Transcript Criteria for Future Earth Research

Future Earth workshop – Kuala Lumpur
Breakout session 1: Developing a regional
vision for Future Earth
Key messages
Group 3
Participants
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Harini Nagendra (Chair)
Anantha Duraiappah
Toshio Yamagata
AkioTakemoto
Aysun Uyar
Hong Kum Lee
Nancy D. Lewis
Soroush Modabberi
Christine Chan
Kanayathu Koshy
Meine Van Noordwijk
Mitsuo Uematsu
1. What is your vision for global change and sustainability
research for the region and how do you see Future Earth
contributing to it?
Human development that is equitable and inclusive; self-determined
governance; environmentally and ecologically sustainable
• Rethinking the FE vision – relationship between science and society
• There are a lot of existing networks in Asia – universities, funding
agency networks, policy networks (ASEAN, APN, START, CSIR labs
etc) - FE should not aim to replace, but to build on these
• Lack a regional funding agency like the EU
• What is the scale of Future Earth? Unless we know some answers to
this (which depend on funding, but also on level of organization,
institutional mechanisms, human resources etc), difficult to answer
these questions
1. What is your vision for global change and sustainability
research for the region and how do you see Future Earth
contributing to it?
Research challenges
• Include coastal sustainability, climate change, urbanization, fresh
water scarcity – huge variability between issues for Iran and
Afghanistan, for eg, and Bangladesh, and Japan
• Need to involve engineering community for focused technological
”green” solutions
• Danger of focus only on short term quick answers – governance
issues and equity issues take time and effort to solve;
Other challenges –
• Lack of capacity in many countries
• Training for next generation
• Brain drain – especially following training
• Involve private sector, educational, policy, local communities etc
2. What would success look like for Future Earth in the
region? What impacts could Future Earth make in the region?
• Focus on meso-scale GEC issues such as pollution; monsoons;
riverbasins etc – that require explicitly regional focus
• Careful selection of small scale studies with best practices, to then
provide to governments to scale up
• Develop approaches and programs to bring groups of people who do
not normally talk to each other, together
• Capacity building for education, research and policy
• All of this is linked to funding – Governments should be approached
to develop capacity within countries to build research addressing
international agreements like UNFCCC, CBD
• Current Asia, Future Earth?
3. What would be key requirements / steps to get there?
• Increase human capacity – training programs, short term workshops,
exchanges of PhD students, more PhD positions within countries on
GEC; post-docs, funded Chairs;
• Create networks such as STS – bring together scientists, policy
makers, corporates – such as successful examples in Japan
• Bring in a greater diversity of countries – central Asia, east Asia,
significant gaps in country representation noted at this meeting
• Significant lack of social scientists particularly working on
policy/institutions, poverty/equity, behaviour studies
• Explicitly bring in indigenous communities and local knowledge
systems
4. What would the success indicators be?
• Discomfort with too much of a focus on quantitative indicators of
success
• Quality as important as quantity
• Establish a stable funding mechanism at a regional level
• Indicators such as doubling or tripling number of PhD, postdoc, chair
positions in GEC by 2020; increased access to funding and finance
for young scientists; doubling publication output and citation levels in
region on GEC; etc
• More importantly – again – lack of time and diversity of
representation to address these issues
Long term recommendations
• Strongly recommend that these dialogues continue beyond
workshop, electronically, adopting this group as a core but also
extending to crowdsourcing to address issues of representation,
geographic diversity of countries and ecosystems; more social
scientists; diverse sectors of society
• This should not be a rapid, one-off initiative in the region but carefully
built
• Regionally self-determined, within global framework
• Strengths of Asia – half the world’s population, economic growth
• Need regional solutions and strong, representative regional network
with priorities that are developed through in-depth, long term,
sustained discussion