The Living Climate Futures Lab (LCFL) has been named the recipient of the inaugural Faculty Driven Initiative (FDI) Seed Grant from the MIT Human Insight Collaborative (MITHIC).

FDIs are programs that build community and scholarship on a defined topic of relevance to the humanities, arts, or social sciences. They bring together faculty or teaching staff from multiple units across SHASS or the Institute, collaborating on a common area of study or issue.

The FDI award comes with a $500,000 seed grant. The LCFL had previously been named a recipient of a MITHIC Humanities Cultivation Fund award in 2024.

The interdisciplinary project is administered through MIT Anthropology and includes more than 19 faculty and affiliates from across the Institute. The LCFL is premised on the recognition that climate change – its causes, impacts, and solutions – are simultaneously ecological, economic, technological, political, social, and cultural.

The LCFL is intended to serve as a home base and umbrella organization at MIT for the growing number of researchers who are interested in its three pillars:

• Focusing on how climate change plays out in people’s everyday lives
• Creating knowledge/research partnerships with community organizations around climate change
• Building bridges across STEM and SHASS disciplines.