Report: Earth’s Systems Can Be Sustained

Report: Earth’s Systems Can Be Sustained

BY LIA UNRAU
Rice News staff

A successful transition toward sustainability—meeting the needs of a larger population while nurturing and restoring Earth’s life support systems—is possible over the next two generations, according to a recent report by the National Research Council’s Board on Sustainable Development.

The report states that even “without miraculous technologies or drastic transformations of human societies” the transition can be achieved—through significant advances in basic knowledge, the social capacity and technological capabilities to use it and if the political will exists to turn the scientific knowledge gained into action.

The report, titled “Our Common Journey: A Transition Toward Sus-tainability,” argues that societies should approach sustainable development not as a distinct end point, but as an ongoing, adaptive learning process.

“We spent two and a half years and made a really decent start on a very complex and portentous issue for the future,” said Rice University President Malcolm Gillis, who serves on the National Research Council’s Board on Sustainable Development. He is one of three social scientists and the only microeconomist on the board.

Among his contributions was the report’s making note of the natural causes of global climate change in addition to human-made causes.

In addition to climate change, among the trends that bear watching are expanding population and habitation, growing disparities in wealth, wasteful consumption, shifts in the distribution of power, increasing connectedness, buildup of greenhouse gases, increasing air pollution, water shortages, declining fisheries and deforestation.

The report outlines several priorities for action in five key areas to achieve a successful transition to sustainability. The priorities for action include achieving a 10 percent reduction in the population of 9 billion, the figure now projected for 2050; building urban systems that meet human needs and preserve the environment; reversing declining trends in agricultural production in Africa while sustaining historic trends elsewhere; accelerating improvements in the use and efficiency of energy and materials; and restoring degraded ecosystems and conserving biodiversity.
The report recognizes that understanding the interactions among human activities and their multiple environmental consequences will require a new research agenda for sustainability science.

The report’s proposed research agenda includes developing a research framework that integrates global and local perspectives to shape a “place-based” understanding of the interactions between environment and society, initiating focused research programs on a small set of understudied questions that are central to fully understanding interactions between society and the environment and promoting better use of existing tools and processes for linking knowledge to action in pursuit of a transition to sustainability.

The National Research Council is the principal operating arm of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering. It is a private, nonprofit organization that provides advice on science and technology under a congressional charter.