New approach to science and science funding needed, say experts

Germany has played a pioneering role in promoting renewable energy and campaigning for green policies internationally. But scientists at a conference in Lower Saxony earlier this year called for a much wider approach given the obvious lack of progress regarding sustainability since the 1992 Rio conference.

At a three-day Sustainability Summit in Lüneburg, near Hamburg, environment and sustainability experts from more than 50 countries expressed doubts about whether national governments could agree on a global sustainability policy.

The meeting, held at Lüneburg’s Leuphana University, called for the establishment of a World Environment Organisation and a Council for Global Sustainability.

Further demands raised by participants included an international understanding on the limits of growth and a definition of prosperity. Science ought to play a greater role in developing solutions to global problems. And countries should step up their education effort regarding sustainability.

Referring to a 45% increase in greenhouse gas emissions and growing social imbalance worldwide over the past 20 years, the scientists maintained that efforts to achieve more sustainability had failed.

While the conference demonstrated that scientific insights in areas ranging from species extinction to economic and social crises were available, this had not contributed to reducing levels of environmental destruction.

According to Leuphana’s Professor Harald Heinrichs, who headed the summit, the chief problem was the lack of readiness or political will to shape and push through policies that might be contrary to the interests of individual actors in the business world, and to develop a framework restraining non-sustainable concepts in favour of more sustainable practice both in business and regarding lifestyles.

“That it is still possible to shape developments with politics despite pressure through economic globalisation was demonstrated by the change in Germany’s energy policy last year,” said Heinrichs.

“Here, in the face of opposition from the nuclear industry, it was decided to phase out nuclear power.” Now it was up to politicians to prevent a possible stalling of energy policy reforms.

University research tackled sustainability

Several German higher education institutions competing in the third round of the Excellence Initiative are addressing sustainability.

This joint federal and state government programme was started in 2005 to make funds available for top-flight research and to enhance Germany’s higher education system and raise its competitiveness as a centre of science and research.

Areas described in proposals for new schemes include risk research at Technische Universität München, sustainable land use at Humboldt University in Berlin and, at the University of Mainz, examining the ‘anthropocene’, defined as a new era that the Earth has entered, in which humans influence natural cycles of elements and geological processes.

However, Heinrichs is sceptical of the Excellence Initiative regarding the issue of sustainability.

“Despite, and perhaps even because of, the Excellence Initiative, higher education and research continues to be insufficiently involved,” he said. “It is particularly in the Excellence Initiative that the traditional disciplinary or interdisciplinary criteria are applied.”

Heinrichs called for a transdisciplinary approach involving not only an interdisciplinary concept with two or more academic disciplines, but also integrating actors and perspectives from practice and including different forms of gaining insights in projects aimed at finding solutions.

“Moving towards a transdisciplinary, involved and socially relevant sustainability science requires a new approach to science itself, and to science funding. So far, the Excellence Initiative has had a relatively traditional approach,” Heinrichs maintained.

“There is hardly any indication of priorities, including its applying new assessment criteria, for a transdisciplinary sustainability science.”