What's more important: finding environmental problems, working on problems or finding solutions for them?
They're all important, but not all are equally well supported
If you write a grant on an environmental issue these days, chances are you write it for working on a problem, or if you are involved in more applied research, you work on a grant proposal for solving aspects of a problem. What you will never write a grant proposal for is this: finding an environmental problem.
Now, what’s more important then? Of course working an an environmental issue is important, this is how you learn about the problem, the mechanisms underpinning the issue, you will better understand the effects of such an issue. There is no doubt that this is crucial to do. I would guess that most proposals are written on this, just imagine grants on understanding the nature and effects of warming, CO2, microplastics, chemical pollution and so on.
Finding solutions is of course also important; especially once you have understood what the problem is about, and what the effects are. It is not enough to just describe a problem, it is also very helpful to use that knowledge to propose possible solutions and to test them. Nobody would argue that research that is aimed at mitigation of environmental effects is not useful. And of course you can write a proposal for work on such matters.
So what about finding new issues then. Of course you cannot work on a problem or find solutions for a problem, if you haven’t identified a problem in the first place. Therefore, finding a problem — recognizing it as a problem for the environment — is crucially important, because it starts the whole process.
But the thing is this: you can’t really get this funded. At least I have never seen a proposal that says: Ok, people, we will think about new issues and try to discover them. I think this work just kind of happens because people are curious about something.
Shouldn’t we also support this kind of work more systematically then? I think so. Granted, there are some efforts that do get supported, for example the excellent Horizon Scans for conservation issues, headed by Bill Sutherland, which for years have brought groups of people together to collectively think about future challenges, following a clear protocol for identifying such new issues.
It does seems strange that we don’t have very many clear avenues for funding such endeavors. To me it seems very important to think about environmental issues that may be unfolding, but that people simply do not have on their radar. I think this is because this is more like a creative endeavor, and thus more difficult to plan and press into work packages. And thus it doesn’t lend itself to being funded in the classical way by grants awarded from the usual national funding agencies.
To me, it seems like this should change. Or am I wrong about the issue?
Please share your experiences with discovering new environmental issues. How did these come about? How did they start to be studied? What was the initial impetus, the nucleus? How was this initial work funded, if at all. If you have any sources, please share. I know the story of the atmospheric CO2 concentration (Keeling), and how atmospheric nitrogen deposition was elevated to a factor of global change (Vitousek), for example. Would be curious to learn about more.
I suspect that the answer to your question is political.