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Condensed Executive Summary
Grand Challenges in Environmental Sciences
by
Committee on Grand Challenges in Environmental Sciences
Oversight Commission for the Committee on Grand Challenges in Environmental Sciences
National Research Council
This report was written in response to a request from the National Science Foundation (NSF) that the National Research Council (NRC), drawing on expertise from across the environmental sciences, offer a judgment regarding the most important environmental research challenges of the next generation--the areas most likely to yield results of major scientific and practical importance if pursued vigorously now.
After soliciting input as broadly as possible and considering more than 200 nominations from the scientific community, the committee selected the eight grand challenges listed below. The committee’s selection criteria included probability of significant scientific and practical payoff, large scope, relevance to important environmental issues, feasibility, timeliness, and requirement for multidisciplinary collaboration.
The committee also selected four areas, derived from the grand challenges, to recommend for immediate research investment by NSF and others, also listed below.
The committee did not rank-order either the grand challenges, as all were considered to be broadly and deeply important. Neither did they rank-order the immediate research investments for the same reason. Therefore, both are presented in alphabetical order.
The Grand Challenges
1. Biogeochemical Cycles. To further our understanding of the Earth's major biogeochemical cycles, evaluate how they are being perturbed by human activities, and determine how they might better by stabilized.
2. Biological Diversity and Ecosystem Functioning. To improve understanding of the factors affecting biological diversity and ecosystem structure and functioning, including the role of human activity.
3. Climate Variability. To increase our ability to predict climate variations, from extreme events to decadal time scales; to understand how this variability may change in the future; and to assess realistically the resulting impacts.
4. Hydrologic Forecasting. To develop an improved understanding of and ability to predict changes in freshwater resources and the environment caused by floods, droughts, sedimentation, and contamination.
5. Infectious Disease and the Environment. To understand ecological and evolutionary aspects of infectious diseases; develop an understanding of the interactions among pathogens, hosts/receptors, and the environment; and thus make it possible to prevent changes in the infectivity and virulence of organisms that threaten plant, animal, and human health at the population level.
6. Institutions and Resource Use. To understand how human use of natural resources is shaped by institutions such as markets, governments, international treaties, and formal and informal sets of rules that are established to govern resource extraction, waste disposal, and other environmentally important activities.
7. Land-Use Dynamics. To develop a systematic understanding of changes in land uses and land covers that are critical to ecosystem functioning and services and human welfare.
8. Reinventing the Use of Materials. To develop a quantitative understanding of the global budgets and cycles of materials widely used by humanity and of how the life cycles of these materials (their history from the raw-material stage through recycling or disposal) may be modified.
Recommended Immediate Research Investments
The committee recommends that immediate investments be made in the following four priority research areas related to the grand challenges.
1. Biological Diversity and Ecosystem Functioning. To develop a comprehensive understanding of the relationship between ecosystem structure and functioning and biological diversity.
2. Hydrologic Forecasting. To establish the capacity for detailed, comprehensive hydrologic forecasting, including the ecological consequences of changing water regimes, in each of the primary U.S. climatological and hydrologic regions.
3. Infectious Disease and the Environment. To develop a comprehensive ecological and evolutionary understanding of infectious diseases affecting human, plant, and animal health.
4. Land-Use Dynamics. To develop a spatially explicit understanding of changes in land uses and land covers and their consequences.
Implementation Issues
The identification of grand challenges in environmental sciences and priorities for immediate research investment is only a prelude. The key then becomes implementation. In the committee's view, several critical implementation issues cut across all of the research areas identified. These issues include such matters as whether to proceed by establishing regional research centers, how best to support interdisciplinary research, and how to make environmental science useful to decision makers and managers and the public.
Recommendation: NSF, together with other agencies as appropriate, should conduct workshops that include research scientists in academia, the relevant agencies, and the private sector, as well as potential users of the research results, to discuss and plan research agendas and address implementation issues.
Click here to see entire report.
Posted November 6, 2000.
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