Washington University in St. Louis
ER-15: Sustainability Research Identification

Sustainability research includes scholarly examinations and explorations that fall under the University’s definition of sustainability (provided below). Sustainability research is perceived broadly and is not defined by source of support.

“Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”
- From the Report of the Brundtland Commission, Our Common Future, 1987.

Washington University honors the spirit of sustainability captured in the famous quotation of the Brundtland Commission. On the other hand, we recognize that sustainability is a complex term, because it embraces concepts that as a matter of practice can be in conflict with one another. A community may overuse a limited natural resource because they perceive such exploitation is necessary to compete economically or even to survive. In another setting, a country may have an abundance of resources that could benefit other nations but its social infrastructure is unstable and inequitable making cooperation difficult. All of these complexities are combined in a world where resources are used unevenly by the world’s population. Technological advances in efficiency in food, energy, or material production, if implemented worldwide, could move more societies closer to a sustainable lifestyle, but these advances are just one component of an overall sustainable solution. At Washington University, we recognize these intricacies and view sustainability through the lenses of the environment, the economy and our social structures.
Through our research, our teaching, and our engagement with those outside of our community, we strive to create viable solutions that may address some or all three of the components of sustainable systems. We also want to help train tomorrow’s leaders to use our resources efficiently and find innovative solutions to human-environment issues.

One important way to work with our future leaders is through our sustainability-focused courses that concentrate on the concept of sustainability and our sustainability-related courses that incorporate sustainability as a topic or focus on one of the components of sustainable systems.

Production of the University’s sustainability research inventory began with an examination of the fiscal year 2010 award list used by the Vice Chancellor for Research for the FY2010 Annual Report. The annual award report is produced for internal use only and is the basis for the data presented in this report. The report was reviewed to broadly classify research at the University. It was quickly noted that the report under-reported total research at the University by narrowly focusing on research projects that received external funding support via grants and contracts in that fiscal year. Since not all disciplines rely equally on external funding to conduct research it was decided that a more individual review of research was required to fully identify sustainability research, especially across the academic departments outside the medical center. Since research centers and other core infrastructure supports are very important to the University’s research enterprise the next step was to identify those centers that conducted sustainability research to identify faculty actively engaged in sustainability research projects. Centers identified to be active in sustainability research include:
-International Center for Advanced Renewable Energy and Sustainability
-Consortium for Clean Coal Utilization
-McDonnell Academy Global Energy and Environment Partnership
-Center for Genome Studies
-Institute for Public Health
Reviewing these sites was helpful to identify critical masses of sustainability research and to provide parameters for the more detailed inventory steps to be undertaken. The final step in the inventory included a thorough walkthrough of each academic department’s faculty roster to identify tenure and tenure-track faculty engaged in sustainability research. This was assessed through faculty members’ identified research areas, description of lab research projects, recent publications and other such descriptions. Results were cross-checked against the research listings of the sustainability activities of the identified research centers and through advanced searches of University and department websites.

Additional websites for sustainability research:
http://mageep.wustl.edu/Research.aspx http://cccu.wustl.edu/research.php http://publichealth.wustl.edu/people/Pages/Institute%20Projects.aspx