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Sustainability Videos & Lecture Series

Osvaldo Sala - On Sustainability

Osvaldo Sala is a Julie A. Wrigley chair in life sciences and sustainability and a Foundation professor in the School of Sustainability; a professor in the School of Life Sciences; an advisory board member for the Center for Biodiversity Outcomes; and a distinguished sustainability scientist in the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability. He is particularly interested in working with scenarios as a way of simplifying, understanding and communicating the complex relationships that emerge from the study of social-ecological systems.

Transcript

My name is Osvaldo Sala, and I am the Julie A. Wrigley Professor of Sustainability and Life Sciences. I'm a foundation professor at ASU, and I'm a sustainability scientist in the Julie Ann Wrigley Institute of Sustainability.

Describe your areas of research interest.
I'm interested in the impacts of climate change on ecosystems. I am interested in the impacts of land use change on the provisioning of ecosystems services. I'm interested in generating scenarios of biodiversity change for the next 50 years. I'm interested in different food production systems. So, I have a portfolio of research questions that I address, or that people working in my lab address with me.

Describe some applications of your research.
For example, for the function of the planet Earth, I work on the effects of climate change on deserts. I'm looking at the factor of variability as an independent variable. What happens with variability increases independently of other things: CO2, nitrogen, all those other variables that are changing. So trying to distinguish the effect of directional changes, like warming, versus the effects of increasing variability. That contributes to our understanding of how planet earth functions and is going to respond to future climate.

I work on assessments of the efficiency of different crops and their ability to produce protein and calories per unit of nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium. That is going to help us allocate land for conservation, for production.

Why do you study sustainability?
I study sustainability because it's my passion, because I can't do anything else, and because I'm passionate about our science. I think it's very important, and there’s a huge demand from our students, from our society to have a more thorough understanding.

What is sustainability?
We think that a system is sustainable when it is expected to continue supplying the services to humanity through time. At the same time, in my class, we realize there are different capital sources, so you have structural capital, you have manufactural capital, you have human capital, social capital, natural capital. And there are some trade-offs among those capitals. This is what, in my class, we call inclusive wealth. It's the sum of all those different forms of capital. We define sustainability when the inclusive wealth doesn't change through time, or increases.”

Describe the importance of collaboration.
It's fundamental to understand the nature of the scientific endeavor. If we think it's made out of individuals, we are wrong. It's an endeavor of society where a lot of people contribute in many, many different ways. If providing food for 9 billion people is our goal, that goal is not going to be met by a single individual. It has to be met by people that are working in soils, people that work in crops, economists, sociologists. All of them have to work together and communicate.

Nobody saves the world. All of us contribute as much as we can to save the world.

Why ASU?
ASU is a pioneer in fostering interdisciplinary studies. It is absolutely necessary to make progress in sustainability to have different people from different disciplines working together. That happens here better than any other part of the world.

Do universities have a responsibility to teach and research sustainability?
I think universities represent the brain of our nation. This is where ideas are generated. It is a responsibility to provide sustainability understanding, sustainability solutions.

From the research point of view, we need to have the responsibility to be constantly aware of new windows of opportunity and not get stuck in some sort of a traditional knowledge associated with traditional outcomes. We need to be always open to explore. Taking risk, that's what we need to do. That is true for research, and that it's true for education because that is necessary to make progress, fast progress.