New center links environmental science, policy

Jonathan Foley, director of one of the campus’s newest research centers, likens the project to an intellectual incubator.

“The idea here is to spawn ideas and nurture them, then let them go,” Foley says of the Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment, established in July by the Institute for Environmental Studies.

“It does not have a permanent intellectual focus,” he explains. “It’s not going to be the center for land use studies or the center for global business patterns. We have enough centers like that.

“The idea is to have an extremely flexible structure to deal with issues involving human impact on environmental systems,” says Foley, an associate professor of environmental studies and atmospheric and oceanic sciences.

SAGE joins the Center for Climatic Research and the Environmental Remote Sensing Center, the other IES research hubs.

The new center consolidates IES research and outreach projects related to environmental policy. Its core is a group of more than 20 faculty, staff and student researchers who worked with Foley in the Climate, People and Environment Program, which he directed for seven years. But SAGE also has taken in several IES research projects not linked with the institute’s other centers.

Foley intends for SAGE to blend science and policy studies intentionally, with emphasis on regional and global problems resulting from interactions between environmental systems, natural resources and human activity. He envisions interdisciplinary teams tackling such topics as land use and land cover change, hydrological systems and water resources, agricultural ecosystems and food supply, and environmental change and human health.

To that end, Foley and eight colleagues in the sciences and social sciences recently submitted a faculty cluster-hire proposal in international environmental affairs that would assemble experts in four areas:

• Water conflicts and world water resources.
• Agriculture and food security.
• Security issues, including poverty, environmental degradation, urbanization and refugees.
• Environmental economics and the global market.

“UW-Madison already ranks among the nation’s top universities in the areas of natural resources and environmental science,” says the cluster proposal. “Yet neither UW–Madison nor its peers in these areas — Yale, Duke, Michigan and Berkeley — have built cohesive programs in environmental decision-making and public policy to complement their capabilities in environmental science and engineering.

The proposal adds that SAGE could serve as the “connection point” that provides shared resources for teaching, research and administrative support.