The Need for CHANGE

Climate change… population growth… increasing resource consumption… degraded air, land, and water resources… these environmental problems are increasingly well documented and understood. Solutions to these problems that are scientifically sound, just, and achievable, however, have been elusive.

Successful responses to these global environmental issues require attention to the interconnections among social and ecological systems across scales from the village to the globe. Social and ecological systems are tightly interwoven and vulnerable to a range of forces from globalization to climate change and the loss of biological diversity. There is a consequent need for new approaches that can identify and analyze the vulnerabilities of coupled human- non-human natural systems and contribute to strengthening their resilience and sustainability. Accomplishing this will require new forms of knowledge that integrate natural science, social science and humanistic approaches. Innovative solutions to global environmental problems must attend to dynamics at multiple scales—both spatial and temporal—and engage diverse ways of understanding and intervening.

Students of IGERT faculty member Dr. Jonathan Patz have conducted on-site research studying the effects of deforestation on malaria in the Amazon territories.

Training future leaders and researchers to address these problems requires an interdisciplinary approach. Too often, however, interdisciplinarity has come to mean collaboration only across sectors of the natural sciences. When the social sciences are included, there is often a strong bias towards economics and other fields that employ quantitative research methodologies, foregoing qualitative research methods that are more difficult to integrate into quantitative modeling approaches but which nonetheless are essential to better understanding human identities, relationships, and institutions as they relate to the natural environment. To discover and promote effective solutions to problems of environmental vulnerability and sustainability we need to train scholars who can both understand and wisely apply the insights of the full range of environmental disciplines.

The Response

Faculty from the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at UW-Madison decided to attack these environmental problems in a new way. We designed a graduate education and training program that recognizes and responds to the cross-disciplinary complexities of environmental vulnerability and sustainability. As a result of this effort, the Nelson Institute was awarded an IGERT grant from the National Science Foundation that funds 3-4 new PhD students per year, and creates a new graduate Certificate on Humans and the Global Environment (CHANGE). (View a copy of the abstract for our IGERT proposal.) This program transcends strict disciplinary divides and makes meaningful integration of the natural and human sciences a reality.

Research by UW Professor Lisa Naughton reveals the impact of urban charcoal demand on the biodiverse forests of Uganda.

charcoal vendors in Kampala

Red Colobus monkey (Piliocolobus tephrosceles)