The Chronicle of Higher Education spotlights CESP's Yaqui Valley Sustainability project as a case study sprung from the new field of 'sustainability science'

October 18, 2006

Over the past decade, CESP researchers, along with over 50 collaborators from other U.S. and Mexican institutions, have been studying the complex relationships among environment, agriculture, and policy decisions in the Yaqui Valley, Mexico.

Originally appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education, October 18, 2006

A New Science Breaks Down Boundaries

By RICHARD MONASTERSKY

How does one give birth to an academic discipline? The parents of a subject called "sustainability science" are wrestling with that question as they try to nurture their fledgling field through its infancy. Like any new mothers and fathers, these leaders have struggled to choose a name, to provide a home in a sometimes hostile academic world, and to scrape up enough money to support their offspring.

It's not yet clear whether sustainability science will ever thrive on its own, but advocates point to some promising signs. Next February the American Association for the Advancement of Science will make sustainability science and technology the central theme of its annual meeting. This year the National Academy of Sciences recognized the field as a separate discipline, worthy of its own section in the well-regarded journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. And practitioners of sustainability science are starting to find a home in centers and institutes that are popping up at Arizona State University, Harvard University, Stanford University, the University of Wisconsin, and elsewhere.

"Right now the forefront of action is in the universities," says William C. Clark, a professor of international science, public policy, and human development at Harvard, who is one of the leaders in the new field. "We see program after program building up on sustainability studies or science."

In many ways, it's easier to chart the growth of the subject than to define it. Mr. Clark and his colleagues struggled to come up with a description for the national academy and settled on calling it "an emerging field of research dealing with the interactions between natural and social systems, and with how those interactions affect the challenge of sustainability: meeting the needs of present and future generations while substantially reducing poverty and conserving the planet's life-support systems."

Translating that mouthful into a compact equation, one could say the subject equals environmental science plus social science in the broadest possible terms. It deals with agriculture, biodiversity, economics, energy, health, natural resources, and urbanization, among other topics. Across that sweep, it seeks to harness the power of basic research to solve particular problems, not just at the global level but also at the scale of a water-stressed city or a struggling rural community.

Unlike a human child, sustainability science has had several births and many parents, scattered around the world. European investigators have pursued this kind of research for more than a decade, and scientists have made similar efforts in India, Africa, and South America, often as part of development or agricultural initiatives.

In the United States, the field gained a name in 1999, when the National Academy of Sciences published a report called "Our Common Journey," written by a committee led by Mr. Clark.

"We had long discussions about what to call this new area of research," says Pamela Matson, dean of the School of Earth Sciences at Stanford. The naming struggle mirrors the complexity of the interdisciplinary field and the kinds of multipronged problems that researchers are focusing on. The projects that fit into this arena tend to produce papers with long lists of scientists and social scientists, spread out around the world.

Trouble on the Farm

If there were textbooks in sustainability science, they might choose as their first case study the kind of research that Ms. Matson and her colleagues have conducted in Mexico since the mid-1990s. Working with some 50 collaborators at other U.S. and Mexican institutions, the Stanford team has studied the complex relationships among environment, agriculture, and policy decisions in the Yaqui Valley, an agricultural breadbasket along the Gulf of California.

The valley was one of the original sites of the "green revolution," which rapidly increased crop yields during the middle part of the 20th century. In the 1940s, the future Nobel Peace Prize winner Norman E. Borlaug helped start a wheat-research program in the valley that evolved into the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center, which is better known by its Spanish acronym, Cimmyt.

Although the region is semiarid, the green revolution coincided with several relatively wet decades, which helped Yaqui Valley farmers greatly increase the acreage they planted. They developed irrigation systems and reservoirs and improved their production with intensive use of fertilizers. Farmers there produce some of the highest wheat yields in the world, note Ms. Matson and her colleagues.

But the past decade has brought a prolonged drought, and Yaqui Valley farmers have struggled with economic changes, like a jump in the price of the fertilizer that they rely on so heavily.

Fertilizers are what brought Ms. Matson to the valley in the first place. As a biogeochemist specializing in soils, she was interested in what happens to the fertilizer nitrogen that escapes from the fields, particularly the portion that ends up in the atmosphere as nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse gas.

In the early 1990s, she started working in the valley along with Rosamond Naylor, a Stanford agricultural economist, and Ivan Ortiz-Monasterio, an agronomist at Cimmyt. They set out to study fertilizer use from multiple perspectives: how to improve its application, how to lower the cost to farmers, and how to reduce nitrogen pollution.

Some two-thirds of the nitrogen used in the Yaqui Valley either leaks into the atmosphere or drains into canals and then into the Gulf of California. The pollution not only adds to global warming but also triggers algal blooms in the gulf and potentially causes respiratory problems for people in the region.

The researchers discovered a way that farmers could keep their yields high and reduce their costs, by applying smaller quantities of fertilizer at specific times in the crop cycle. They estimated that it would save farmers 12 percent to 18 percent in after-tax profits and cut the loss of nitrogen by 90 percent.

"It's a classic win-win situation," says Ms. Matson.

Mr. Ortiz-Monasterio described those findings to the farmers, but they didn't change their practices. "Most of them were putting a lot of fertilizer on," says Ms. Matson, "probably even more than when we started."

So the researchers widened their investigation to look at the social and economic forces that were influencing the actions of the farmers. It turned out that growers were adding as much fertilizer as they could because of the advice they had received from their local credit unions, which functioned as farm associations. The scientists decided to bring the credit unions into the research program.

Mr. Ortiz-Monasterio and his colleagues developed a technique, using a hand-held radiometer, to measure the chlorophyll in the crops. The meter could give farmers instant feedback on the health of the plants and whether more fertilizer was called for. The credit unions have purchased some of the devices for the farmers, and the researchers now are trying to determine whether the meters will help lower the use of fertilizer in the valley.

The project has the potential not only to solve a practical farming problem, it also has yielded a bumper crop in the academic world. The research team has so far published more than two dozen papers, including several in top-tier journals including PNAS, Science, and Nature. The work has provided a model that Stanford used in creating its new Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Environment and Resources, which offers master's and doctoral training in sustainability.

"The experience of so many of us working together on this project has illustrated what we can do if we bring many disciplines together," says Ms. Matson.

Looking for Leadership

The Yaqui Valley work also reveals gaps in U.S. federal scientific leadership, which has not yet developed a comprehensive way to support such broad research projects. "Those sorts of programs are invariably multidisciplinary and involve lots of people," says Harvard's Mr. Clark. At the federal level, he says, "nobody's wanted to touch them."

Ms. Matson and her colleagues cobbled together support from a "genius" award she had received from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, as well as funds from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and an alphabet stew of federal agencies that financed small parts of the work.

James P. Collins, who heads the biology directorate at the National Science Foundation, says his agency is working to finance sustainability science and has for several years provided funds for interdisciplinary projects that combine elements of environmental, social, behavioral, and economic science. One example is the Long-term Ecological Research Network, which has large, multidisciplinary teams of scientists studying 26 sites around the globe. Many are in remote settings, but two are located in Phoenix and Baltimore, where teams of scientists are trying to understand the interactions of the human and natural aspects of the cities.

Still, practitioners of the new science of sustainability say they would love to see some leadership at the federal level. "Academics are pretty clever about how to pitch their wares to the various funders," says Jonathan A. Foley, head of the Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. "We're doing the best we can, but it would be wonderful to see a real top-down push for this in the federal agencies. I don't see that right now."

Several other countries have moved far ahead of the United States in supporting the new field. In Germany the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research has for more than a decade brought together the fields of science, social science, and sustainable development. Britain established the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, in 2000, as a consortium of researchers from around the country. They focus on "solutions oriented" studies that involve society and governments. Austria, Sweden, and Switzerland have also developed programs.

Despite the movement forward, supporters of sustainability science say its future remains unclear.

"The real question is whether this is something that's truly going to emerge into a brand-new field of research and education," says Vaughan C. Turekian, chief international officer at the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

The next few years will be crucial in terms of the nascent field's growth. New journals devoted to sustainability science have appeared, and universities are developing academic departments to train the first generation of specialists in this remarkably unspecialized field. As those students graduate, look for jobs, and start their research careers, they will soon find out if their new discipline is truly sustainable.