11.58 So, how do we encourage people to shift towards a plant-based diet, she asks? The solution should, and can, involve delicious plant based alternatives and fresh local food, but that won’t necessarily be enough. Policy and strategic nudges may be required, but they’re often both unpopular and controversial. Read more about how reducing your meat consumption really can help the climate.
Shifting towards a plant-based diet is crucial for environmental sustainability, but can also improve animal welfare, public health, food security and create new local economic opportunities. Plus, it’s a change that individuals can make on their own, she adds.
11.50 Now, Alex Berke, a PhD student in the MIT Media Lab’s City Science group, is talking about low-carbon diets.
Animal products contribute the majority of food related emissions, and are much more resource intensive than plant based foods, she says. Producing animal products contributes more than 56% of food related emissions, and takes up more than 75% of global farmlands, yet only contributes about 37% of the protein and 18% of calories to the global food supply.
The world is producing more animal products that people need, she adds, which is particularly problematic in the US and other affluent countries where meat is consumption is the highest.
11.40 Now Maitane Iruretagoyena, a technical associate at the City Science Group, has taken to the stage.
“We want to create more vibrant, productive, and creative spaces,” she says. One way to do this, she explains, is through transformable wall systems that integrate furniture storage, lighting, office and entertainment systems.
“Sometimes the living room could be transformed to a bathroom,” she adds. “So the rooms are created on demand they can they function that you need.”
11.30 Next up is Ronan Doorley, an engineer and data scientist at MIT City Science, talking about hybrid working and proximity to the workplace from where you live.
Commuting contributes to emissions. AI models can provide interesting insights into how to reduce the amount of time people spend commuting by creating a kind of a proximity matrix of job to job skill, similarity, and work, he says.
“By modeling and simulating the likely job transitions that would occur in any particular industry development scenario, we can actually start to understand how many of the newly created jobs could be attained by the local population versus how many would have to be filled from the outside community, which would likely lead to more commuting and potentially even displacement pressure on the local population,” he explains. Another important element to reducing the amount of car journeys people make is to make key amenities, such as healthcare, easily accessible by foot, or bicycle.
11.27 We love cities here at MIT Technology Review—so much so we wrote a whole issue about how technology is shaping cities in June last year, and another more recently about urbanism.
Gabrielle Merite and Andre Vitorio wrote a really interesting piece for us in April 2021 exploring how megacities could lead the fight against climate change—because reducing emissions in a few of the world’s most populous cities (including New York, Los Angeles, and Shenzhen) could have an outsized impact on climate change.
11.22 Onstage now is Luis Alonso, a research scientist in the City Science group and Principal Investigator of the Andorra Living Lab Project.
When we talk about deep building retrofitting, we’re talking about increasing the thermal isolation, and improving exterior cladding, he says. This will reduce the amount of operational energy required.
11.20 Welcome back to the day’s second session, and the topic is how to create realistic ways for cities to adapt to the changing climate, while also creating new spaces and opportunities for people to thrive.