Download 1) The most interesting developments of the last twenty years in your

Environmental Sciences and Policy Department
1) The most interesting developments of the last twenty years in your discipline
It would not be an exaggeration to say that environmental science as we now
know the discipline emerged during the last two decades or so. At the end of the 1980s,
when the decision was made to add an Environmental Sciences and Policy Department to
CEU, the reasoning was mostly political. The then newly born NGOs in Central and
Eastern Europe played a very important role in the processes of political change in the
region, and in many countries (including Hungary) environmental protests were a kind of
first awakening for the general public, clearly demonstrating the limitations of the former
system and the need to change economic and social policy. At that time environmental
science as a field was mostly represented by knowledge obtained from traditional
disciplines (biology, chemistry, geography, geology, etc.). Research in environmental
science therefore was mostly done on traditional topics like biodiversity conservation,
national parks and their management, biological and health consequences of
environmental pollution and the like. The policy part was mostly represented by studies
of public movements and NGOs, and environmental law existed as a somewhat separate
field. International environmental governance was also starting to develop at this time
with multi-lateral environmental agreements like the Convention on Biological Diversity
signed at the Rio summit in 1992 and numerous EU directives dealing with water, waste,
agriculture, and air.
By the mid-1980s EIA (Environmental Impact Assessment) had become
established institutionally as a link between environment and economy, with most
countries having laws about EIAs and their implementation by that time.
Serious international research in climate change only started to develop after the
IPCC was formed back in 1987 (the first IPCC report was published in 1991); green
energy was not even an issue at that time. The first report on sustainable development
(the Brundtland Commission Report) was published in 1987, but a lot of ambiguity about
the notion of sustainability remained.
So briefly that was the background when CEU was formed 20 years ago.
Since then, there have been many new developments. First and foremost, a lot of
formal mechanisms were established to push environmental issues into the decisionmaking process: Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) for policies and plans
developed as a next step after EIA, which was mostly about individual projects.
Environmental standards for organizations appeared, such as EMAS (Eco-Management
and Audit Schemes) and the ISO 14000 series of the International Organization for
Standardization (ISO), which are now fully established internationally with thousands of
companies participating world-wide. Environmental Policy Integration (in other words,
inclusion of environmental considerations in sectoral development plans) has also
become commonplace, especially within the EU.
Sustainable development has become an important part of international, national
and even local discourses; and the question has now become how to translate the
principles of SD into everyday life.
Climate Change stopped being a curious scientific debate and became the
dominant problematic policy area and research focus, a hot issue for current political and
economic life, with numerous political, social and economic consequences.
Technological developments in alternative energy production and rising energy
efficiency of conventional processes will most likely lead to a number of breakthroughs
in the near future. Carbon trading is rapidly becoming an essential part of national and
international economic activities.
The entirely new sphere of Global Environmental reporting started to develop,
when all major international institutions (IPCC, UNEP, UNDP, OECD, IEA, World Bank
etc) started to produce global and regional environmental reports on a regular basis as an
essential and important tool for decision-makers and the general public.
In the social field a whole new movement for sustainable production and
consumption is gaining momentum. Lifecycle analysis of products has become an
essential part of most economic activities, especially in the developed world. Real change
of lifestyles on a massive scale has not occurred yet, but there are numerous signs of
growing environmental consciousness within society which may soon provoke rapid and
radical shifts.
Such issues as environmental justice, and environment and gender are becoming
increasingly important, especially in the poorer parts of the world.
The appearance of new technologies such as GIS (Geographic Information
Systems), GPS (Global Positioning System) and new modeling tools has revolutionized
traditional branches of ecological and geographical knowledge, allowing research to be
conducted on an entirely new level, with much more precision and with new techniques
of data analysis and presentation.
So, in brief, the last 20 years have witnessed a complete change in the face of the
environmental sciences and policy discipline, bringing it from relative obscurity (with a
sense of being somewhat important, but marginal for economic and political progress) to
the forefront of international politics and economic activities.
2) the most important contributions of your department or by department
members to the field
As a department we feel very proud that our faculty has played a role in most of
the developments described in point 1, and often at a global or pan-European level.
We studied environmental NGOs when they first appeared, and trained many
NGO leaders from the region in the early years of the department.
Later we joined global and regional reporting processes, so for instance the CEU
logo is present on all 4 existing publications of the Global Environmental Outlook (GEO)
– the flagship UNEP global reporting document series, first published back in 1997. One
of our professors (Aleh Cherp) played an important role in (actually, created) a network
of experts in EIA and SEA in Central and Eastern Europe as part of his PhD on the
subject. Later he joined the secretariat of ISO 14000 and is helping to develop a new
carbon emission standard which is still under consideration.
Through another of our professors (Diana Ürge-Vorsatz) CEU has been very
active in research in climate change and sustainable energy policy. She has been a coordinating lead author on past and present IPCC reports, and was a member of the IPCC
team when it received the Nobel Peace prize.
Now the new Global Energy Assessment by the International Institute for Applied
Systems Analysis is under preparation, a global-scale work involving 200 scientific
experts from all over the world. Professors from our department are convening lead
analysts of 2 different chapters out of 25 total – no mean achievement for any single
department, especially a relatively small one such as ours at CEU.
In the field of integrated assessment we have conducted some important regional
studies, and recent work on the Caspian region was praised as a unique contribution by
top international experts.
In the field of environmental sociology many works of our professors have a
pioneering character, especially for the region of Eastern and South-Eastern Europe and
the Balkans. Such topics as environmental justice, environment and gender, and
environment and security are very well covered by our faculty members, we have a
number of publications in these fields, and international organizations like UNEP and
UNDP rely on our professors and PhD students for their reporting in these and related
topics (such as the UNEP Environment and Security Initiative and the UNDP Human
Development Report).
3) the most interesting emerging/new developments in your discipline
It seems that the current economic crisis together with the growing evidence of
rapid climate change will stimulate new approaches towards the ways we produce,
distribute and consume energy and conduct other economic activities (related with
transportation for example), encouraging the transition to a low-carbon (and potentially
non-carbon) economy. These general shifts towards greener economies, the development
of sustainable consumption and production, non-material economic growth etc. all relate
to the field of environmental sciences and policy, and require trained experts to advance
the transition process. It is obvious that many of these processes are already starting, and
there are many new developments going on world-wide, which means that our discipline
has little chance of becoming outdated or irrelevant.