Conflicting interests and the urgent need for rapid action and collaboration make solutions difficult, but they also inspire significant innovation. The newly launched MIT Center for Sustainability Science and Strategy (CS3) aims to address these challenges in a holistic way.
“There’s a growing realization at MIT that in order to understand the world we live in, which is very much a goal of science, we can’t just think about the Earth in the absence of humans who are living in it,” says inaugural faculty director Noelle Selin, a professor in MIT’s Institute for Data, Systems, and Society and in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences. “By modeling natural and societal systems in their full complexity, we can obtain a more complete picture of the Earth system—one that provides a more robust basis for decision-making.”
Political science, human behavior, technologies
Aligned with MIT’s Climate Project, CS3—which is also led by deputy directors and senior research scientists Sergey Paltsev and C. Adam Schlosser, and executive director Anne Slinn SM ’91—harnesses interdisciplinary expertise to advance research, develop and leverage new methods of computing and data, and drive global engagement in strategies that help government, industry, and civil society make environmentally and economically sound choices for sustainable development. The initiative unites the work of the former MIT Center for Global Change and the former MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change. Under the leadership of TEPCO Professor of Atmospheric Science Ronald Prinn ScD ’71, those initiatives pioneered an interconnected approach to environmental and human systems over more than three decades.
“Expertise is needed across a broad range of social sciences as well as natural sciences and engineering to truly get the picture of this integrated system that we’re studying,” says Selin. “It’s not just economics anymore. It’s political science, human behavior, and technologies. It’s thinking about how decisions are made, how the Earth system reacts, and then how people react in turn to that.”
Community of sustainability scholars
CS3, which hosted the 47th Global Change Forum in March 2025—a gathering of 100 invited representatives of industry, government, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), policymaking bodies, and research groups—is a community of students, faculty, and researchers focused on comprehensive sustainability science research and its global and regional applications. It also builds on the Institute’s strengths in areas like machine learning and AI to address complex sustainability challenges.
For instance, Selin looks at how policies can affect the probability of pollutants being released into the atmosphere and how they cycle in the Earth and impact populations. Other researchers focus on future challenges related to food production, and the knock-on effect on the environment of carbon pricing, she says. Recent CS3 research news includes a study confirming the climate impacts of hydrogen and the development of a new AI tool that generates realistic satellite images of future flooding.
Although they model possible results under different policy scenarios, CS3 researchers aren’t in the business of making predictions. Still, their work can help public and private sector decision-makers better assess proposals and mitigate the risks of abrupt changes to critical life-support systems, Selin says. The center also engages stakeholders from governments and corporations as well as NGOs and local communities to develop measurable outcomes that promote equity and justice, especially for those most impacted by environmental harms. For example, researchers created a tool called the STRESS (System for the Triage of Risks from Environmental and Socio-Economic Stressors) platform, which involves overlaying risks from environmental and socioeconomic stressors, such as exposure to airborne particulate matter and the unemployment rate.
“We have to be careful about who bears burdens and who benefits from different actions, and be really explicit about that in our modeling and science,” Selin says. “When we talk about humans, humans are not one unit. We have to take account of that and make sure that human well-being is equitably shared across the planet.”