Environmental Challenges Call for Interdisciplinary Action

The report highlights the complexity of today’s environmental challenges, necessitating input from the natural sciences, social sciences, engineering, and management. It emphasises how intermeshing different disciplines becomes vital to address such problems but can also pose some difficulties. Experts from various fields may use varying terminology and perceive the issues from different perspectives. This aspect can result in confusion and poor coordination, detrimental to effective collaboration.

Clarifying Alternative Environmental Concepts

Environmental Sciences

The authors indicate that environmental sciences – a set of scientific disciplines – focuses on utilising natural and social sciences to understand and solve environmental problems. Environmental sciences incorporate the knowledge sector of the environment, helping in gaining insights for the sustainable use of natural resources and improved environmental protection.

Sustainable Development

Sustainable Development focuses on balancing today’s economic, social, and environmental needs, without jeopardising natural resources’ availability for future generations. The report points out that the concept of sustainable development asks, “what should we sustain?” and “how feasible is sustainability?” Feasibility depends on the substitutability of natural and human-made capital in production.

Circular Economy

The concept of a “Circular economy” has been gaining prominence in environmental discussions. This concept focuses on a system that reduces waste and promotes a ‘closed loop economy’, whereby resources are kept in use for as long as possible, extracted, and regenerated at the end of their life. Such an economy aims to be restorative and regenerative by design, with the objective of preserving natural resources and reducing environmental impacts.

Challenges and Opportunities for Transdisciplinary Research

The report points out some opportunities and challenges of each concept; however, it argues that none of the terms are inherently better than the others. The authors emphasise the need to understand the nature, meaning, and inter-relationship of these alternative concepts to help trans-disciplinary researchers understand the challenges and opportunities of each.

The report highlights that experts from different fields come together to collaborate, and the distance in approach and thinking increases as the degree to which they differ from one another increases. The farther apart the disciplines, the greater the challenges in understanding shared goals and terminologies.

One of the challenges is bridging the gap between ecological, economic and social objectives. The authors further elaborate on how public authorities’ intervention becomes necessary based on societies’ needs and that the inclusion of ecological and social objectives might affect economic objectives to achieve sustainability. The report argues that while interventions may be useful in some plants, inclusivity of these factors becomes essential; however, it creates challenges.

Conclusion

The report concludes that integrating knowledge from the natural sciences, social sciences, engineering, and management is key to addressing today’s environmental challenges. However, the authors highlight the need for appropriate understanding, knowledge sharing and bridge building between disciplines to ensure effective transdisciplinary research. This comes with challenges such as variations in language, perception, and collaboration methods. As such, these challenges need to be addressed to ensure an effective integrated assessment of the situation and means to address it.