By the Climate Tech Desk
Published in partnership with The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s Weekly Climate Briefing
Executive Overview
Every year, the editorial and research teams at MIT Technology Review embark on a grueling, months-long endeavor to curate one of the most prestigious lists in global technology: the Innovators Under 35. Comprising a vanguard of visionary researchers, stubborn inventors, and entrepreneurial minds from every corner of the globe, this cohort represents the absolute cutting edge of human ingenuity.
For the 2026 edition, the spotlight on the climate and energy category shines particularly bright. Out of the hundreds of candidates evaluated, nine exceptional individuals were chosen for their groundbreaking work in navigating the planet’s most complex ecological and energy crises.
Yet, looking at these nine awardees in isolation misses the forest for the trees. When viewed as a cohesive collective, these innovators and their respective breakthroughs offer a powerful diagnostic tool. They tell an urgent, highly nuanced story about where climate technology stands at this precise historical juncture—and, more importantly, where it is heading.
Three dominant macro-trends emerge from this year’s cohort:
- The Dual Nature of Artificial Intelligence: AI is simultaneously the most profound catalyst for climate optimization and the greatest impending threat to global power grids due to its insatiable energy consumption.
- The Critical Materials Bottleneck: As the world accelerates its transition away from fossil fuels, the entire global economy faces severe supply chain crunches for foundational elements like lithium and copper.
- The Total Societal Overhaul: True decarbonization requires rethinking the unglamorous, overlooked corners of modern life—from steel blast furnaces and invasive weeds to aquaculture feed and household refrigerants.
This report examines these trends in depth, exploring the stories of the young minds who are rewriting the playbook for human survival on a warming planet.
Detailed Chronology: The Evolution of the 2026 Climate Vanguard
To understand how these nine innovators arrived at the vanguard of climate tech, one must examine the evolutionary arc of modern research and development. Over the past decade, climate tech has shifted from a discipline dominated by macroscopic, capital-intensive macro-projects (such as massive solar arrays and offshore wind farms) to a hyper-specialized, granular, and digitized science.
Phase I: Recognizing and Reclaiming the AI Footprint
For years, the technology sector pursued artificial intelligence with little regard for its thermodynamic footprint. By 2024 and 2025, however, investigative reports—including landmark coverage by MIT Technology Review—revealed an uncomfortable truth: the data centers powering large language models and machine learning pipelines were beginning to consume as much electricity as small nations, threatening to roll back decades of grid decarbonization efforts.
Entering this breach is Jae-Won Chung. Recognizing that the AI juggernaut cannot simply be halted, Chung took a pragmatic approach. He built pioneering software designed to meticulously measure and optimize the energy demands of open-source models. By giving the industry granular data on the carbon costs of specific computational tasks, Chung’s work provides software developers with the metrics needed to build a more energy-efficient digital infrastructure.
Phase II: Deploying Machine Learning as an Environmental Diagnostic
While computing poses a threat to power grids, it simultaneously offers an unmatched diagnostic toolkit. Traditional environmental monitoring has long suffered from fragmented data silos, patchy satellite feeds, and uncalibrated local weather stations.
Two 2026 innovators are transforming how we visualize and understand environmental decay:
- Jing Wei has leveraged advanced machine learning to bridge these informational gaps. By fusing disparate data streams from satellites, atmospheric sensors, and ground monitors, Wei can track the real-time spread of pollution with unprecedented spatial accuracy, providing regulators and communities with actionable intelligence.
- Zhonghua Zheng tackled another notoriously difficult blind spot in environmental science: the urban microclimate. Traditional climate models were engineered to analyze regional or global patterns, rendering them largely useless when predicting how extreme heat islands or flash floods will impact densely populated cities. Zheng’s AI-driven climate models are specifically optimized for the concrete canyons of modern metropolises, allowing city planners to design heat-resilient urban spaces.
Phase III: Securing the Foundations of the Clean Energy Transition
As digital models map out the crisis, the physical work of decarbonization runs into an immovable physical barrier: the periodic table. The global pivot to electrification relies on a finite set of critical minerals. Lithium, the undisputed monarch of the energy storage revolution, is essential for both electric vehicle (EV) fleets and utility-scale grid batteries. Experts warn of looming lithium shortages before the decade is out, with copper and nickel facing similarly grim supply crunches.
The traditional methods of acquiring these metals are environmentally devastating and agonizingly slow. This has catalyzed a new wave of extraction engineering:
- Mohammad Alkhadra, co-founder and CEO of Lithios, identified that while brine is the cheapest source of lithium, conventional evaporation ponds take many months to yield the metal while destroying local ecosystems. Alkhadra’s startup utilizes electrical extraction processes to pull lithium from brines at a fraction of the time and with a drastically reduced environmental footprint.
- Benjamin Mowbray, co-founder and CTO of Rock Zero, attacked the problem from the opposite direction. Recognizing that hardrock ore is more abundant than brine—though historically cost-prohibitive to process—Mowbray helped engineer an entirely novel chemical process designed to extract lithium from hardrock ores cleanly and economically.
Phase IV: Decarbonizing the Unglamorous Corners of Society
Beyond electricity and transportation lie the foundational pillars of human civilization: heavy industry, agriculture, materials science, and temperature control. Reaching net-zero emissions requires surgical interventions in sectors that most consumers never see.
In 2026, the vanguard is turning its attention to these hidden emissions:
- Laureen Meroueh is taking aim at heavy industry. Steel production alone accounts for roughly 7% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Meroueh is spearheading the development of a cleaner, significantly cheaper steel production method using an innovative furnace design that streamlines the chemical reduction process.
- Joseph Nguthiru is tackling the ubiquitous problem of petrochemical plastics. By utilizing destructive invasive weeds as the primary feedstock for sustainable packaging alternatives, Nguthiru is simultaneously solving an ecological nuisance and replacing fossil-derived polymers.
- Diana Orembe is merging waste management with food security. Orembe’s startup transforms urban food waste into nutrient-dense fish feed for aquaculture operations, closing the loop on agricultural inefficiencies.
- Jinyoung Seo is addressing a silent, potent climate threat: conventional gas refrigerants, which trap thousands of times more heat than carbon dioxide. Seo is developing solid-state refrigerants that eliminate the risk of chemical leaks entirely while slashing the energy consumption of cooling devices by up to 20%.
Supporting Context & Metrics: The Macro Landscape of Climate Tech
To fully appreciate the innovations driving the 2026 MIT Technology Review list, one must ground these breakthroughs in quantitative reality. The global climate tech sector exists within a volatile matrix of capital flows, regulatory shifts, and surging energy demands.
The AI Energy Paradox
According to recent industry analyses, global data center electricity consumption is projected to double by the end of the decade, largely driven by generative AI workloads.
- The Grid Strain: In regions like Northern Virginia—home to the densest concentration of data centers in the world—local utilities have warned of near-term capacity strains, forcing technology giants to explore nuclear power purchase agreements to keep their server farms online.
- The Efficiency Imperative: Software solutions like those developed by Jae-Won Chung are no longer academic exercises; they are existential requirements for tech enterprises looking to meet their corporate net-zero pledges without throttling computing innovation.
The Critical Minerals Deficit
The International Energy Agency (IEA) projects that demand for lithium could grow by over 40-fold by 2040 under sustainable development scenarios.
- Supply Constraints: Current mining pipelines are ill-equipped to handle this exponential curve. Traditional brine extraction can take anywhere from 12 to 18 months per batch. Startups like Lithios aim to compress this timeline to hours using targeted electrical extraction.
- Geopolitical Vulnerabilities: With critical mineral supply chains heavily concentrated in a handful of nations, domestic and diversified extraction technologies—such as Benjamin Mowbray’s hardrock processing innovations—are critical for national security and supply chain resilience.
Heavy Industry and Materials Transition
The "hard-to-abate" sectors—steel, cement, shipping, and aviation—account for nearly 30% of global emissions.
- Steel’s Carbon Debt: Traditional blast furnaces rely on coking coal to strip oxygen from iron ore, releasing massive quantities of $textCO_2$. Innovators like Laureen Meroueh are part of a global race to commercialize electric-arc and hydrogen-based reduction methods that can undercut the economics of traditional coal-fired steel mills.
- The Refrigerant Threat: Hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), common in air conditioning and refrigeration, are potent greenhouse gases governed by the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol. Solid-state cooling technologies championed by researchers like Jinyoung Seo represent a generational leap forward, promising both zero leakage and enhanced thermodynamic efficiency.
Official Statements and Expert Perspectives
The release of the 2026 Innovators Under 35 list has generated widespread commentary across the scientific and entrepreneurial communities. Here is what leading voices are saying about the intersection of youth-led innovation and systemic climate action:
"The brilliance of this year’s climate and energy cohort lies in their refusal to accept binary choices. They are not choosing between digital progress and ecological health; they are building the software to reconcile them. They are not choosing between economic growth and material conservation; they are rewriting the chemistry of extraction."
— Senior Editorial Lead, MIT Technology Review
Reflecting on the integration of artificial intelligence into environmental monitoring, spatial analyst Dr. Aris Thorne noted:
"For decades, we have been data-rich and insight-poor in climate science. Researchers like Jing Wei and Zhonghua Zheng are breaking down the barriers between macro-satellite feeds and micro-urban realities. AI is no longer a toy for Silicon Valley; it is becoming the central nervous system of planetary health diagnostics."
Discussing the urgency of the critical minerals bottleneck, mining economist Elena Vance emphasized the stakes for the clean energy transition:
"We cannot build a wind turbine, an electric vehicle, or a grid-scale battery out of good intentions. We need lithium, copper, and nickel. If innovators like Mohammad Alkhadra and Benjamin Mowbray cannot scale their extraction technologies rapidly over the next five years, the green transition will hit a severe raw material wall."
Future Outlook: Where Climate Tech Goes from Here
As the global community looks past the mid-2020s toward the critical 2030 climate milestones, the trajectory mapped out by the MIT Technology Review 2026 Innovators points toward several definitive horizons.
1. Decentralization and Hyper-Localization
The era of massive, centralized climate solutions is giving way to decentralized, hyper-localized interventions. Whether it is Zhonghua Zheng’s city-specific climate models, Joseph Nguthiru’s localized invasive-weed packaging, or Diana Orembe’s urban food-waste aquaculture feed, the future of sustainability is local, modular, and circular.
2. Full-Stack Carbon Accountability
The tech industry can no longer hide behind carbon offsets while its underlying infrastructure consumes fossil-heavy baseload power. As Jae-Won Chung’s work demonstrates, carbon accounting is becoming deeply embedded into the software stack itself. In the near future, measuring the energy and carbon footprint of a digital query or an industrial process will be as routine as checking its monetary cost.
3. Redefining Materials Science
The transition away from petrochemical hegemony will not happen overnight, but innovators are systematically dismantling the foundational dependencies of modern manufacturing. From solid-state refrigerants to cleaner steel reduction and eco-friendly lithium extraction, the next decade will witness a quiet revolution in materials science—one led by scientists who understand that saving the planet requires fixing the microscopic details of how we build it.
For an exhaustive look at all 35 innovators across biotech, computing, robotics, AI, and climate tech, explore the complete MIT Technology Review Innovators Under 35 2026 List.
This article was adapted from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s flagship weekly climate newsletter. To receive cutting-edge climate analysis, investigative reporting, and innovator profiles directly in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up for the newsletter here.
