Environmental change is a phenomenon that impacts nearly every aspect of society, from the fuel we use to heat our homes and drive our cars, to our efforts to maintain viable food and water supplies affected by changing weather conditions. To encompass all of these areas of research and inform public policy decisions, the Environmental Change Institute was created in 2008, with a generous gift from the Alvin H. Baum Family Fund and matching funds from the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences; the College of Business; and the College of Law.
Changing climate and increasingly variable weather will affect the ECI Domains in many ways. We advance understanding and develop solutions to global environmental change in the following areas:
Food systems and security
Food supplies, quality, and prices, both locally and globally, will be destabilized by climatic changes and energy supply and cost-related disruptions. New plant varieties, crop management systems, and appropriate and efficient processing and distribution systems must be developed to address these risks.
Resource and energy use
The dynamics and quantity of resource availability, including water and wind, will change. For example, storage of water — groundwater, reservoirs and lakes, and snow pack — will change, affecting water supplies and quality. Strong weather events can destabilize dams, levees, wastewater treatment facilities and drinking water supplies, and risk must be managed. Increased heat will increase demand for cooling, driving the need for comfortable living and working environments that use little or no external energy.
Public policy and social and economic well-being
The science underlying the threats to food systems and security, and resource and energy use, must be applied to inform the policies which guide public, and private response through business decisions. ECI will explicitly strive to make these linkages effective.
Biodiversity and ecosystem health
The biological elements of natural and agricultural ecosystems will respond to a generally warming climate by genetically evolving (naturally or through managed genetic change — e.g., plant breeding), attempting to migrate away from the equator and toward the poles, or moving to higher elevations. The implications of these responses, as well as the ecosystem services expected in a given geographical location, must be anticipated and addressed to avoid chronic and catastrophic failures in these systems themselves and the human systems they support.
