Integration of research disciplines necessary to address sustainability challenges according to new article in Nature Sustainability
The ASE takes pride in being a school that despite its small size, hosts a range of scientific disciplines, which connect through various interdisciplinary research collaborations. In a recent article in Nature Sustainability, ASE’s Asst Prof Janice Lee and co-authors conclude that an interdisciplinary approach is indeed the best way forward for finding sustainable solutions that can both be implemented and work in the long-term.
Historically, scientific problems have generally been relatively specific and/or localized. The division of research into different disciplines like branches on a tree has worked well for solving such problems. However, the complex and interconnected nature of current planetary challenges, including water scarcity, climate change, pollution and biodiversity loss, requires a different type of structure in research, where the solutions are found in cross-disciplinary connections in a web of different fields of expertise. Water, for example, “…drives and maintains ecosystem functions, plays a critical role in socio-economic development and is essential to human survival”. The management of water resources often involve conflicting views and values of stakeholders, and “span multiple physical, political and jurisdictional boundaries”. For successful water management the interconnections between human and natural systems need to be considered. The authors illustrate their point by describing how shifting the approach to two urgent environmental problems to one that was more interdisciplinary played a major part in finding solutions enabling restoration of China’s second largest inland river basin, the Heihe River Basin and the Arkavathy river in southern India.
The authors suggest that the current structuring of academia into distinct disciplines stands in the way of the interactions required to formulate holistic questions and solutions and connect the scientific community with policy makers and society. One way of achieving this is to structure research programmes around topics instead of disciplines. Rather than waiting for the urgency of finding sustainability solutions to drive us into unconventional collaborations, as happened in the examples, perhaps this new web approach to sustainability should be our starting point.
Read the article “On knowledge generation and use for sustainability” here