Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Challenge: to better understand the interaction between climate variability and
greenhouse warming on extreme events, allowing for improved efficiency of
production systems and security of natural ecosystems, while addressing the
non-sustainability of current practices and security of cultural and social
systems.
Challenges for sustainability science and policy
When each of us makes decisions individually, or through our companies or
governments, our choices are generally made in such a way as to balance
competing objectives. By and large they might be self-centred decisions, but
they tend to recognise that what we do impacts on others or the environ-
ment and reflects on both the immediacy of today's outcomes as well as a
potential legacy for tomorrow. So today's growing interest in the concept of
balancing the triple bottom line is more about doing what we have always
done, but doing it overtly and with a degree of rigour that may, in the past,
have been restricted to short-term financial decisions or investments. In
order to simultaneously maximise wealth, social, environmental and inter-
generational equity, we are confronted with the need for new tools that allow
for the complexity generated by such demands. We need to make integrated
assessments of all of the factors, and, given that we can never have perfect
knowledge about the current situation let alone the future, we need these
assessments to be in the form of risk assessments related to policy or deci-
sion options.
'Sustainability science' is about underpinning these needs. It is about a
higher level of integration of natural and social science and indeed the
humanities, all under the conditions of rigour and process that characterises
science, but directed at delivering options for environmental, social and eco-
nomic value that overtly balance the competing objectives. We really do not
know how best to do this. Improved integrated representations of the whole
system need to be underpinned with quality disciplinary understanding and
that remains incomplete - continued investment is needed at this level. Con-
tinued investment is also required at the even more fundamental level of
observations work.
Challenge: to maintain our ability to observe and understand the systems of the
natural and social world, while building higher level, integrative representations
of the world for describing policy options.
