This article is adapted from 'Transforming the planet: Our vision for the future of environmental science', which sets out a vision for the role of environmental science in facilitating the transition to a sustainable society.
In 2023, the IES’s Future of ES23 horizon scanning and foresight project set out a vision to shape the future of the environmental sciences. Beyond our vision for a more positive future and how it can be created, the IES also took stock of developments for environmental science and what they mean for how we view the discipline.
Definitions are important. If environmental science is defined in too narrow terms, it may limit our scope for collaboration. If environmental science is defined too broadly, it may open the door to greenwashing and other forms of misinformation that weaken public trust in science. A good definition is clear, accessible, and has strong boundaries that support targeted interventions and actions.
In ‘Transforming the planet’, the IES defined environmental science as:
"Modern environmental science is an interdisciplinary challenge-led field studying, developing, and disseminating knowledge of natural processes and systems through scientific tools, methods, and understandings, including their application to social and economic systems, the creation and assessment of solutions to environmental challenges, and the two-way interactions between the human and natural worlds.
Environmental scientists work across natural and social disciplines, incorporating academics, policy professionals, environmental engineers, and practitioners. They use scientific methods to inform environmental work, as well as insights from diverse sources of knowledge including professional practice, the interactions between science, policy, and society, and indigenous forms of knowledge."
How was our definition developed?
In the first instance, common-language definitions of environmental science were considered alongside rich pictures and other visualisations. These inspired a working ‘root definition’ constructed in line with Soft Systems Methodology (SSM), which was used as a starting point for further discussions.
The IES reflected on this provisional definition with reference to Critical Systems Heuristics (CSH), with the primary goal of challenging the definition’s boundaries, as well as the extent to which it reflected the reality of environmental science beyond the perceived reality of the IES’s immediate stakeholders and network. Finally, senior leaders in the environment sector were consulted for their perspective on the working definition.
The work culminated with a synthesis, intended to capture a single working definition that captured the accessibility of common-language approaches, the completeness of the root definition, and the critical reflectivity of the CSH approach through a systemic triangulation process.
How has the role of environmental science changed?
Historically, science served society through discovery: the more people learned about the natural world, the more it informed the many ways that humanity interacted with it. Pressing environmental crises now necessitate that environmental science concerns itself with solutions, and with communicating the insights that support those solutions to decision makers and a broad public audience.
Environmental science plays five key roles as it addresses environmental crises:
- The Sceptical Arbiter: environmental science challenges conventional thinking and contests hypotheses about how the world must and should work, allowing the public to reconsider social systems and interactions with the natural world.
- The Expert Communicator: environmental science demystifies evidence and understandings of natural systems and the consequences of our interactions with them, allowing the public to understand and engage with the environment, now and in the future.
- The Neutral Convenor: environmental science brings together scientific disciplines, policy, and society to acknowledge and address environmental challenges, allowing the public to share different perspectives and debate what matters.
- The Open-minded Designer: environmental science identifies solutions to environmental challenges, provides options for society, and explains the costs and trade-offs associated with different pathways, allowing the public to make choices about the future.
- The Rational Translator: environmental science operates at the interface between evidence, policy, and society, brokering knowledge and spanning the boundaries between different competencies, allowing the public to ensure that evidence informs the design and delivery of solutions.
While many scientists use these personas to be solutions scientists who support a transition in the face of interlinking crises, others still need to focus on discovery, further developing humanity’s collective knowledge of environmental systems through a precautionary lens, so that future generations have the evidence needed to address challenges which do not yet exist.
Validity, reliability, and reproducibility: Maintaining the tenets of environmental science
The legitimacy of modern environmental science comes from using evidence and insights to inform decisions and educate the public. This relies on a bedrock of trust that those insights are objective and impartial. Science has always sought to achieve that goal through the scientific method and the fundamental criteria that underpin good research: validity, reliability, and reproducibility.
- As data collection becomes increasingly supplemented with artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques, it will be necessary to ensure the validity of data which arises from projections and expectations rather than ‘in the field’ data collection.
- As citizen science projects increasingly supplement data for resource-constrained organisations, it will be necessary to ensure the reliability of data that is collected under less rigorous scrutiny, which may otherwise lead to peaks and troughs in the consistency of collection.
- As environmental science increasingly enters the space of solutions-led science, reproducibility will also be a significant challenge to overcome, as many solutions will be novel in nature. Post-implementation reviews and robust monitoring will be vital to achieving that reproducibility.
Robust research and innovation will be pivotal to maintaining these standards, which requires funding to be sufficient, accessible, flexible, and targeted. To ensure the public controls the direction of research, it should also be transparent and democratised in its allocation. Research needs to match the interdisciplinary and challenge-led nature of emerging environmental science, so funding applications should promote holistic and thorough projects, which may require novel funding approaches.
Who are the environmental scientists of the future?
Environmental science is an increasingly collective endeavour, thriving on interdisciplinarity, systems thinking, and collaboration. The success of environmental science in the future will depend considerably on the extent to which scientists can connect with one another to solve environmental challenges, utilising knowledge networks and communities.
At the same time, greater equity, diversity, and inclusion across the workforce has the potential to increase the breadth of knowledge and expertise in environmental science. These trends will determine whether science can support society’s environmental ambitions. If they are correctly nurtured and linked through interdisciplinarity, then they will reinforce the capacity of the scientific community to address environmental challenges.
What next?
Any future for the environment will be determined at its heart by environmental science and the scientists who will deliver that future, both through the evidence and understandings that help people to engage with the environment, as well as the insights that drive environmental solutions.
Science is already changing, but the workforce will need to continue changing to bring together society, policy, and evidence to address the immense environmental challenges facing our planet.
Header image credit: © May Chanikran via Adobe Stock
