Interview
- What made you decide to get involved with the RESCUE foresight initiative?
The RESCUE initiative addresses themes of highest relevance for global change research. It is a great opportunity to promote innovative ideas in the scientific and policy communities and funding agencies. Progress is needed in methodologies, data and in cooperation across disciplines and the science policy interface, themes addressed by RESCUE.
- In your field, what are the most urgent issues at stake for our unstable Earth?
My own field of research is sustainable water resources management and governance. The sustainable management of water resources in times of global change is one of the most pressing challenges of the 21st century. Globally freshwater resources are not (yet) scarce. However, their unequal distribution at different scales (among world regions, countries and even different social groups within a river basin) can provide multiple sources of tension. Climate change and the concomitant increase of extreme weather events have exposed vulnerability and lack of resilience of current water resource management regimes. This triggered as well an increased awareness for uncertainties, the complexity of the systems to be managed and the need to put more emphasis on the human dimension. Many water related problems are primarily caused by governance failure. Developing new paradigms and practices has gained increasing importance with the attempt to implement integrated management approaches. Another important aspect is the increasing awareness that water is a global issue. Water problems have traditionally been considered to be local or regional problems whereas one needs to adopt a multi-level approach. Analysing, developing and implementing multi-level water governance regimes that are able to deal with global change challenges are important tasks for the scientific and policy communities.
- What are your ambitions for how RESCUE could help address these challenges – how could it help in the short and long term?
RESCUE can help raising the profile of interdisciplinary research and systemic approaches which are always praised as being important but which still enjoy little recognition in the main-stream scientific community. We need to attract the best scientists to deal with the challenges of our unstable Earth. This applies in particular to the social sciences that are yet underrepresented in the global change research community. To be successful RESCUE needs to engage with the target groups to be addressed from the beginning.
- As Professor for the ‘Management of Resource flows’ in an Institute of Environmental Systems Research, is there something from within your field you wish to emphasize while chairing the Working Group on requirements for research methodologies and data?
RESCUE can support the development of global data bases in particular on socio-ecological systems and resource management regimes and support a better collaboration between the social and natural sciences by promoting conceptual and methodological innovation. Regarding methodologies frameworks that allow integrating “hard” and “soft” approaches in systems science and knowledge generation are urgently needed. Conceptual and methodological frameworks that support integration across different social science disciplines are largely lacking. Improving our understanding on the requirements for sustainable resource governance and management cannot build on fragmented disciplinary perspectives.
- What do you think is the main challenge for your Working Group?
Given the breadth of topics and application areas to be addressed it will not be easy to agree on key priorities and come to some tangible and reasonably focused conclusions and recommendations.
