Monday, January 23, 2012

MIT contestants to present climate-change economy ideas to UN, Congress

By Lori Valigra

MIT Sloan School of Management’s 2011 Climate CoLab contest winners will present their proposals on how the 21st century economy should evolve in light of climate-change risks to the United Nations and U.S. Congress.

Starting tomorrow, the winning teams will present their proposals to Brice Lalonde and Elizabeth Thompson, executive coordinators for the upcoming United Nations Rio+20 Conference. On Jan. 25, they will then visit Capitol Hill, where they will be part of a briefing sponsored by the U.S. House of Representatives Natural Resources Committee.

“Even though the problem of what to do about global climate change is very complex, recent examples like Wikipedia, Google, and Linux show that it’s possible to harness the collective intelligence of thousands of people around the world to solve complex global problems. Our goal with the Climate CoLab is to apply that approach to the problem of climate change,” MIT Sloan Professor Thomas Malone, director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, which leads the Climate CoLab, said in a statement.

“Many people are concerned about climate change around the world, but feel they don’t have a voice in serious discussions on the issue,” added research scientist Rob Laubacher, who manages the Climate CoLab and is associate director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence. “The presentations at the UN and on Capitol Hill are an important part of the contest, as they allow the winners to share their ideas with a larger audience and provide input to policymakers.”

The green economy will be a theme at the UN’s Rio+20 Conference in June 2012. The more than 60 proposals submitted by contest participants had either a national or international approach.

In the global category, the winner of the Popular Choice Award was a proposal combining the top ideas from the previous year’s contest. It was prepared by Dennis Peterson, a software engineer from North Carolina. The new proposal focused on a North/South approach to global agreements for emissions reductions, lowering mitigation targets to make them more achievable, and using technology and policies to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.

A U.S. team whose members are affiliated with a political blog, the Daily Kos, won second place in the global category, proposing a reduction in meat eating to reduce high impact greenhouse gases.

In the national category, Peterson again won for his proposal about cycling carbon in the United States. Second place went to a graduate student team from India, which proposed ideas for how to reduce emissions in their country and use computer technology for monitoring.

Two Judges’ Choice Awards were presented in the national category. One was awarded to a team from Nigeria proposing that university students work with subsistence farmers to mitigate climate change and assure that farming practices adapt to new climate conditions. The other award went to an MIT computer science researcher who proposed using personal rapid transit systems in urban U.S. areas.