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Science and Sustainability: The State of the Planet
From: Columbia University
| By:
Jeffrey SachsLewis GilbertMariellen Gallagher |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
Science has a major role to play in solving the challenge of how poor countries can achieve higher levels of well-being while protecting the environment. Science and Sustainability was the theme of the 2002 State of the Planet Conference hosted by Columbia University's Earth Institute on May 13-14. The conference was a prelude to the 2002 United Nations' sponsored World Summit on Sustainable Development held in Johannesburg, South Africa.
In this feature, the Earth Institute's Director of External Affairs, Mariellen Gallagher, summarizes the key points and outcomes of the conference. In an accompanying May 2002 video interview, Jeffrey Sachs, the Director of Columbia University's Earth Institute, explains the theme of Science and sustainability. He describes how science is critical to public health issues such as malaria, which is resurging in developing countries. He also cites the vital link between science and the economic management of some of the world's poorest countries ravaged by extreme weather like El Niqo.
As the world looks toward science and technology to confront poverty, scientists must continue to face the challenge of climate change and the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Its global warming affect is like putting an extra blanket on the planet explains Lewis Gilbert, executive Director for Integration and Implementation at the Columbia Earth Institute. In a March 2002 interview, Gilbert conveys the necessity for the planet as a whole to reduce its emissions of carbon dioxide, and describes the direct correlation between the size of the world's economy and its emissions of carbon dioxide. |
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| Harvesting wheat in India. | |
 cientists speaking at Columbia expressed optimism that the technical means now exist to end worldwide starvation in the next generation. A hopeful view prevailed among the 26 speakers addressing an audience of more than 400 gathered at Columbia's second State of the Planet Conference to discuss the role of science in achieving sustainability. |
Results of the conference, including archived web broadcasts of all presentations, may be viewed at the Columbia Earth Institute website (see relevant links below). |
"Our base of knowledge across all disciplines has expanded dramatically in the 10 years since the Rio Summit," noted John Mutter, associate vice provost for the Earth Institute at Columbia, which hosted the two-day event. "We know enough about the science of Earth to take action and work at solving the miserable conditions under which a large share of the planet's six billion people live." |
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Jeffrey Sachs stresses that in order to provide scientific and monetary aid to developing countries, and at the same time to protect the environment, it is critical to understand their unique biodiversity and ecologies. |
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A missing link is money to address the problems. Incoming Earth Institute Director Jeffrey Sachs said that if industrialized countries spend just one cent out of every 10 dollars earned, they could create an annual fund of roughly $25 billion with which to control the spread of HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis, and end death during childbirth as well as from diarrheal diseases. This would save around 25,000 lives daily, or eight million annually. "This is a bargain on the global scale," said Sachs. "I can't believe we are not yet buying this bargain, but I believe that we will." |
Speakers at the conference noted that while institutions will need strengthening, scientists have a responsibility to use their knowledge to improve the livelihood of the two billion people living on less than one dollar a day. "Making the transition to sustainability," said keynote speaker Jane Lubchenco, "is the challenge of our time, as we seek to build a world that meets the needs of its peoples while it restores Earth's life support systems." |
Added Michael Crow, executive vice provost, "It is the moral responsibility of the Academy to conceptualize and implement the means to produce a sustainable planet." Along with Crow, many speakers voiced a need to build expertise locally. "We need to develop the right institutions within countries to carry out research and decision-making needed at those levels," said Cristian Samper, acting director of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. |
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Lewis Gilbert argues that in order to sustain economic growth and reduce carbon dioxide emissions, the US needs to more than double its reduction goal set by the Bush administration. |
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Rather than prescribe global solutions, conference participants called for local and regional approaches to complement global approaches. For example, keynote speaker from Bangladesh, Saleemul Huq, director for the Climate Change Program at the International Institute for Environment and Development in London, said, "Too often, we receive funding and take the advice that comes with it, rather than employ what we know about our particular situations. We need to combine global and local knowledge, basic scientific research and traditional knowledge." |
The conference was intended to send a message to the World Summit on Sustainable Development this August in Johannesburg, and the World Food Summit that will precede it in June in Rome. Conference organizers hope that policy makers at both summits will look to science for the answers to some of the world's most serious problems. |
State of the Planet conference speakers cited many specific examples of the ways that science can and does help solve difficult problems facing the world's poor: |
- Improving soil fertility in Africa so that tens of thousands of small farmers are no longer hungry;
- Training village women in coastal India to download climate information from satellites and transmit ocean wave size predictions to area fishermen;
- Empowering countries to choose cleaner, modern technologies so that development can proceed with less environmental cost;
- Raising fish catches by setting aside marine reserves, and
- Reducing forest loss by increasing the yield of food production.
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While science can provide the technical means, institutional and political will are lacking, speakers at the conference said. Uma Lele, an agronomist at the World Bank, observed that, "We have to address the consequences of plenty for the poor of the world. Agriculture needs to become central to development again. The funding is stagnating even as the agenda becomes much more diverse." |
In spite of these difficulties, it is significant that the world's leading scientific authorities on sustainability science believe the scientific knowledge exists to solve world poverty. As stated by Harvard scientist Calestous Juma: "We have agreed on the basic problems and we are now in an operational phase." |
Columbia's Earth Institute hosted the two-day conference in collaboration with the London School of Economics and Political Science, Harvard University and UNESCO. |
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