ResilienceReducing Risk, Empowering Resilience to Disruptive Global Change
Five-hundred-year floods. Persistent droughts and heat waves. More devastating wildfires. As these and other planetary perils become more commonplace, they pose serious risks to natural, managed, and built environments around the world. Assessing the magnitude of these risks over multiple decades and identifying strategies to prepare for them at local, regional, and national scales will be essential to making societies and economies more resilient and sustainable. A workshop highlights how MIT research can guide adaptation at local, regional, and national scales.
Five-hundred-year floods. Persistent droughts and heat waves. More devastating wildfires. As these and other planetary perils become more commonplace, they pose serious risks to natural, managed, and built environments around the world. Assessing the magnitude of these risks over multiple decades and identifying strategies to prepare for them at local, regional, and national scales will be essential to making societies and economies more resilient and sustainable.
With that goal in mind, the MIT Joint Program on the Society of Global Change launched in 2019 its Adaptation-at-Scale initiative (AS-MIT), which seeks evidence-based solutions to global change-driven risks. Using its Integrated Global System Modeling (IGSM) framework, as well as a suite of resource and infrastructure assessment models, AS-MIT targets, diagnoses, and projects changing risks to life-sustaining resources under impending societal and environmental stressors, and evaluates the effectiveness of potential risk-reduction measures.
In pursuit of these objectives, MIT Joint Program researchers are collaborating with other adaptation-at-scale thought leaders across MIT. And at a conference on Jan. 10 on the MIT campus, they showcased some of their most promising efforts in this space. Part of a series of MIT Joint Program workshops aimed at providing decision-makers with actionable information on key global change concerns, the conference covered risks and resilience strategies for food, energy, and water systems; urban-scale solutions; predicting the evolving risk of extreme events; and decision-making and early warning capabilities — and featured a lunch seminar on renewable energy for resilience and adaptation by an expert from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
Food, energy, and water systems
Greg Sixt, research manager in the Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS), described the work of J-WAFS’ Alliance for Climate Change and Food Systems Research, an emerging alliance of premier research institutions and key stakeholders to collaboratively frame challenges, identify research paths, and fund and pursue convergence research on building more resilience across the food system, from production to supply chains to consumption.
MIT Joint Program Deputy Director Sergey Paltsev, also a senior research scientist at the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI), explored climate-related risks to energy systems. He highlighted physical risks, such as potential impacts of permafrost degradation on roads, airports, natural gas pipelines, and other infrastructure in the Arctic, and of an increase in extreme temperature, wind, and icing events on power distribution infrastructure in the U.S. Northeast.
