The MIT Sustainability Summit is an annual event that has grown to include more than 350 attendees ranging from professionals, academics, and students. The past Summits have featured discussions with thought leaders and expert practitioners like Jeremy Grantham (GMO), Jim Hanna (Starbucks), Mindy Lubber (Ceres), Nancy Gillis (GSA), Jeffrey Hollender (Seventh Generation), Scot Horst (USGBC), James Balog (Chasing Ice), Rick Ridgeway (VP Patagonia) and many more.

As one of the world’s preeminent research universities, MIT and its five schools–science, engineering, architecture and planning, humanities and social science, and management–are in a unique position to bring business and societal leaders together with academic researchers and students to address challenges in sustainability.

The 7th Annual Sustainability Summit will focus on understanding—and offering solutions to—the complex problems facing local and global agriculture systems. This year’s Summit will tackle food and farming challenges through the lens of the “Circular Economy,” a systems-thinking approach that demonstrates that a flourishing, sustainable world is built on intentionally cycling resources between production and consumption: from farm to table and back again.