Stanford’s Sustainability Accelerator adds new targets

The Sustainability Accelerator at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability has named five new targets for its efforts to help people, economies, and ecosystems thrive worldwide by rapidly translating Stanford research into applied policy and technology solutions. 

Ranging from food and agriculture to electricity and grid systems, the new targets join the Accelerator’s first Flagship Destination, which involves channeling resources toward Stanford-led projects that can help enable the removal of billions of tons of greenhouse gases annually from Earth’s atmosphere by the middle of this century.

The Accelerator will offer multi-year seed grants of up to $1 million per project under each of the new Flagship Destinations, which were selected after extensive discussions with faculty, staff, students, and external experts. 

These projects will support the school’s broader efforts, announced on Aug. 6, to focus research on a set of Solution Areas that includes climate, water, energy, food, nature, and cities, among other topics.

‘A sustainability safety net’

“Destinations matter. Thinking big matters. This dramatic expansion of the Accelerator’s efforts recognizes both the magnitude of the challenges we face and the tremendous potential for realizing real and measurable impact,” said Dean Arun Majumdar. “This moment also reflects the school’s core commitment to leveraging our expertise and skills across our entire research enterprise, from discovery to solutions to impact.”

The new Flagship Destinations are climate adaptation, food and agriculture, water, electricity and grid systems, and industry. Additional work supporting all the Accelerator’s targets will focus on improving sensing, measurement, and data analytics, and on leveraging biological systems to help solve challenges within any one of the Flagship Destinations. For example, bioengineering could contribute to the production of alternative protein sources.

“The fundamental goal of the Accelerator is sustainability impact at global scale. These Flagship Destinations represent targets where we see significant opportunities to protect or restore resources worldwide,” said Yi Cui, faculty director of the Sustainability Accelerator and the Fortinet Founders Professor in the School of Engineering and the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability. He emphasized that the targets are not mutually exclusive. “They are intertwined and inseparable. They weave a sustainability safety net for the world.”

Ingenuity and cooperation

Faculty, staff, and students from across the university provided input and feedback to inform the new lineup of Flagship Destinations. Accelerator leadership, guided by a Faculty Advisory Council, also consulted external experts from non-governmental organizations and industry professionals with unique expertise in sustainability. 

Each Flagship Destination was chosen for its potential to rapidly apply Stanford research to address climate change, biodiversity loss, disaster risk, and other sustainability challenges prioritized under the school’s Solution Areas. “Today’s sustainability challenges are daunting, but we can tackle them with human ingenuity and cooperation,” said Accelerator executive director Charlotte Pera. “Our Flagship Destinations are ambitious, commensurate with the scale of the challenges we face, and Stanford can make substantial contributions to each one. We look forward to working with creative and committed teams from across the university to accelerate innovative solutions and have impact at scale.”

What is a gigaton? 1 gigaton equals 1 billion metric tons. Annual global emissions of greenhouse gases are equivalent to about 60 gigatons of carbon dioxide. Most of these emissions come from burning fossil fuels.