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CNIE Update
- July 15, 1998
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#46 |
Help CNIE
to Identify Holes in the
Federal Research Funding Infrastructure
One of the
motivating needs behind the National Institute for the
Environment is a class of environmental topics that are
poorly addressed by the present science programs. These
topics tend to be multi-disciplinary, long-term and
cross-agency, bringing together questions about humans
and the environment. They often span the spectrum between
fundamental and applied approaches. In some cases, there
may be small amounts of research funding ($5 million or
less) that touch on the problem, but not nearly enough to
truly understand the issue sufficiently to prevent,
resolve, or remediate these concerns.
Examples
that CNIE has gathered include:
Endocrine disrupters
Declining and deformed amphibians
Environmental justice
Population and environment linkages
Distinguishing between natural variation and
anthropogenic causes of environmental change
Earth
science bases for urban development
Urban
impacts on estuarine systems
Evaluation of methods of risk assessment
Marine
conservation biology
Characteristics of sustainable development
Environmental design
We would
like to add to this list of topics and be specific about
what science is not being funded because it does not fit
within the structure and missions of federal funding
agencies.
PLEASE
HELP US BY SENDING
EXAMPLES of the
types of
environmental research that cannot be addressed through
the present structures for funding environmental
research.
If you are
a researcher, please send us an example of your top
"environmental research proposal that you didn't
write because there was no place to submit it".
If you are
a manager or decisionmaker, give us an example of
environmental problems you are dealing with where
"lack of science is a barrier to sound
decisionmaking and where you are unable to get the
scientific answers that you need."
Don't send
us a full proposal - just a title and a few paragraphs of
explanation: why it is important, and why it doesn't fit
with existing funding programs. The following example was
submitted by Dr. Peter Richerson of U. California-Davis:
Mercury Ecotoxicology
Mercury
contamination is a serious problem in the Western
U.S. where mercury was mined and where it was used in
precious metals extraction. The problems in the West
have a number of similarities and differences with
contamination from atmospheric and industrial sources
in other parts of the world. In the West, rather
large sums of money will be spent to remediate
sources of mercury.
The
current scientific state of the art is not sufficient
to make sensible recommendations for remediation
strategies. It is just within the realm of
possibility to do reasonably complete mass balances
for mercury and so to understand how the flows of
mercury from contaminated sites might best be
reduced.
One of
the most difficult problems is to estimate rates of
methylation of mercury. Particularly in the Western
sites, where mercury has been widely distributed by
mining activities in the last century, controlling
the flow of methylmercury from the inorganic
reservoir is the best hope for remediation. Because
of high analytical costs, most research programs that
can be conducted with available funding are quite
small scale. Some of the best data is likely to come
from Superfund Ecological Assessments simply because
the Superfund can afford the analytical costs.
However, "research" is forbidden on
Superfund projects, so it is not possible to set and
implement a research agenda under Superfund auspices.
What
is needed is a way for the mercury research and
remediation communities to meet to hammer out a
research agenda that is synergistic with ongoing
remediation assessment needs, and, of course, to
locate sufficient research resources and an
interested funder to implement the agenda.
- Dr.
Peter Richerson
University of California at Davis
Committee
for the National Institute for the Environment
1725 K Street, NW, Suite 212, Washington, D.C.
20006-1401
Phone (202) 530- 5810 cnie@cnie.org Fax
(202) 628-4311 |
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