Industry leaders team up with MIT in fight against climate change

The MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium launches with 13 company members to work toward innovation in climate and sustainability.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) announces the development of a new consortium - the MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium (MCSC) - to create an alliance of leaders from a broad range of industries and aims to vastly accelerate large-scale, real-world implementation of solutions to address the threat of climate change.

The inaugural members of the MCSC includes; Accenture, Apple, Boeing, Cargill, Dow, IBM, PepsiCo, Inditex, LafargeHolcim, MathWorks, Nexplore, Rand-Whitney Containerboard (A Kraft Group Company), and Verizon. 

The MCSC aims to unite  influential companies to work with MIT to build a process, market, and ambitious implementation strategy for environmental innovation. 

The work of the consortium will involve a cross-sector collaboration to meet the urgency of climate change. The MCSC plans to take action and foster the necessary collaboration to meet this challenge, with the intention of influencing efforts across industries.

Another goal of the MCSC will be to drive down costs, lower barriers to adoption of best-available technology and processes, speed retirement of carbon-intensive power generating and materials-producing equipment, direct investment where it will be most effective, and translate best practices from one industry to the next in an effort to deploy social and technological solutions at a pace more rapid than the planet’s intensifying crises.

'If we hope to decarbonise the economy, we must work with the companies that make the economy run,' says MIT President L. Rafael Reif.

'Drawing its members from a broad range of industries, the MCSC will convene an alliance of influential corporations motivated to work with MIT, and with each other, to pilot and deploy the solutions necessary to reach their own ambitious decarbonisation commitments.

'By sharing solutions across companies and sectors, the consortium has the potential to vastly accelerate the implementation of large-scale, real-world solutions to help meet the global climate emergency.'