Credits: Photo: Abbie Trayler-Smith/Panos Pictures
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As a small child, Manduhai Buyandelger lived with her grandparents in a house unconnected to the heating grid on the outskirts of Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. There, in the world’s coldest capital city, temperatures can drop as low as minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit in the winter months.
“Once I moved further into the city with my parents, I had nightmares about my grandparents,” recalls Buyandelger, now a professor of anthropology at MIT. “I felt so vulnerable for them. In the ger district where they lived, most people do not have central heating, and they warm their homes by making fire in their stoves. My grandparents didn t have heat. I was always worried about them getting up in this icy cold house, carrying buckets of coal from their little shed back into the house, and then using a small shovel putting the coal in the stove. It has been more than 40 years since the
Caption: There is tremendous and growing interest in environmental questions within economics, says Assistant Professor Clare Balboni. Economic models and methods can help to enhance our understanding of how to balance the imperative for continued growth in prosperity and well-being particularly for the world’s poorest with the need to mitigate and adapt to the environmental externalities that this growth creates. Credits: Photo courtesy of Clare Balboni
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In an ongoing series, Solving Climate: Humanistic Perspectives from MIT, faculty, students, and alumni in the Institute s humanistic fields share scholarship and insights that are significant for solving climate change and mitigating its myriad social and ecological impacts.