the health impacts of climate change via air pollution), equity (who benefits from strategies to protect human health) and uncertainty (which solutions are robust to uncertainty and feedbacks). Tapping different model components in four different studies aimed at better understanding and alleviating air-quality-related health risks, Saari found that reducing greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change, in coordination with boosting adaptation to climate-related risks, could yield significant health benefits.

Brent Boehlert, Principal of Industrial Economics, Incorporated (IEc), presented two insights and two challenges from IEc's contributions to the World Bank Country Climate and Development Reports (CCDRs) in over 50 countries, which use integrated climate-biophysical-economy models to inform national climate-related policy and investment recommendations. The insights: the main drivers of macroeconomic impacts of climate change (e.g., heat effect on labor productivity versus flooding) often do not align with expectations, and development is usually an effective climate adaptation strategy. The challenges: how to design climate and development policy scenarios to balance simplicity and analytical rigor, and how to overcome gaps in local and global datasets and models so as to produce more robust policy recommendations.

 

Session 2: Sustainability Science: Institutions, Markets, and Incentives 

MIT CS3 Principal Research Scientist Jennifer Morris explored four challenge questions for expanding the set of metrics that sustainability scientists use to track progress toward human well-being: what scales and metrics should we be studying; are we capturing the needed dynamics in our models; how do we connect models of different scales; and how do we balance treatment of uncertainty with model complexity and resolution. These challenges can be overcome, Morris maintained, by advancing integrated modeling in a way that enables flexible cross-scale linkages between human system models, Earth-system models and emulators, and biophysical and socio-economic sectoral impact models.

Gregory Characklis, Professor of Environmental Sciences and Engineering and Director of the Institute for Risk Management and Insurance Innovation (IRMII) at the University of North Carolina, noted that while natural hazard-related financial risks—and attention to them—are growing, corporate disclosures of those risks have failed to provide actionable information to insurers and reinsurers, lenders and investors, and ratings agencies. Characklis described how IRMII frames financial risk as a function of linked systems that quantify the hazard (the frequency and severity of damaging events such as flooding, wildfires and earthquakes), the exposure (how much damage is created by the events), and the vulnerability (how that damage translates into financial losses). 

Noting the critical role that political and economic institutions play in shaping decision-making, Michael Davidson, Assistant Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and Director of the Power Transformation Lab at the University of California, San Diego, discussed how explicit modeling of institutions can impact outcomes of sustainability policy studies. Based on simulation experiments incorporating institutional representations in three leading-edge sustainability models, Davidson and colleagues recently generated practical frameworks and a research agenda for adding institutional detail to sustainability models. Their study shows that omitting institutions can influence the costs of climate mitigation and miss opportunities to leverage institutional forces to speed up emissions reduction.

Session 3: Feedbacks, Nonlinearities, and “Tipping Points” 

Robert Kopp, Distinguished Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Rutgers University, warned that references to “tipping points” for Antarctic ice sheet collapse and other climate impacts may confuse and distract from urgent climate action. He argued that the term as used in practice lacks a clear definition and is best viewed as an imprecise, boundary-spanning metaphor. Advocating for the use of more precise phrasings such as “unknown-likelihood, high-impact potential surprises,” Kopp said that the tipping framing risked the 1.5 degrees Celsius policy target being perceived as a physical threshold, a confusion that could result in fatalism, harmful overreactions and loss of confidence in science.  

MIT CS3 Deputy Director and Senior Research Scientist C. Adam Schlosser discussed how researchers might address tipping points or alternative concepts. Citing feedback from MIT CS3’s inaugural Tipping Points Workshop, Schlosser emphasized the need to define/measure/model tipping points more rigorously (in terms of underlying processes, outcomes, severity, duration, location, uncertainty and other factors), change the context/language of “tipping points” for each specific phenomenon; and communicate the concept more effectively to decision-makers and to the public. For example, in studying water- quality tipping points, Schlosser recommended that researchers focus on specific geographical locations where tipping points could emerge, noting that salient responses can emerge in small basins.

Chris Bauch, Professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Waterloo in Canada, framed tipping points as bifurcations that occur when a “small incremental change to the governing conditions of a system causes a sudden qualitative change in its behavior.” Likening the phenomenon to a ball perched atop a hill whose position is threatened by an emerging positive feedback loop, he observed that early warning signals (EWS) for a tipping point can be detected when a system’s dynamics slow down. Bauch highlighted two challenges/opportunities for tipping-point EWS research: using data-driven dynamical systems to detect EWS of climate tipping points, and characterizing tipping points and their EWS in coupled human-environment systems.

Climate Missions of the Climate Project at MIT 

The goal of the Climate Project at MIT is to focus the collective strength of the Institute community on the urgent challenge of climate—"the greatest scientific and societal challenge of this or any age,” as MIT President Sally Kornbluth stated in announcing the project in 2024. To explain how the Institute plans to develop and scale technological, behavioral and policy solutions within a decade, five Climate Project representatives presented overviews of the initiative’s six climate missions. The climate missions are problem-solving communities charged to “identify, develop, launch, and support new projects, Climate Frontiers, to attack difficult problems that are either roadblocks to climate progress or whose resolution may create important new pathways for effective climate action.” 

MIT Professor of Materials Science and Engineering Elsa Olivetti, director of the Decarbonizing Energy and Industry mission, described plans to reduce industrial carbon dioxide emissions through electrification of processes that currently rely on fossil fuels, reduce the environmental impact of mining resources that support electrification, decarbonize maritime transport, and reduce the computational energy demand of artificial intelligence systems. 

Christopher Knittel, Professor and Associate Dean for Climate and Sustainability at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and director of the Inventing New Policy Approaches mission, highlighted potential efforts to support the design and development of new policy approaches that incentivize firms and consumers to adopt low-carbon alternatives. These include identifying new ways of globally governing the climate; developing more accurate methods to measure emissions costs; assessing the viability of a post-carbon global economy; better understanding evolving political and information landscapes; and providing policymakers with accessible decision-support tools. 

Jesse Kroll, MIT Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and co-director of the Restoring the Atmosphere, Protecting the Land and Oceans mission, summarized plans aimed at reducing atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations and minimizing climate change impacts. These include creating next-generation models to inform climate interventions; advancing understanding of the global carbon cycle in order to better inform and guide natural climate solutions; significantly expanding sensor measurements of the Earth system; and creating a climate mitigation toolkit with frameworks for climate intervention implementation, measurement, verification and reporting. 

Sarah McGrath, Managing Director of the Climate Project at MIT, discussed the Wild Cards mission, which is charged to pursue high-risk, high-reward, “unconventional solutions outside the scope of the other missions.” Initial projects include efforts to change collective decisions, opinions and attitudes toward climate change; advance new technologies to address food insecurity in developing economies, build grassroots innovation, and mitigate human displacement in the Global South; and design a global “bioeconomy” that reduces energy consumption, increases access to resources, enhances prosperity and preserves ecosystems and biodiversity.

Observing that cities account for more than 75 percent of the world’s energy and greenhouse gas emissions on only three percent of its landmass, MIT Professor of Architecture Christoph Reinhart, director of the Designing Resilient and Prosperous Cities mission, framed cities as a “high-leverage opportunity” for deploying high-impact solutions. Projects will focus on reducing climate impacts of transportation systems and buildings, with goals that range from promoting walkable cities and mixed-use zoning to a global building inventory that provides users with estimates of their building’s carbon emissions and instructions on how to reduce them. 

Reinhart also summarized the Empowering Frontline Communities mission, which aims to support “the world’s most vulnerable populations with technologies, designs, and policies for climate relief and resilience.” Initial projects aim to reduce adverse health effects of climate change; improve flood, drought and fire resilience; reduce greenhouse gas emissions in building retrofits and biomanufacturing; support a just energy transition; increase livelihood resilience; and rethink the social cost of carbon.

Session 4: Integrating Equity in Addressing Global Change 

Jan Kwakkel, Professor of Decision-Making under Deep Uncertainty at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, explored what he views as a misalignment between the information produced by integrated assessment models (IAMs) and the needs of decision-makers: IAMs do not typically consider climate justice and equity, but these are central in ongoing climate negotiations. To overcome this misalignment, Kwakkel suggested that scientists use existing models differently, change what and how they model, and enhance the diversity of modeled perspectives. He recommended multiple modeling techniques to encode climate justice and equity, including optimizing the performance of multiple rather than single climate policy objectives (e.g., minimize projected global temperature and policy-cost inequities among income groups).  

Using the COP28 final statement on “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems in a just, orderly and equitable manner” as a springboard for his talk, MIT CS3 Deputy Director and Senior Research Scientist Sergey Paltsev observed that citizens of the “developing world” have different views than their counterparts in the “developed world” on what share of emissions they should be responsible for, and how much financial support they should receive. Citing widely varying interpretations on the fairness of different countries’ Paris Agreement Nationally Determined Contributions, Paltsev presented results from a study he co-authored on how the cost of low-carbon policies within the United States could be distributed equitably.

Amanda Giang, Assistant Professor in the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability and Mechanical Engineering at the University of British Columbia in Canada, argued that local community and other, often-underrepresented perspectives are needed to inform understanding of and action on distributional equity. She outlined three mutually reinforcing dimensions of equity: procedural (ability for stakeholders to meaningfully participate in decision processes), distributional (distribution of costs and benefits) and recognitional (respect for distinct identities, histories, values and knowledge systems), and presented examples of how all three are needed to achieve a “triple win” (e.g., improve air quality, mitigate greenhouse gas emissions and reduce exposure disparities) through targeted interventions and systemic transformations.

Session 5: Sustainability Strategy at Global Scale 

Schmidt Sciences Program Scientist Poushali Maji highlighted two Schmidt Sciences Climate Institute programs: Virtual Earth Systems Research Institute (VESRI) and Decarbonization and Energy Virtual Institute (DEVI). VESRI aims to improve the realism and credibility of climate models in order to make projections more useful for decision-making and planning. That means better math, algorithms and theory; parameterizations of complex sub-grid processes; and innovative Earth-system models and emulators. DEVI seeks to develop rigorous, cross-disciplinary and multiscale computational models for assessing decarbonization pathways by transforming decarbonization modeling to tackle fundamental gaps in capturing complex interdependencies in energy systems, and building international teams to inform country-specific models and strengthen research networks in host countries.

Edward Wack, Head of the Biotechnology and Human Systems Division at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, highlighted the work of the Jameel Observatory Climate Resilience Early Warning System Network (CREWSnet), whose mission is to create “proactive, integrated decision-support tools and services that empower frontline vulnerable communities to prepare for climate impacts and minimize losses.” CREWSnet focus areas include climate-resilient shelters and structures, water security, and agriculture and livelihood resilience. Wack described how CREWSnet is running MIT models to project future climate trends and assess possible effects on crop viability or yields in Bangladesh, and using those projections to provide guidance to inform climate adaptation decisions by farmers, technologists and policymakers. 

Amy Luers, Senior Global Director of Sustainability Science and Innovation at Microsoft, offered a corporate perspective on the role of knowledge in advancing sustainability. She emphasized three key lenses: the insights that motivate action, the information needed to achieve corporate sustainability goals, and the value of co-developing understanding with partners and customers. She explained that the IPCC Special Report: Global Warming of 1.5 ºC was a major catalyst for Microsoft’s sustainability goals—including becoming carbon negative, water positive, nature positive and zero waste. Luers underscored the importance of public-private-academic collaboration in driving the systemic change required to meet these goals and concluded by highlighting the powerful role artificial intelligence can play, when used to co-produce knowledge, in accelerating sustainability transformations at scale.

 

For the first time, this year’s Forum featured a poster session at which MIT CS3 students and postdoctoral associates showcased some of their latest research. All posters can be viewed on the Forum event page.

“As the first Global Change Forum under the CS3 banner, you’ve given us a lot to think about in terms of how we might help decision-makers advance sustainability pathways around the world, in different sectors and in different places,” said MIT CS3 Director Selin in closing remarks. “The Forum is about us building a community of sustainability-focused researchers and practitioners from different sectors and disciplines, and it’s our hope that you will stay with us as we develop this community over time.”

 

Associated Event: 

Global Change Forum 47: Sustainability Science - Navigating the Challenges of Global Change

Related Links: 

Global Change Forum