Policy innovation and experimentation for effective and equitable climate solutions

A team of Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL)-affiliated researchers led by Nobel laureate and J-PAL co-founder and co-director Abhijit Banerjee with support from J-PAL global executive director Iqbal Dhaliwal and King Climate Action Initiative (K-CAI) project director Claire Walsh, were invited to pitch for the MIT Climate Grand Challenges. The Team proposed a collaborative project that would engage scientists around the world. The project's main objectives are to co-design and measure mitigation and adaptation innovations, scale-up effective solutions with policy partners and reinforce MIT as a global leader in evidence-based climate policy.

The ambitious project proposes the implementation of 30 research and scaling projects over the course of 5 years to inform policy that will impact more than 15 million people living in poverty within 10 years. The project comprises three core components. The first component, competitive research and scaling funding, brings J-PAL and MIT researchers together for rigorous evaluation of the impacts of climate solutions and scaling-up of effective solutions with policy partners. This is complemented by embedding J-PAL and MIT staff, students and researchers in governments, NGOs and J-PAL regional offices to build research and implementation capacity for solutions that are found to be effective. Finally, the proposal includes inviting visiting scholars from low-and middle-income countries to MIT for knowledge saring and the establishment of new research collaborations.