The goal of the Climate Missions is to launch projects that will take on “MIT-hard” problems that are either roadblocks to climate progress or whose resolution may create important new pathways for effective climate action. Taken together, the Climate Missions and Climate Frontier Projects constitute a new model of accelerated, university-led innovation seeking impact on the climate problem at scale.
Climate Frontier projects will receive funding through the missions. They will have clear milestones, deliverables, and accountability. They will closely involve prospective end-users and will have well-developed plans for translation, field-testing (if needed), and scale-up.
Possible projects include developing and testing prototypes based on proof-of-principle technologies; large data-collection projects; testing and evaluating the impact of new policy implementations; and problem-solving to support large-scale deployment of industrial technologies and systems. The larger projects will be carried out by a single large team or by smaller teams working in parallel on pieces of a bigger problem. They will span basic and applied research, engineering, systems analysis, and manufacturing, if relevant. They may include innovation at the component, subsystem, and system levels. They will require operational and scientific excellence and will be professionally led and managed.