At New York Climate Week 2026, MIT connects with a global network

MIT brought a broad campus delegation to Climate Week NYC, held Sept. 21-27, according to MIT News. Using several spaces at the Dream Downtown Hotel in Chelsea, the MIT Climate Project and eight departments, labs, centers and initiatives ran 14 sessions that drew more than 700 attendees. The citywide event, which MIT News says attracts over 100,000 people to more than 1,000 events each year, also featured Evelyn Wang, MIT's vice president for energy and climate, at the opening ceremony speaking about artificial intelligence and climate.

Sessions covered supply chains, flood resilience, food security, industrial decarbonization and education. At a panel on data centers, Gang Chen, faculty director of the Climate Project, said the facilities are at a turning point and that technology can help make them more sustainable and better for host communities, though it cannot solve every problem. A workshop led by Jesse Kroll examined super pollutants, which the article says account for nearly half of human-caused warming so far. Kroll cautioned that much of those emissions cannot be reduced with existing methods.

MIT also co-hosted an event with the Bezos Earth Fund on moving discoveries out of the lab. Wang and fund president Tom Taylor discussed gaps in validation, commercialization and deployment, while a panel of MIT faculty and spinout leaders pointed to needs such as testing infrastructure and patient capital.

The recurring message, as MIT presents it, is that climate solutions depend on partnerships beyond any one institution and on realistic adoption. J-PAL's Claire Walsh noted that even cheap technology does not necessarily spread on its own, so developers should consider users' incentives early.