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, and the faculty leadership team 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 of them 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
Flooding linked to sea-level rise could displace hundreds of millions of people on the world’s coasts and cause trillions of dollars in annual losses by mid-century. With the development of nature-based solutions, adaptive infrastructure, and advancing monitoring, we can protect people, improve well-being, and restore coastal environments.
Learn more about Building Coastal Resilience.
2. Decarbonizing Ports and Shipping
Ports can be reimagined as intermodal hubs that enable low-carbon, resilient transfers across maritime, rail, and road systems— cutting emissions while strengthening supply chains and protecting nearby communities.
Learn more about Decarbonizing Ports and Shipping.
3. Designing Data Centers of the Future
AI and data centers are essential to modern life, yet they consume tremendous amounts of energy and water. Approached from a systems perspective, data centers of the future can be reimagined as community assets, operating as partners in prosperity and climate resilience.
Learn more about Designing Data Centers of the Future.
4. Reinventing Agriculture
We must transform agriculture to feed a growing population while sustaining the planet—producing more food with fewer inputs, lower emissions, healthier soils, and greater resilience for farmers and ecosystems.