Get Involved
If you are part of an MIT department, lab, center, or institute and would like to learn more about how to get involved, please reach out to climate_hq@mit.edu.
The Climate Missions are MIT-wide problem-solving communities. Each mission addresses a broad domain where solutions are required for effective climate response and where a critical mass of excellent research capabilities exists at MIT.
Decarbonizing Energy and Industry
Decarbonizing the world’s industries with affordable low-emissions electricity and fuels and climate-relieving industrial innovations.
Restoring the Atmosphere, Protecting the Land and Oceans
Removing, managing, and storing greenhouse gases. Protecting ocean and land ecosystems.
Empowering Frontline Communities
Supporting the world’s most vulnerable populations with technologies, finance, and policies for climate relief and resilience.
Building and Adapting Healthy, Resilient Cities
Designing, building, and adapting habitable, resilient cities.
Inventing New Policy Approaches
New institutions and incentives, policies/systems for rapid scaling, and decision support tools.
Wild Cards
Unconventional solutions outside the scope of the other Missions.
The task of these mission-focused communities is to help MIT identify and advance new solutions to tough problems that stand in the way of an effective global climate response. These advances will include “big bets”: potentially transformative developments focused on problems whose solution would have game-changing consequences for the world. The projects will work within integrated systems - technological, regulatory, industrial, financial, social, and political – to deliver public benefits at scale.
Each Mission has three main roles:
- Assessing national and global progress within its domain
- Identifying critical gaps and bottlenecks constraining progress, as well as promising new pathways for effective action
- Selecting, launching, and supporting projects to accelerate progress
The Missions will 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.
The Climate Frontiers will closely involve prospective end-users and will have well-developed plans for translation, field-testing (if needed), and scale-up. Possible projects will encompass a broad range of climate mitigation and resilience solutions, including but not limited to: developing and testing prototypes based on proof-of-principle technologies; large data-collection projects; testing and evaluating the impact of new policy implementations; developing new urban design, planning, and land use approaches; creating new strategies to influence behavior, and assessing their effectiveness; and problem-solving to support large-scale deployment of technologies, processes and systems. They will require operational and scientific excellence and will be professionally led and managed.
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.
Join the Climate Project Community
Sign up to receive updates and get involved in the Climate Missions.
