The National Research Council (NRC) has been asked by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to identify grand challenges in the arena of environmental sciences. NSF places a high value on interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approaches because it believes many interesting environmental problems transcend traditional science disciplines, although those disciplines are essential components of any research program. Therefore, the NSF is seeking advice from the scientific community on research initiatives and programs that would address scientific (not management) uncertainties in environmental science. These initiatives will likely involve researchers from a variety of disciplines and will likely be relevant to the research mandates of several federal agencies. Policy implications of scientific research are of course important, because public funding of research is based at least in part on the premise that there will be benefits to the public. However, because NSF is a science agency, its motivation is primarily scientific.
The study will identify and describe the few grand challenges that appear to have the greatest scientific importance and research potential with a clear effort to set priorities and to document the scientific reasons for its choices. A specific effort will be made to identify multidisciplinary approaches to identifying and researching the questions.
The anticipated result of the project is a report containing findings and recommendations regarding grand challenge research priorities in environmental sciences. The report will describe the criteria for identifying and describing a few major scientific questions, document the reasons for choosing them, and prioritize them in terms of research. More information is available at www.nas.edu/gces