Draft:Boston University Institute for Global Sustainability

The Boston University Institute for Global Sustainability (IGS) is a sustainability and climate research institute at Boston University. IGS’s mission is to “pioneer research to advance a sustainable and equitable future,” with a particular focus on planetary and environmental health, climate governance and sustainability transitions, and energy systems of the future. It brings together more than 90 core and affiliated faculty members from 12 of Boston University’s schools and colleges. The Institute and its leadership have publicly stated a strong commitment to equity and justice, working towards a just transition to an economy less dependent on fossil fuels that considers the livelihood and well-being of all people.

History and Leadership
IGS was formerly the Boston University Institute for Sustainable Energy (ISE), which was founded in 2016 by Peter Fox-Penner, a former Senior Advisor in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. The Institute relaunched as IGS in July 2022 to focus on sustainability research more broadly. Since 2022, IGS has been led by social scientist Benjamin K. Sovacool, referred to as "the father of energy justice" by Shalanda Baker, director of the Office of Economic Impact and Diversity and secretarial advisor on equity at the US Department of Energy. Rebecca Pearl-Martinez, who has previously worked with the United Nations on climate and energy policy, also joined as executive director in 2022 with the goal of seeing the Institute become “a global leader in the climate and sustainability space.” Faculty associate directors include Cutler J. Cleveland, Nalin Kulatilaka, M. Patricia Fabian, Arunima Krishna, Emily Ryan, and Henrik Selin.

Research Focus

 * Planetary and environmental health: Research areas span impacts on the natural environment and human health, including air pollution, extreme heat, climate change, and other factors.
 * Energy systems of the future: IGS researchers are investigating alternatives to the current energy system and the impacts of this transition, including electric vehicles, renewables, energy storage, energy efficiency, and more.
 * Climate governance and sustainability transitions: Projects investigate corporate social responsibility and performance, science communication, offshore wind, data centers, emerging climate technologies, energy equity, zero waste, and more.

Research Projects
IGS oversees several ongoing research and outreach projects:


 * Visualizing Energy is a science communication project that launched in 2023, providing data stories on the link between sustainable energy and human well-being. The data, visualizations, and original text are free to use.
 * Benjamin Sovacool and Rebecca Pearl-Martinez co-lead the Resource Function of the Research Coordinating Center of the NIH Climate Change and Health Initiative that is jointly led by the Boston University School of Public Health and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
 * The ongoing multi-year research project, “Energy Justice Indicators: Measuring Community Effects of Offshore Wind Energy Development” is a collaboration between IGS, the University of Rhode Island, and the University of Delaware that is funded by the Department of Energy’s Wind Energy Technologies Office.
 * Development of the “Energy and Equity Exposures Database for Population Health” is seed-funded by an IGS Sustainability Research Grant with the Boston University School of Public Health to better understand how energy decisions affect population health in the United States.
 * The Boston University Campus Climate Lab supports sustainability and climate research led by student-mentor teams using the BU campus and operations, such as the Anthony Janetos Climate Action Prize winning project for 2023 on making research labs more sustainable. Campus Climate Lab is led by IGS in collaboration with BU Sustainability and the Office of Research.
 * A year-long project that IGS jointly funded with the Rafik B. Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering called “Data and Misinformation in an Era of Sustainability and Climate Change Crises” launched in 2022 to research the spread of climate misinformation and disinformation through Twitter (now X), Reddit, and native advertising.
 * In 2023, the Research Council of Norway awarded $1.1 million to support a research collaboration between NTNU Social Research (NSR) and Boston University called the “Limits to Digitalization (L2D)” project. The effort is designed to evaluate Norway’s growing data center industry and digital transformation amid Norway’s shift to clean energy.
 * The Institute received nearly $500,000 in funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to pursue research examining the equity implications of renewable energy generation.
 * Engineering professors affiliated with IGS have earned funding from the National Science Foundation and Boston University College of Engineering’s Dean’s Catalyst Award to improve energy storage and battery performance, respectively.
 * The Impact Measurement & Allocation Program (IMAP) sponsored by the Ravi K. Mehrotra Institute and affiliated with the Institute for Global Sustainability in 2021 is focused on improving sustainable investing metrics.

Research Projects
A selection of publications by Boston University faculty affiliated with IGS includes:


 * Political economy of low-carbon electricity: Governance effects across 198 countries (2024)
 * Coral reefs, cloud forests and radical climate interventions in Australia’s Wet Tropics and Great Barrier Reef (2023)
 * Building a green future: Examining the job creation potential of electricity, heating, and storage in low-carbon buildings (2023)
 * Air pollution and health impacts of oil & gas production in the United States (2023)
 * Simulating energy use, indoor temperatures, and utility cost impacts amidst a warming climate in a multi-family housing model (2023)
 * Policy prescriptions to address energy and transport poverty in the United Kingdom (2023)
 * Urban green space and albedo impacts on surface temperature across seven United States cities (2023)
 * Smoothed particle hydrodynamics modeling of electrodeposition and dendritic growth under migration- and diffusion-controlled mass transport (2022)
 * Analysis of daily ambient temperature and firearm violence in 100 US cities (2022)
 * Decarbonization, population disruption and resource inventories in the global energy transition (2022)
 * Industrial clusters for deep decarbonization (2022)
 * Mapping the gaps between cooling benefits of urban greenspace and population heat vulnerability (2022)
 * US cities increasingly integrate justice into climate planning and create policy tools for climate justice (2022)
 * Inefficient building electrification will require massive buildout of renewable energy and seasonal energy storage (2022)

Partners
National Renewable Energy Laboratory

Schneider Electric