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November 6 & 7, 2014
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Crowds & Climate: From Ideas to Action was a day-and-a-half program on how new technology-enabled, crowd-based approaches can help in developing creative new ideas and taking meaningful action on climate change. In this year's event, we rolled up our sleeves and worked to figure out how to implement an innovative set of ideas to address climate change.
Recordings of Plenary Sessions
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Crowds & Climate in Review
Business and non-profit leaders, innovators, academics, policymakers and concerned citizens gathered at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) last week for the Climate CoLab's Crowds and Climate: From Ideas to Action conference.
A project of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, the Climate CoLab uses a technology-enabled, crowd-based approach to tackle climate change by dividing the problem into sub-challenges, running contests that address key issues, and allowing its growing international community of over 30,000 members to develop solutions. The interactive two-day conference provided a forum for attendees to see presentations by and then collaborate with the 34 contest winners.
"Harnessing the power of people all across the country and around the world toward climate solutions is exactly the kind of initiative we need," said Anthony Leiserowitz, the director of the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication and a keynote speaker at the conference. He referred to the Climate CoLab as "a 21st century approach to solving these kinds of problems."
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| Osero Shadrack Tengeya from Kenyatta University, Kenya, discusses his team's winning proposal on biogas technology in interactive breakout sessions. Photo by Dominick Reuter |
The winners came from over 17 countries and represented a diverse set of ideas, including (a) a U.S. carbon tax that uses the revenue to benefit poor households, reduce corporate income taxes, and reduce the federal deficit; (b) educating building technicians to take advantage of the often-unused energy-saving potential of sophisticated heating and cooling systems; and (c) radio programs to help residents of coastal areas in Tanzania, and other developing countries, adapt to changing weather and other effects of climate change. To see all the winning proposals and read stories about their work, click here.
Thomas Malone, director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence and the principal investigator for the Climate CoLab, encouraged the 200 people in attendance and more than 1,000 participating online to use the conference as an opportunity not only to learn from the proposals developed on the Climate CoLab platform, but also to "find something that you personally can do to help move these ideas to action."
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| Plenary session on climate change and the private sector. Photo by Dominick Reuter |
Conference participants also heard from and engaged with leading climate change experts through a series of plenary panels. The first focused on creating transformational change in the private sector to respond to climate change.
"About 87 percent of our environmental footprint occurs during the product use phase," said panelist Matthew Swibel, director of sustainability strategy at Lockheed Martin. "We are working on demonstrating the total systems value and the total footprint to our customers, who are increasingly concerned about the resources required to operate the products we are delivering. Systems thinking is the holy grail."
Victoria Mills, managing director at the Environmental Defense Fund, spoke about how EDF was one of the first environmental groups to work with corporations to find and implement environmental solutions that make sense for a business's bottom line.
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| Some Climate CoLab winners presented virtually. Photo by Dominick Reuter |
Mills also called for corporate leaders to take action outside their own organization. "The next frontier of corporate leadership is engaging in policy," she said, encouraging executives to talk with their elected representatives about carbon and methane emission regulation. "Businesses voices need to be much stronger in the policy conversation."
To speak further about the policy initiatives needed to address climate change, the second panel brought together experts from all levels of government.
Curt Spalding, administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) New England Region, spoke about the EPA's recently announced Clean Power Plan, which aims to cut carbon emissions from the country's electric power plants.
"[The plan] has been very well received throughout the country," Spalding said. "But it is a disruptive event when it comes to the economy. Whenever you do disruptive things, there are great challenges."
Brian Swett, chief of Environment, Energy and Open Space at the City of Boston responded that, "what is disruptive is the do-nothing scenario. Of the 20 largest cities in the country by gross domestic product, 10 of them are coastal. And they represent 30 percent of the U.S. economy. [Climate change] is a national economic issue and national security issue."
(Click here for Blouin News' review of this panel.)
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| Keynote speaker Anthony Leiserowitz. Photo by Dominick Reuter |
Thursday's keynote address was given by Anthony Leiserowitz, quoted above, who spoke about the state of the public's understanding of climate change.
"Four out of ten adults on the planet have never heard about climate change. That's almost 2 billion people," he stated. He then presented the five key facts he and his team think are the most important for people to understand: "It's real. It's us. It's bad. Scientists agree. There's hope."
(Click here for Blouin News' review of his address.)
Friday consisted of a plenary session on grass roots, community-based efforts to address climate change. Gary Langham, vice president and chief scientist at the National Audubon Society, is working on one such campaign focused on something millions Americans care about deeply: birds. Bird watching is the number two hobby in the United States, and Audubon's recent report shows that without urgent action, half the birds in North America will be severely threatened by climate change.
"One of the things about birds is that they are apolitical," Langham said. "This gives us an authentic way to enter into the conversation with folks and makes it easy for them to talk about this issue with their neighbors and their communities."
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| Keynote speaker Jeremy Grantham. Photo by Dominick Reuter |
The conference's closing keynote was delivered by Jeremy Grantham, co-founder and chief investment strategist at Grantham Mayo van Otterloo (GMO) and founder of the Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment.
Grantham provided a thorough review of what he sees to be the most pressing climate change issues – methane cathrates, topsoil erosion, and running out of the phosphorus that supports current "big ag" farming. He also spoke about the trends that he sees working in our favor, such as the recent drop in fertility rates and unprecedented progress in the development of renewable energy technologies. To win what he called the "race of our lives" against pressing environmental threats, Grantham said humanity will need "talent, money and a fire in the belly."
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| Grand Prize and Honorable Mention awardees: Sardar Mohazzam, Kathleen Saul, Job Taminiau, Anne-Marie Soulsby and Danielle Dahan. (Adele Morris not pictured.) Photo by Dominick Reuter |
MIT Professor Thomas Malone awarded the Climate CoLab's $10,000 Grand Prize to Danielle Dahan for her proposal, Improve Building Energy Performance: Green Job Skills Training, as well as three Honorable Mention awards. (Click here for more about these proposals.)
Malone closed the conference by sharing his aspirations both for the Climate CoLab and for humankind. "My hope," he said, "is that we will be able to use our global collective intelligence to make choices about our environment that are not just smart, but also wise."
The first 2015 contests, run in collaboration with the City of Cambridge and the American Geophysical Union's Thriving Earth Exchange, are open for submissions and can be found on the Climate CoLab's website.
Click here to watch the conference recordings.
Sponsors
Crowds and Climate is hosted by the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence's Climate CoLab, and co-sponsored by four groups at MIT working on aspects of climate change:
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Contacts
For more information regarding sponsorship, please contact Rob Laubacher.
For inquiries regarding registration, please contact Conference Services.
For inquiries regarding the program, media, partnerships, volunteer opportunities, and all other inquiries, please contact Laur Fisher and our conference team.
Acknowledgements
The conference was made possible through the help of commited volunteers. We appreciate they time and efforts they invested in the event and would like to thank you very much. The volunteers were (in alphabetical order): Jamie L Bemis, Masha Birger, Lily Bui, Cessy Cook, Julie Curti, Cherry Gao, Iwanka Kultschyckyj, Vinoth Kumar, Deanna Maheras, Kim Nguyen, Hanny E Rivera, Jesse Ruf, Manuel Thurner, Ismini Tsakiris, Allison Wallisch, Mahdi Zarghami, and Pam Ziereg. A very special thank you goes to Michael Houle, Nancy Taubenslag and Axum Teferra.
