When MIT President Sally Kornbluth announced the Climate Project in 2024, she called for faculty leaders to identify frontier areas where MIT could make a distinctive, significant, and measurable impact.
In Fall 2025, Evelyn Wang, the Vice President for Energy and Climate, announced the first three frontiers for campus exploration. These areas represent starting points—linked visions that invite further refinement, innovation, and coordination.
Because they sit at the intersection of global systems, progress in any one can spark advances that ripple across communities and through sectors such as energy, transportation, industry, and the built environment. The frontiers are:
1. Building Coastal Resilience
Coastal communities face rising seas, stronger storms, and ecosystem loss. Building coastal resilience will require developing nature-based solutions, adaptive and hybrid infrastructure, and advanced monitoring systems that protect people and restore coastal environments.
Learn more about Building Coastal Resilience.
2. Decarbonizing Ports and Shipping
Ports and shipping drive global trade but also generate emissions, pollution, and climate vulnerabilities for nearby communities. Decarbonizing ports and shipping will require innovations in clean fuels, electrified operations, community-centered planning, and solutions that integrate intermodal freight networks to enable healthier, more resilient port ecosystems.
Learn more about Decarbonizing Ports and Shipping.
3. Designing Data Centers of the Future
Growing data and AI demands strain power grids, water resources, and surrounding communities. Data centers of the future will depend on advances in clean power systems, compute efficiency, and next generation thermal management, enabling them to operate as sustainable, communityaligned infrastructure.
Learn more about Designing Data Centers of the Future.