MIT’s Environmental Solutions Initiative (ESI), an innovative interdisciplinary organization that significantly advanced sustainability and climate change solutions at MIT, will cease to operate as an independent entity at the close of June. However, this marks far from the conclusion of its extensive efforts, which will progress under new management. Many of its essential functions will transition to MIT’s newly established Climate Project. John Fernandez, who has overseen ESI for almost a decade, will revert to the School of Architecture and Planning, where some of ESI’s vital undertakings will persist within a new interdisciplinary lab.
When the concepts that led to the inception of MIT’s Environmental Solutions Initiative first began to be formulated, its founders remember, there was already a substantial amount of activity at MIT related to climate change and sustainability. As Professor John Sterman from the MIT Sloan School of Management explains, “there was much in progress, but it lacked cohesion. Thus, the overall effort amounted to less than its individual components.”
ESI was established in 2014 to help fulfill that coordinating function, and since then, it has achieved a broad spectrum of significant milestones in research, education, and communication regarding sustainable solutions across various sectors. Its founding director, Professor Susan Solomon, led it for its inaugural year before passing the leadership to Fernandez, who has guided it since 2015.
“There wasn’t much of a sustainability ecosystem [at that time],” Solomon reflects. Yet, with the assistance of ESI and other organizations, that ecosystem has flourished. She notes that Fernandez “has cultivated some extraordinary initiatives under ESI,” including work on nature-based climate approaches, along with other domains such as sustainable mining and the reduction of plastics in the environment.
Desiree Plata, director of MIT’s Climate and Sustainability Consortium and associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, states that a pivotal achievement of the initiative has been in “communicating with the outside world, simplifying really intricate systems and topics into not only plain language but something that is scientifically robust and defensible, suitable for external audiences.”
In particular, ESI has developed three exceptionally successful outputs, which will continue under the Climate Project’s umbrella. These encompass the popular TIL Climate Podcast, the Webby Award-winning Climate Portal website, and the online climate primer created with Professor Kerry Emanuel. “These are among the most visited websites at MIT,” Plata remarks, asserting that “the influence of this work on the global knowledge landscape cannot be underestimated.”
Fernandez notes that ESI has played a crucial role in fostering what has evolved into “a rich institutional framework of work in sustainability and climate change” at MIT. He highlights three primary areas where he believes ESI has had the most influence: engaging the MIT community, initiating and overseeing essential environmental research, and promoting sustainability as a core mission of a research institution.
Engagement with the MIT community, he claims, commenced with two programs: a research seed grant initiative and the establishment of MIT’s undergraduate minor in environmental and sustainability studies, launched in 2017.
ESI also set up a Rapid Response Group, which offered students the opportunity to collaborate on real-world projects with external collaborators, including governmental bodies, community organizations, NGOs, and businesses. Through this experience, they frequently discovered why tackling environmental challenges in reality often takes much longer than anticipated, he explains, and that a challenge that “appeared relatively simple initially turned out to be more intricate and nuanced than expected.”
The second major area, initiating and managing environmental research, developed into a framework of six specific program domains: natural climate solutions, mining, urban areas and climate change, plastics and the environment, arts and climate, and climate justice.
These initiatives involved collaborations with a Nobel Peace Prize recipient, three consecutive presidential administrations in Colombia, and communities impacted by climate change, including coal miners, indigenous populations, various municipalities, corporations, the U.N., several agencies — and the renowned musical ensemble Coldplay, which has committed to achieving climate neutrality for its performances. “It was the role that the ESI played as a host and guide for these research programs that may be a cornerstone of our legacy,” Fernandez remarks.
The third broad domain, he states, “is the notion that the ESI as an institution at MIT would inspire this movement of a research university toward sustainability as a primary focus.” While MIT was established to serve as an academic partner to the world’s industrialization, “aren’t we in a different world now? The scale of infrastructure planning, investment, and construction needed to decarbonize the energy system may be the largest industrial revolution ever embarked upon. More than ever, the array of priorities influencing this process relates to sustainable development.”
Overall, Fernandez asserts, “we endeavored to instill within the Institute its educational and research endeavors with the understanding that the world is now in urgent need of sustainable solutions.”
Fernandez “has cultivated some extraordinary initiatives under ESI,” Solomon states. “It’s been a remarkably strong and beneficial program, both for education and research.” However, she believes it is timely to distribute its projects to other platforms, mentioning, “We now have a significant thrust under the Climate Project, and it’s essential to avoid redundancies and overlaps between the two.”
Fernandez explains that “one of the goals of the Climate Project is to truly unify and aggregate numerous efforts across MIT.” With the Climate Project itself, along with the Climate Policy Center and the Center for Sustainability Science and Strategy, it now makes more sense for ESI’s climate-related endeavors to be absorbed into these new entities, while other projects less directly related to climate can be situated within various suitable departments or labs, he says.
“We achieved enough with ESI to facilitate the growth of these other centers,” he states. “And in that regard, we fulfilled our role.”
As of June 1, Fernandez has returned to his position as professor of architecture and urbanism and building technology in the School of Architecture and Planning, where he leads the Urban Metabolism Group. He will also be initiating a new group called Environment ResearchAction (ERA) to persist with ESI’s work in urban areas, nature, and artificial intelligence.