Providing the Scientific Basis for Sound Policy

From left to right: Howard Epstein, Jay Zieman, and Karen McGlathery
Photo by Tom Cogill

At the beginning of 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued the first in a series of reports on global warming. For a consensus-driven document, the language of the report was unusually blunt. Members of the panel declared that the evidence for global warming was “unequivocal” and asserted with “more than 90 percent confidence” that carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping greenhouse gases from human activities were the main culprit. They concluded that as a result of global warming, sea level will rise for at least a thousand years and heat waves and storms involving heavy precipitation will become more frequent.  

“Human beings have not been through this kind of environmental upheaval at any time in their history,” notes Jay Zieman, chair of the University’s Department of Environmental Sciences. “The nations of the world are facing a series of very difficult decisions.”

The department is ideally placed to play a significant role in ensuring that the decisions needed to secure a sustainable future are made on the basis of scientific fact. In 1969, scientists at U.Va. created the first department of environmental sciences in the country—pioneering an integrated, multidisciplinary approach that is critical to understanding the interrelated processes that drive natural systems on a global scale. This model has been widely replicated at other universities, and the department is now considered among the best in the nation, highly regarded for its strengths in such fields as coastal dynamics, atmosphere-biosphere interactions, and contaminant hydrology.

The department has been a leader in organizing the long-term scientific campaigns essential to a baseline understanding of our environment. Both the Shenandoah Watershed Study and the Virginia Coast Reserve Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) project have compiled unprecedented data sets going back several decades. This information provides the foundation for more comprehensive analysis. For instance, scientists at the LTER, which is located on 35,000 acres of Virginia’s Eastern Shore, are developing a predictive understanding of how slow, progressive changes in climate, sea level, and land use combine with short-term disturbances like hurricanes to influence the dynamics and biotic structure of coastal barrier islands. “We now look at these ecosystems from a much broader temporal and spatial perspective,” says Karen McGlathery, LTER’s principal investigator. 

The department’s ability to conduct this kind of long-term research, however, extends far beyond Virginia’s shore. Environmental sciences are inherently global—the winds and water know no boundaries—and the University’s faculty and graduate students have done research in 90 countries worldwide.  

A few examples tell the story. As chair of the International Nitrogen Initiative, James Galloway has worked tirelessly to create a global network of centers that enable people around the world to focus on minimizing the negative effects of nitrogen on human health and the environment, while optimizing its beneficial role in food production. Atmospheric scientist José Fuentes is part of NASA’s African Monsoon Multidisciplinary Activities project, designed to provide more accurate forecasts of precipitation in drought-stricken West Africa as well as hurricane activity in the Caribbean and eastern United States. Robert Swap organized and led the Southern African Regional Science Initiative, a multinational project cosponsored by NASA designed to understand the ramifications, both locally and in other parts of the world, of annual biomass burning in southern Africa. Howard Epstein is leading “The Greening of the Arctic,” a study funded by the National Science Foundation designed to better define the relationship between rising temperatures, the spread of vegetation, and the loss of sea ice. This is particularly important, as the impact of global warming has been most dramatic at the poles.

As these examples show, the goal of the department’s faculty is not to study nature in its pristine state. In fact, as W.W. Corcoran Professor Herman “Hank” Shugart points out, “there is very little of that left.” Rather, environmental scientists study nature as it is affected by the hand of man—which has led to a number of productive interdisciplinary collaborations. “There has been a realization among us that we don’t understand human systems very well,” says Shugart, “so we’ve formed alliances with U.Va. faculty in such fields as medicine, nursing, commerce, and anthropology.”

Thanks to the generosity of our donors and the dedication of its faculty, the department is equipped to take on these challenges. In 2002, it completed a $40 million effort to expand and renovate Clark Hall—and in 2006 it opened the state-of-the-art Anheuser-Busch Coastal Research center at the LTER site.  

“With a talented, inspired faculty, decades of interdisciplinary experience, and first-class facilities, this department is unusually well-suited to provide policy makers the tools and the information to address the environmental challenges that are upon us,” says Zieman.