Reports & Papers

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is upending our lives and the global economy in ways unimaginable until recently. While the overall impacts are still difficult to quantify, ramifications are sure to be felt for decades to come. Providing secure, reliable, and affordable resources for all without causing devastating environmental consequences is perhaps the greatest challenge of the 21st century. But the pandemic has significantly altered dynamics and changed priorities. How is this impacting the quest for sustainability?

In this paper we analyze these challenges by focusing on the plastic industry. There is no doubt that plastic has molded society in many ways that make our lives easier and safer, but it has also created a global environmental and sustainability crisis. In order to curb our addiction to plastic, the world had been waging a war against virgin plastic, but the pandemic has turned an enemy into a much-needed ally. How can we leverage the advantages of plastic without contributing to the world’s environmental crisis? This dilemma poses a significant challenge, but also opens an opportunity to address sustainability at a systemic level through circularity and the transition to low-carbon alternatives to petroleum-based plastics.

This paper of the Global Environmental Assessment Project (GEA) examines fisheries assessment failures in New England and Newfoundland. While scientific assessments proved ineffective determinants of sustainable policies in both cases, a comparative analysis reveals important differences. In New England, ominous assessments were ignored by decisionmakers while in Newfoundland more optimistic assessments led decisionmakers astray. This contrast in outcomes illustrates the countervailing perils associated with the degree to which scientific assessment processes are embedded within the organizations that use assessments to inform their decisions. Embedded assessments are often influential within their host organization, but are apt to raise suspicions outside of them. Disembedded assessments garner less suspicion, but run the risk of being marginalized when their conclusions conflict with the objectives of decisionmaking organizations. Given the prevailing conditions within their respective issue domains, this analysis suggests that scientific assessments were insufficiently embedded in New England's regulatory structure while exceedingly embedded in Newfoundland's.

The 2001 Summer Study of the Research and Assessment Systems for Sustainability Program was a working session to advance the intellectual agenda of science and technology for sustainability. Discussion focused primarily on issues of vulnerability and resilience, as they provide an exceptionally rich "case study" for exploring the conceptual and design challenges facing efforts to build place-based, integrative systems of research, assessment and decision support that can more effectively address problems arising through the interactions of society and environment. The particular objective of the Summer Study was to make significant progress in addressing the following four related groups of questions: what is the Research and Assessment Systems for Sustainability Program's model of vulnerability/resilience for coupled human-environment systems; how can this model be refined, tested, and applied; how can integrated systems of research, assessment and decision support be designed to enable such work; and what methodological and modeling innovations are needed to facilitate the analysis of such systems and to advance understanding of the nonlinear, multi-scale, rapidly evolving relationships between nature and society that are the focus of sustainability science? This paper reports on the discussion at the Summer Study on these four core sets of questions.

Seasonal climate forecasts offer the possibility of helping people to change their decisions in response to scientific information. With an improving ability to model and predict the El Niño / Southern Oscillation, climatologists are able to issues seasonal forecasts that in some places are quite reliable. One such place, is Zimbabwe, lying in the semi-arid tropics of southern Africa, and with an economy highly dependent on rain-fed agriculture. Starting in 1997, there have been efforts to apply seasonal forecasts to decision making in Zimbabwe. The success of these efforts has been mixed. This study examines these efforts, and attempts to explain why they may have been more or less successful. Drawing off literature in environmental assessment, risk communication, and behavioral economics, this study offers guidance for ways to improve the forecast applications process, particularly with respect to the communication of probabilistic information. Additionally, this study seeks to test whether the recommended course of action-a highly participatory assessment process examining uncertainties in great detail-could succeed, through the undertaking of a behavioral economic experiment in rural villages throughout the country. The experimental results suggest the approach could work.