Driving Change: Scholarship Students are Shaping the Future of Climate Action

1. Smarter Cities & Climate-Resilient Urban Environments

Managing risk and energy consumption in built environments is a core pillar of modern climate adaptation. Three student projects targeted how our cities are designed and how they perform.

• Occupant Behavior & Building Energy Use

  • By Bhanu Mohindra 

  • The Project: Occupant behavior can impact annual energy consumption by up to 150% in commercial buildings. Bhanu utilized data from the KTH Live-in Lab and combined MATLAB and IDA ICE co-simulations to model realistic, stochastic human behavior profiles alongside 21-year historical weather data to significantly reduce the performance gap in building energy simulations.

• Stitching Sundbyberg: Urban Climate Design

  • By Kaushiki Brahma

  • The Project: Focusing on Sundbyberg centrum, one of Sweden’s densest multimodal interchange nodes, Kaushiki proposed strategies to heal the "urban wound" created by railway corridors. The design integrates active mobility, expands green infrastructure to connect the Järvakilen green wedge, and implements floodable plazas and cooling corridors to combat the urban heat island effect.

• Modelling Long-Term Urban Pluvial Flood Risk

  • By Irja Höglund & Andrea Robling

  • The Project: Utilizing a coupled hydrodynamic and agent-based model (ABM), Irja and Andrea investigated how long-term pluvial flood risk interacts with municipal planning, household adaptation behavior, and Blue-Green Infrastructure (BGI).

2. Artificial Intelligence for Climate Mitigation & Carbon Monitoring

Advanced technology and machine learning models are proving crucial in predicting extreme events and mapping climate factors rapidly.

• AI-Generated Flood Maps for Swedish Municipalities

  • By Filip Forsberg 

  • The Project: Collaborating with FYREN AB, Filip developed a geospatial AI method using a convolutional neural network framework (U-net architecture) to generate rapid, cost-effective flood maps (Skyfallskartering). The model achieves rapid zero-shot transfer capabilities, predicting flood extents across unseen municipalities in minutes instead of the hours required for traditional heavy hydrodynamic simulations.

• Diffusion Planners for Underwater Carbon Dioxide Monitoring

  • By Yuki Okamoto

  • The Project: To mitigate the risks associated with offshore Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), Yuki applied robotic Diffusion Models to Informative Path Planning (IPP) for Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs). The resulting diffusion planner outperformed traditional baseline models in early-stage simulation efficiency for reconstructing underwater carbon leakage fields.

3. Circular Bioeconomies & Industrial Symbiosis

Transitioning from linear "take-make-waste" systems to circular models is essential for decoupling industrial growth from fossil fuels.

• Industrial Symbiosis: Comparing Sweden and Italy

  • By Albert Edvardsson & Amanda Aho Vanhatapio

  • The Project: Supported by the KTH Climate Action Centre, this study comparatively explored how governance networks affect the deployment of industrial symbiosis (where industries exchange by-products like excess heat, materials, and water). Their results contrasted Sweden's infrastructure-and-energy-heavy networks (e.g., Händelő, Sotenäs, Umeå) with Italy’s sector-specialized, project-based clusters (e.g., Brescia, Prato, Emilia-Romagna).

• Circular Bioeconomy in Kenya’s Mango Value Chain

  • By Sara Hailu & Risha Chowdhury

  • The Project: Done in collaboration with the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) Africa Centre, Sara and Risha investigated the 54% post-harvest loss along the Kenyan mango supply chain. By studying smallholder cooperatives in Machakos and Makueni counties, they highlighted bottom-up "bricolage" innovations (like low-cost DIY mango-drying greenhouses) that can successfully scale up value-added circular products.

4. Climate Finance Mechanisms

• Comparative Assessment of BECCS Carbon Crediting Methodologies

  • By Angela Ofosua Twum

  • The Project: Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS) is a critical permanent Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) technology. Angela evaluated how major carbon certification standards differ in their baseline, additionality, and double-claiming frameworks when combining state aid with voluntary carbon markets (VCM). Her analysis mapped key financial realities to protect the environmental integrity of future climate credits.