The MCSC team participates in the Equitable Resilience Framework exercise led by Professor Janelle Knox-Hayes and Jungwoo Chun.
Social dimensions is a cross-cutting theme that involves considering human, social, policy, and governance factors in technical solution-building. This scope of interest includes social dimensions – equity and agent-centered design, behavior and markets, transparency and accountability, and policy and governance – as in-built components to development and implement solutions. There is interest in development of equity-based evaluation criteria, monitoring and accountability systems, finance, and benchmarking of the human costs of status-quo practices. In implementation, members are interested to engage applied researchers, policy and governance experts, and pilot sites for community development engaged in the behavioral, institutional, and cultural context of solution building for MCSC focus areas.
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All of our areas of interest have links to the MCSC Seed Awards projects.
MIT faculty members, researchers, and students interested in this impact area: we’ve got all kinds of ways for you to work with us and our member companies.
Projects
- Social dimensions guidance (Frye-Levine, Chun)
- An exploration of how MCSC member companies are considering social sustainability questions in their operations.
- Sustainable solutions for climate change adaptation: weaving traditional ecological knowledge and STEAM (Knox-Hayes)
- Within this project is a focus on the Equitable Resilience Framework (ERF), a new methodology that redefines how adaptation and resilience planning works for the communities it seeks to support. The ERF draws on human capabilities, enhanced trade-off analysis, and knowledge convergence to ensure that adaptation and mitigation efforts improve the resilience of individuals and communities most in need. By reconceptualizing the links between resilience and equity within communities, the ERF gives researchers and practitioners better theoretical and practical tools for applying resilience to interconnected social systems across different timescales. The ERF facilitates just solutions while empowering communities that are often overburdened by environmental injustice and climate change. The ERF Initiative is led by Janelle Knox-Hayes, Associate Professor and Director of the Resilient Communities Lab.
- Anthro-engineering decarbonization at the million-person scale (Buyandelger)
- This cross-school project, comprised of anthropology and engineering Co-PIs, postdocs, and NEET undergraduates, will explore the contexts for designing and implementing a locally specific, culturally acceptable, and socio-economically viable reusable molten salt heat bank, amenable to energy input by concentrated solar and nuclear power, to reduce this dependency of citizens on their government, and sustainably decarbonize Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia.
Contact Us
If you would like more information, please e-mail mcsc@mit.edu.
Who's studying this
Research Scientist
MCSC Impact Fellow