Boston and New YorkBoston and NY

Visualizing Climate Worlds: Data, AI, and Immersive Futures

The data describing our climate — rainfall, rising tides, the metabolism of cities — are vast, technical, and largely invisible. Experience three projects using data, modeling, and visualization to make climate futures legible at different scales.

Thanks to a proliferation of climate data, processed and interpreted with AI tools and new visualization methods, we can recognize new patterns in our relationship with our cities and our planet, predict extreme events or future hazards, and inform the hard work of climate adaptation and mitigation. Visualizing Climate Worlds brings together three projects that turn data into new ways of seeing — and living in — a changing planet.

The Better Planet Laboratory at CU Boulder uses satellite data, sensors, and AI to monitor global food and environmental systems, transforming planetary-scale information into early-warning and decision tools for a more resilient, equitable future. MIT’s Urban Metabolism Environmental Research and Action Lab (UMERA) applies Material Flow Analysis and machine learning to 11,000+ cities worldwide, surfacing productive and sometimes unexpected climate “sister-city” networks and modeling how they converge on unique sustainability paths to 2050. And BEAM Studio’s TIDELANDS 2100 draws on NOAA flood models and the oral histories of Rhode Island’s coastal residents to build immersive VR worlds of adaptation in place.

Together they move from planetary monitoring to urban comparison to lived experience, asking: once we can model and see a changing planet, how do we choose to live in it?

Program

  • 2:45pm – Doors Open
  • 3:00pm – Welcome Remarks
  • 3:10pm – Flash Talks
  • 3:30pm – Panel Discussion
  • 4:00pm – Q&A
  • 4:15am – Networking
  • 5:00pm – End
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Event start time

  • New York

    3:00PM

Speakers

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    Bio

    Zia Mehrabi

    Director, Better Planet Laboratory
    University of Colorado Boulder

    Zia Mehrabi is Director of the Better Planet Laboratory at the University of Colorado Boulder, a group of data scientists and creatives who build data products and services that solve problems in climate, food, water, and human rights for a better and fairer planet. His team’s breakthroughs include the Global Food Twin, a digital twin of the global food system; Waternet, which tripled the known extent of the world’s mapped rivers; human rights based carbon labelling; and the highest-resolution map of fenceline communities exposed to fossil fuel extraction, which underpinned Amnesty International’s Extraction Extinction report at COP30. Published in Science and Nature, cited across UN agencies, wide media coverage, and with experience presenting everywhere from farmer meetings to the World Economic Forum, his work pairs deep research with real-world reach. Named a Grist 50 climate leader and winner of the 2025 Frontiers Planet Prize, he holds a BA and PhD from the University of Oxford.

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    Bio

    John E. Fernández

    Professor, MIT Department of Architecture

    John E. Fernández is a full professor of architecture, urbanism and building technology in the Department of Architecture at MIT. He is co-founder of MIT Environmental Research + Action (ERA). ERA was created to advance knowledge and real-world solutions that promote the sustainability of cities, enhance the protection and stewardship of ecosystems in partnership with local communities, and develop and deploy digital technologies for a humane, prosperous and climate safe future.

    Since joining the MIT faculty in 1999, Fernández has led two research labs, the Emergent Materials Group (EMG) and the Urban Metabolism Group (UMG). The EMG has explored the material needs of a sustainable built environment. The UMG has pioneered methods to understand the resource intensity of global cities and the relation between material and energy flows and climate change, biodiversity and novel approaches to infrastructure for a sustainable planet.

    Fernández is author of two books, Material Architecture (Routledge) and Sustainable Urban Metabolism (MIT Press). He is currently completing his third book on the role of cities in global resource flows, climate change and biodiversity.

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    Bio

    Zoe Lee

    Co-founder, BEAM

    Zoe Lee is a Chinese–Japanese–Korean American artist, designer, and sociotechnical researcher. Her work examines how emerging technologies and climate interventions take shape in the real world, and how design, storytelling, and community-centered approaches can expand public agency in technological change.

    In 2024, she co-founded BEAM with Annie Chen, a next-generation creative studio designing the future of climate. Working at the intersection of technology, culture, and living systems, BEAM explores how climate solutions can connect with public imagination and civic life.

    Zoe is currently pursuing a master’s degree at the MIT Media Lab and holds a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. She is an NSF Graduate Research Fellow and has held residencies at MacDowell, Menningarstofa, and Fish Factory.

Moderator

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    Bio

    Lana Z Porter

    Creative Director

    Lana Z Porter is a designer and creative director whose work explores how we imagine, articulate, and construct possible futures. She is co-founder and editor of Tractor Beam, a speculative fiction publication dedicated to soilpunk: radical futures rooted in farming, food, and the living world. With a background in cultural anthropology and speculative design, Lana has spent more than a decade telling stories at the intersection of culture, science, technology, and climate, leading creative teams at Newlab, The New York Times R&D lab, and VICE.

Assembly

This event is part of Assembly, the main Swiss stage at Climate Week NYC 2026. As world leaders gather in Midtown Manhattan, Swissnex assembles Swiss and global voices – from private sector innovators and researchers to artists and policymakers – in the East Village for three days of communal climate thinking and action. Assembly speaks to deliberation and democracy – the idea that communities must collectively define their futures – as well as the ongoing, creative, improvisational process of constructing those futures from the pieces of our present.

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Partners

This event is presented in collaboration with Frontiers, one of the world’s largest and most impactful research publishers, dedicated to making peer-reviewed, quality-certified science openly accessible.