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Global warming inspires cross-discipline research

"We want all the departments to contribute without thinking they own the initiative themselves."

Jonathan Fink, head of Arizona University's Global Institute of Sustainability

It is a basic tenet of university research: Economists do joint studies, chemists join forces in the laboratory, political scientists share ideas about other cultures -- but rarely do the researchers cross disciplinary lines.

The political landscape of academia, combined with the fight for grant money, has always fostered competition far more than collaboration. But the push to stop global warming may just change all that.

Take what's happening at the Rochester Institute of Technology. In September the school established the Golisano Institute for Sustainability, aimed at getting students and professors from different disciplines to collaborate in studying the environmental ramifications of production and consumption.

"The academic tradition is to let one discipline dominate new programs," said Nabil Nasr, the institute's director. "But the problem of sustainability cuts across economics, social elements, engineering, everything. It simply cannot be solved by one discipline, or even by coupling two disciplines."

Neil Hawkins, Dow Chemical's vice president for sustainability, sees it that way, too. Thus, Dow is giving US$10 million, spread over five years, to the University of California, Berkeley, to set up a sustainability center.

"Berkeley has one of the strongest chemical engineering schools in the world, but it will be the MBA's who understand areas like microfinance solutions to drinking water problems," Hawkins said.

That realization is spreading throughout academia. So more universities are setting up stand-alone centers that offer neutral ground on which engineering students can work on alternative fuels, while business students calculate the economics of those fuels and political science majors figure how to make the fuels palatable to governments in both developing nations and the US.

"We give professors a chance to step beyond their usual areas of expertise, and we give students exposure to the worlds of science and business," said Daniel Esty, director of the year-old Yale Center for Business and the Environment, a collaboration between the schools of Management and Forestry and Environmental Studies.

Similar setups are getting easier to find. Last year, the University of Tennessee consolidated all of its environmental research programs under a new Institute for a Secure and Sustainable Environment. Arizona State University did the same in 2004, when it inaugurated its Global Institute of Sustainability.

The Arizona institute reports directly to the university president and is run by Jonathan Fink, who is also the university's sustainability officer.

"We want all the departments to contribute without thinking they own the initiative themselves," Fink said.

Already, experts in biogeochemistry are working with social scientists to study the impact of rapid urbanization on plants and animals.

It is impossible to quantify the growth of stand-alone centers. There is no naming convention -- some are sustainability centers, some are environmental institutes and some are global warming initiatives. And many do not stand alone at all, but are neatly tucked inside an existing school.

For example, in 2003 the University of Pittsburgh School of Engineering dedicated the Mascaro Sustainability Initiative, which studies green construction and sustainable water use.

Nor do the environmentally themed names necessarily convey an envirocentric agenda. Many "sustainability" centers address global cultures, business ethics and corporate social responsibility along with environmental issues.

The Aspen Institute's Center for Business Education compiled a list of more than 600 academic centers that, at first blush, sound like they would be stand-alone environmental facilities. Rich Leimsider, its director, figures only a handful are.

"We are seeing more centers framed as sustainability, but they may not be qualitatively different from the ethics, innovation or globalization centers of 15 years ago," he said.

But Leimsider said he does see more stand-alone centers that are devoted primarily to analyzing environmental problems, influencing environmental policy and preparing students to think collaboratively when they try to solve those problems outside the academic world.
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