[Greenbuilding] Grand Prize Winners Announced at MIT Climate Change Conference

[sanjay jain]

Forwarding an email I received: 


PRESS RELEASE
Grand Prize Winners Announced at MIT Climate Change Conference
Crowdsourced ideas to address climate change honored at today’s conference. 
Grand Prize and Honorable Mention awardees: Sardar Mohazzam, Kathleen Saul, 
Job Taminiau, Anne-Marie Soulsby and Danielle Dahan. (Adele Morris not 
pictured.)   
CAMBRIDGE, MA – The Climate CoLab, a project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), 
uses online contests to find innovative, new ways to address global climate change.  Today, the Grand Prize and Honorable Mention winners were announced at the Climate CoLab’s 2014 conference. 
The Grand Prize winner, Danielle Dahan, took home the $10,000 award for her proposal, Improve Building Energy Performance: Green Job Skills Training, which addresses the shortage of qualified personnel to maintain the 
increasingly sophisticated heating, ventilation and air conditioning 
(HVAC) systems installed in green buildings today.  
“As high performance green buildings increase in complexity,” Dahan writes 
in her proposal, “we need to give building technicians the skills to 
maintain buildings and achieve high performance energy goals.”  The 
curriculum, when in full motion, is projected to save 33 trillion metric tons of carbon each year in the United States alone. 
Honorable Mention awards were given to three proposals:
A Carbon Tax in Pro-Growth Fiscal Reform, by Adele Morris, Fellow and Policy Director of the Climate and Energy Economics Project at the Brookings Institution.  She 
proposes a carbon tax that creates pro-growth tax reform, while also 
protecting the poor and reducing the deficit. 
A Collaborative Solutions Communication Platform, by Anne-Marie Soulsby and Mandolin Dotto Kahindi, of Tanzania.  The 
proposal presents Tunza Kwa Faida (Benefits for All), a platform that 
combines a radio show and two-way text messaging to help coastal 
Tanzanians increase their resilience to climate change. 
Democratic Finance: Energy Of the People, By the People, For the People, by Job Taminiau, Gordon Schweitzer, Kathleen Saul and Sardar Mohazzam, a group from the United States, Netherlands, and Pakistan.  They propose 
installing community-funded solar projects on unused federal rooftop 
space, which, they predict could mitigate millions of tons of CO2 
emissions. 
These proposals were selected by a prominent team of experts:  Robert 
Armstrong, Director of the MIT Energy Initiative; Hazel Markus, 
Davis-Brack Professor in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University; and Richard Schmalensee, the Howard W. Johnson Professor and Dean, 
Emeritus, at the MIT Sloan School of Management. 
The Grand Prize winner and Honorable Mention awardees were selected from the 34 proposals that won individual Climate CoLab contests.  The winning proposals were submitted by scientists, 
non-profit organizations, researchers, entrepreneurs, students, and 
concerned citizens. The contests ran throughout 2014 and covered a wide 
range of topics, including transportation efficiency, changing social 
attitudes and behavior, decarbonizing energy supply, adapting to climate change, land use, urban resilience, and others.

All the winners were recognized at the Climate CoLab’s conference, Crowds & Climate: From Ideas to Action, held this week at MIT. The conference focused on how creative new ideas to tackle climate change can be translated into meaningful action.  As a key part of the 
event, attendees and a set of guest experts worked with the 2014 winners to identify specific actions that can be taken to advance these 
innovative proposals. 
Additionally, the conference featured keynote addresses by Anthony Leiserowitz of the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication and Jeremy Grantham of the Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment.  Plenary panels included speakers 
from business, government and the non-profit sector -- including 
Lockheed Martin, Braemer Energy Ventures, the U.S. Environmental 
Protection Agency, Environmental Defense Fund, and the City of Boston-- 
who have launched climate change initiatives that are making a difference today.  
"This year’s 34 winners came from 17 countries and from a very diverse set of people," says Laur Fisher, the Climate CoLab’s Community and Partnerships Manager. "Winners were researchers 
in Singapore, software engineers in Japan, entrepreneurs in the 
Netherlands, and community organizers working across Germany, Kenya and 
the United States.  We are very proud of them.” 
“With the Climate CoLab project, our hope is to engage the entire world – not just 
experts – in developing creative and effective solutions to address the climate change challenge,” says Professor Thomas Malone, director of the MIT 
Center for Collective Intelligence, and principal investigator for the Climate CoLab.  “And our winners represent that.  Our community now has more 
than 30,000 members and is doubling or tripling in size with each round 
of contests. As the community continues to grow, we hope to engage even 
more smart, creative people from around the globe.”

Read online:  
http://climatecolab.org/ community/-/blogs/press- release-grand-prize-winners- announced-at-mit-climate- change-conference 
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