Accelerator picks 25 new sustainability projects for grants and guidance
The latest awards from Stanford’s Sustainability Accelerator support wide-ranging efforts to help communities and nature withstand climate-related extreme events and advance the measurement of planetary systems.
Twenty-five new research teams have been selected for grants and support from the Sustainability Accelerator at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability. The projects aim to rapidly enhance understanding of Earth systems and resilience to negative impacts from climate change.
Twelve of the 25 projects received funding as part of the Accelerator’s efforts in climate adaptation. This includes work to strengthen the resilience of communities and ecosystems, increase their capacity to adapt to climate change, and reduce harm from extreme climate-related events such as heat, floods, droughts, storms, and wildfires.
For example, one team aims to evaluate, develop, and implement strategies to scale the use of highly reflective white paint on household roofs to reduce heat-related deaths in low-income settlements along the Indonesian coast. Another seeks to develop an energy-efficient, low-cost alternative to conventional air conditioners using materials that pull water from the air. A third team is working to develop disaster preparedness resources for governments and organizations tailored to local community needs and perceptions of risk.
“The Accelerator is all about impact, speed, and scale, and these are very pressing issues that need quick solutions,” said Yi Cui, the Fortinet Founders Professor in the Stanford School of Engineering and faculty director of the Accelerator. “Even though adaptation is a slow process, we think we really need to put all these minds together to implement these solutions as soon as possible.”
Thirteen additional projects have been chosen for their promise to rapidly improve understanding of natural and human systems through innovative technologies and data-driven insights. This is an area of focus the Accelerator team calls “planetary intelligence” and considers a platform supporting its goal-oriented work.
"New technologies make it possible to observe, measure, and understand our world with incredible depth,” said Charlotte Pera, executive director of the Accelerator. “We can harness these technologies to help individuals, companies, and policymakers reduce risk, protect human and ecosystem health, and make businesses and communities more resilient.”
Split roughly evenly between digital solutions and hardware-based technologies, such as sensors, these projects are designed to close critical gaps in monitoring biodiversity, emissions, flood impacts, and more. For example, some teams are working on technologies to detect microplastics, deliver timely intelligence on wildfire smoke toxicity, and monitor methane emissions at the ecosystem scale. Others are working to develop tools for real-time mapping of dengue risk using AI and satellite imagery, and for assessing power reliability.
Finding the right collaborators
Shuchi Anand, a nephrologist interested in extreme heat because it may be a factor contributing to kidney disease, hopes to develop tools that feasibly and effectively alleviate extreme heat in outdoor workers. As part of the latest cohort of Accelerator-funded projects, Anand has teamed up with leading epidemiologist Julie Parsonnet, physiologist H. Craig Heller, and biostatistician Maria Montez Rath to pilot cooling interventions among outdoor workers, such as a bandana that retains moisture and a device that lowers body temperature through the palms.
“The Accelerator team has really helped us with finding the right partners and also putting a solutions-focused lens on our research,” Anand said. “As doctors and epidemiologists, we tend to want to evaluate the effects of different factors rather than saying, ‘How do we find a solution to what we know is likely going to be an increasing problem?’”
The team has already started conversations with a local vineyard contractor who employs farmworkers and a larger organization that works with farmworker labor contractors. “Having that solutions focus is also helpful in finding partners because both workers and employers don’t necessarily want to study effects – they want to test solutions,” Anand said.
The 25 project teams bring together scholars from across more than a dozen departments, five schools, and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. “We got people from medicine, psychology, oceans, engineering, and I believe it’s in this intersection of different disciplines where some magic can happen,” said Gemma Guilera, managing director of the Accelerator’s work on climate adaptation and planetary intelligence.
With the new awards, the Accelerator is bringing these scholars into an ecosystem of support that includes mentorship, networking, training, and business development. The Accelerator complements its project grants with a suite of support services to help project teams succeed.
“Tackling the complex challenges of global sustainability demands a deep understanding of both human and natural systems,” Cui said.
Learning what decision-makers need
Planetary intelligence project investigator and environmental scientist Gretchen Daily is working to transform how we approach questions about the present and future value of nature through the Natural Capital Project’s InVEST® software, a suite of free, open-source tools. Used in more than 185 countries, the ecosystem services modeling software currently requires skills in specialized mapping software, but with the Accelerator’s support, Daily and her team are making it more accessible to decision-makers in government, industry, development banks, and other sectors.
“We need to do more from our end to reduce the gap between the demand we are seeing from decision-makers and the technical expertise needed to generate this information,” said project lead Lisa Mandle, a lead scientist and director of science-software integration at the Stanford-based Natural Capital Project. Over the past month, she said, Accelerator staff have been connecting the research team with interested groups to understand their needs.
The more accessible version of the tool could prove useful across the Accelerator’s other focus areas. “I’m looking forward to attending the cohort kickoff meeting and learning from the other funded projects,” Mandle said.
Cui is also a professor of materials science and engineering in the Stanford School of Engineering; of energy science and engineering in the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability; of photon science at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory; and, by courtesy, of chemistry in the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences. He is a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and the Precourt Institute for Energy. Daily is the Bing Professor of Environmental Science in the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences’ Department of Biology, a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, and the co-founder and faculty director of the Natural Capital Project.
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