Sustainability Connect 2025 brought together the MIT community for a morning of dialogue, collaboration, and hands-on inspiration focused on advancing climate action on campus and beyond. 

The questions that shaped the 2025 program sought to explore how climate solutions were being designed and informed at and across the campus, city and state space.  Some of the driving questions that shaped this dialogue included - How are campuses, cities, and states working together to accelerate climate action? What does climate leadership look like in practice—from policy alignment to zero-waste kitchens and student research? And how can every member of the MIT community contribute to meaningful, measurable change?

These questions shaped Sustainability Connect 2025, the MIT Office of Sustainability’s annual forum spotlighting the people and projects driving climate and sustainability action across the Institute. Through leadership updates, a cross-sector panel on climate partnership, a hands-on zero-waste cooking demonstration, and an interactive e-poster session featuring more than 30 staff- and student-led projects, the event highlighted both the scale and the creativity of MIT’s climate work. Sustainability Connect reinforces the importance of community in this work, creating time and space for the conversations and connections that move climate and sustainability efforts forward at MIT.

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Recap

How is MIT working to meet its goal of decarbonizing the campus by 2050? How are local journalists communicating climate impacts and solutions to diverse audiences? What can each of us do to bring our unique skills and insight to tackle the challenges of climate and sustainability?

These are all questions asked — and answered — at Sustainability Connect, the yearly forum hosted by the MIT Office of Sustainability that offers an inside look at this transformative and comprehensive work that is the foundation for MIT’s climate and sustainability leadership on campus. The event invites individuals in every role at MIT to learn more about the sustainability and climate work happening on campus and to share their ideas, highlight important work, and find new ways to plug into ongoing efforts. “This event is a reminder of the remarkable, diverse, and committed group of colleagues we are all part of at MIT,” said Director of Sustainability Julie Newman as the event kicked off alongside Interfaith Chaplain and Spiritual Advisor to the Indigenous Community Nina Lytton, who offered a moment of connection to attendees. At the event, that diverse and committed group was made up of more than 130 community members representing more than 70 departments, labs, and centers.

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Recap

When MIT’s Office of Sustainability (MITOS) first launched in 2013, it was charged with integrating sustainability across all levels of campus by engaging the collective brainpower of students, staff, faculty, alumni, and partners. At the eighth annual Sustainability Connect, MITOS’s signature event, held nearly a decade later, the room was filled with MIT community members representing 67 different departments, labs, and centers — demonstrating the breadth of engagement across MIT.

Held on Feb. 14 and hosting more than 100 staff, students, faculty, and researchers, the event was a forum on the future of sustainability leadership at MIT, designed to reflect on the work that had brought MIT to its present moment — focused on a net-zero future by 2026 and elimination of direct campus emissions by 2050 — and to plan forward.

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