News Release

Creating a low-carbon, non-nuclear economy: The case of Taiwan

Can Taiwan create a low-carbon economy without nuclear energy? One MIT researcher finds out.

After the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, energy experts and policymakers around the world began to reassess the future of nuclear power. Countries, including Japan and Germany, have since scaled back or plan to shut down their nuclear power — sparking a global debate on how nations will replace nuclear. More...

News Release

MIT and UC Berkeley launch energy-efficiency research project

The E2e Project aims to give decision-makers real-world evidence on the most cost-effective ways to reduce energy and emissions.

Energy efficiency promises to cut emissions, reduce dependence on foreign fuel, and mitigate climate change. As such, governments around the world are spending tens of billions of dollars to support energy-efficiency regulations, technologies and policies. More...

News Release

Putting a price on adaptation

Researchers use new method to calculate the impacts and adaptation costs of climate change.

If you know how much something costs, you can budget and plan ahead. With this in mind, a team of researchers from MIT, the World Bank and the International Food Policy Research Institute recently developed a country-level method of estimating the impacts of climate change and the costs of adaptation. More...

MIT Spotlight

400 ppm CO2? Add Other GHGs, and It’s Equivalent to 478 ppm

Ron Prinn discusses the recent 400-ppm reading at Mauna Loa Observatory.

The Keeling Curve record from the NOAA-operated Mauna Loa Observatory shows that the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration hovers around 400 ppm, a level not seen in more than 3 million years when sea levels were as much as 80 feet higher than today. Virtually every media outlet reported the passage of this climate milestone, but we suspect there’s more to the story. More...

MIT Spotlight

A Woman, a Mountain, a Quest to Map Climate Change

On the slopes of Mt. Karisimbi, a 4,500-meter volcano in northwestern Rwanda, Katherine Potter is working this year to add new data to climate change research.

Katherine Potter PhD ’11 is the principal investigator for the new Rwanda Climate Observatory. Working in the same area where iconic zoologist Dian Fossey studied mountain gorillas a half-century ago, Potter works just as passionately towards her goal: to empower Rwandans in becoming part of climate change research and to get Africa on the climate-change grid. More...

Confronting the Climate Challenge

Science and Policy Working Together

Understanding the complex, long-term changes in our land, air and water requires breakthroughs in measurement, modeling and prediction.

Responding to these changes requires innovative policies that comprehend agriculture, energy needs, trade and finance — along with the political and communications savvy to organize a genuinely global approach.

The Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change is MIT's response to these research, analysis, and public education challenges.

At the heart of much of the Program’s work lies MIT’s Integrated Global System Model (IGSM), a linked set of computer models designed to simulate the global environmental changes that arise as a result of human causes. In this way, it explores the interplay between the Earth systems and the human systems. More...

This comprehensive tool analyzes interactions amoung humans and the climate system

A collaborative research project with China

Communicating risk, uncertainty and the value of climate policy.