NR&E: President Boesch, on behalf of the editorial board of Natural Resources & Environment, I thank you for this interview. What does the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science do?
Boesch: Our center is the University System of Maryland’s primary program for advanced research and graduate education in the environmental sciences. It is a very substantial enterprise because the environment is especially important in Maryland due to the Chesapeake Bay. The Bay defines our state geographically, culturally, and economically.
NR&E: Are there similar counterparts in other states?
Boesch: Yes, but we are unusual for at least two reasons, the first of which is we’re not located in one place. We have four laboratories across the state, from the mountains of western Maryland, to the inner city of Baltimore, to southern Maryland and the Eastern Shore. This allows us to study not only the Bay but also urban and upland environments across the state. The other unusual thing is that we’re a separate institution of the university system. So as president, I have the same responsibility as the CEO of one of the big universities in our system, like College Park, although we are much smaller. So, in addition to the usual academic administration, I work to keep the center funded, deal with state and federal government, and work directly with the chancellor and regents of the 12-institution university system.
NR&E: What are the top three issues in environmental science today, and how do they relate to environmental law?
Boesch: The top on almost everyone’s list is global climate change and all of its implications. What are we going to do to limit it? How are we going to adapt to it? I think most environmental scientists would tell you that global climate change is the biggest challenge we face, not only for society but also for science. A second broad issue is sustainability. Around the world, we are trying to undo some damages to coastal and other ecosystems, restoring them to a more productive state. How we can restore ecosystems and sustain them for the long run is a major challenge. Another third very important issue for environmental science relates to how are we going to feed the world? Populations are growing, and we have essentially no more land suitable for food production. How can we provide food required by human populations, either on land or in the ocean, without further damaging the services ecosystems provide us?
NR&E: How do we inform policymakers best when there are still deniers out there who find the science unpersuasive?
Boesch: Well, it is a challenge, but the scientific consensus is so strong now. Studies show that about 97% of climate scientists are now convinced that climate change is occurring and is caused primarily by humans. There are differences of opinion about the details and exactly how fast climate will change, but any scientist working in this field will tell you that is about as certain as science gets. And at some point people will have to listen, particularly because we are already experiencing climate change, and it will only become increasingly obvious. Extreme events, in particular, get people’s attention. Some skeptics point out that the rate of warming has slowed down; however, there is strong evidence that the oceans continue to store more heat. During the next significant El Niño event, some of that heat will be released into the atmosphere, and more high temperature records will fall.
NR&E: Well, the pendulum always swings. This is just swinging up, up more, and the down swings, but less down?
Boesch: I think so. The recently released Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fifth Assessment raised the certainty. In addition, the National Climate Assessment, also just completed, does a good job in documenting the changes that are already occurring right here in the United States. Then there is the call to action by the Risky Business Project led by former Mayor Bloomberg and former Secretary of Treasury Paulsen. They are businessmen and financiers who are basically saying, “Look. We’re putting ourselves at real risk. We have to pay attention.”
NR&E: Any observations on insurance policy cost and underwriting and the economics of ignoring climate change?
Boesch: As I better understand how science is used in decision making, it has become apparent that scientists need to develop skills to interact more effectively with the legal profession. For example, there are the Supreme Court cases over the authority of EPA to regulate emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases (GHGs) under the Clean Air Act. This was not anticipated when the act was written, leaving the Court to evaluate the scientific evidence that this constitutes “pollution” with harmful effects. My presentation at the [Fall 2013 Section of Environment, Energy, and Resources] meeting offered a scientific perspective regarding the lawsuit challenging EPA’s authority under the Clean Water Act to implement Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) requirements for the Chesapeake Bay. The scientific evidence of impairment by excess nutrient and sediments is compelling. There is very good understanding of the load reductions needed to alleviate the impairment, and science-based models used to allocate the load reductions throughout the watershed provide the basis of implementation plans to achieve the TMDL. The American Farm Bureau Federation and other agribusiness and land development organizations filed suit to stop implementation of the Chesapeake Bay TMDL, arguing that the act does not grant EPA this authority, but also challenging the scientific basis of models used for load allocations. Most curious from a scientific perspective is the assertion that the Clean Water Act does not require a state to consider impairment of waters downstream of that state in setting the TMDL. From the perspective of an environmental scientist who thinks in terms of streams, rivers, and watersheds that do not conform to state boundaries, this would be unlikely to result in a cleaned-up Chesapeake Bay. Another issue that has been in the courts and is now being contested in Congress is the definition of “waters of the United States.” From the scientific standpoint of achieving water quality, it is not so much navigability that matters, but connectivity. Physically, chemically, and biologically, wetlands and temporary streams and pools can affect downstream water quality substantially.
NR&E: What are your biggest challenges in convincing people or policymakers of the importance of your work?
Boesch: My experience is that people who are trusted to make policy have, with few exceptions, a lot of respect for science. They understand that we have to act based upon knowledge developed through a systematic process. The challenge comes when science tells them something that is counterintuitive or seemingly conflicts with human interests and beliefs. It is hard for people to grasp that humans could alter the climatic forces on Earth. Coming to grips with climate change threatens religious beliefs, economic interests, and views on the role of government. Scientists have to be more willing and better able to explain things in a way that people can understand. Scientists have a tendency (not that lawyers don’t have the same tendency) to fall into their own language and jargon, but people kind of tune that out. So speaking in plain language and using metaphors, examples, and analogies is important.
NR&E: How do we separate the good science from the bad science? Especially in informing policymakers?
Boesch: Science has processes like peer review that challenge explanations and correct mistakes, although I admit they are far from perfect. Things that get published in peer-reviewed journals turn out to be wrong. But science, over the long run, works to correct errors and misconceptions. When a scientist publishes a paper that goes against the grain of conventional thinking, it’s sort of like blood in the water. Scientific sharks emerge and begin looking for prey. Sometimes critics refute the new idea, sometimes they don’t, and real paradigm shifts result. So science works through a community of critical eyes. Science is sometimes a lonely enterprise of a professor or a scientist working in the laboratory day after day, developing and challenging hypotheses. In the end science only works because it’s a collective enterprise that allows knowledge to evolve.
NR&E: How do you keep politics out of scientific decision-making and scientific funding?
Boesch: Well, ultimately you can’t because science is a human enterprise, and people are political. In the broad sense of the term, scientific institutions and universities make political decisions all the time. Governmental politics obviously affect the science that is done; it determines which scientific fields are funded by judging what’s in society’s interest and how much we’re prepared to pay. But, an enlightened society should have a broader view of the value of science, invest strategically but broadly in it, and avoid meddling and overprescription. Today there are troubling signs of politicians trying to restrict science that might challenge their interests, for example, restrictions on funding of social science research by the National Science Foundation by requiring that each project must demonstrate that it will contribute to certain national interests. It is better to leave it to agency scientists and peer-reviewers to evaluate the scientific merits and broader impacts, while still holding the agencies accountable for the responsible advancement of science.
NR&E: How do we manage coasts in the face of climate change and preserve functions in those habitats and species?
Boesch: It’s a challenge. While we are now making progress in repairing environmental damages in places like the Chesapeake Bay, climate change and continued population growth will change the playing field and generally make attainment of our goals more difficult. Scientists have become very proficient in using advanced measurements, experiments, and sophisticated models that help us understand why things are the way they are. But the most important questions in environmental science concern how things will be in the future if we did A or B, and, for that, experiments do not help us much.
NR&E: At what point does climate change become too severe to change or mitigate?
Boesch: Well, it is too late to avoid human-caused climate change; it is already occurring. And it has enough momentum that even if we stopped emitting GHGs totally tomorrow, it is still going to become warmer, and the climate will continue to change. A better question is how can we limit and manage climate change rather than let it proceed to unmanageable and catastrophic proportions? The latest IPCC assessment includes a scenario in which GHG emissions are dramatically reduced over the coming decades to limit the increase of global mean temperature to 2°C. It is possible, but beyond that threshold we move in increasingly dangerous territory the longer we wait.
NR&E: And over what period of time?
Boesch: The IPCC found that, to avoid that threshold, we have to not only slow the growth of GHG emissions but also significantly reduce emissions by the middle of this century. That’s 36 years away. Before the end of this century we would have had to bring our net emissions at least to zero. If we do not achieve this we are in for some very challenging climatic conditions in the future.
NR&E: The Earth Institute presented a study and a plan going forward for the top 16 emitting nations this week to the United Nations. It’s a decarbonization plan. If China doesn’t get its act together, we’re in hot water, but all 16 of the top carbon producers need to agree to decarbonize.
Boesch: China recently passed us in terms of annual emissions, but the largest fraction of carbon dioxide that has been added to the atmosphere, the difference between 280 and 400 parts per million, was made in the United States. We got a head start with our emissions, so understandably the rest of the world expects us to lead with reductions. Without common agreement between China and the United States on an approach to reduce emissions, we’re going to fail.
NR&E: With more intense storms, there’s pressure to hard armor many of the coastal areas, especially where there’s development. What are the ecological costs of this, and how do we convince communities that there are better ways?
Boesch: As pressures mount around the country we’re just not going to have the resources. For example, for my hometown, New Orleans, we spent more than $14 billion to build a better storm protection system after Katrina. Can we afford to do this everywhere? Structural protection needs to be well engineered and focused on economically and socially vital areas. We can’t protect everything. We need to enhance and sustain natural systems, such as coastal wetlands and other living shorelines that can moderate storm surge. Although difficult to talk about, we are going to have to retreat from some areas of the coast. We don’t have the will or capability to move whole communities, so what happens is, after devastating hurricanes, we raise the FEMA flood levels. Then people can’t afford to rebuild and move out family by family. At some point in time we’re going to have to provide assistance for whole communities to relocate. It’s a challenge because folks are so connected to where they live; they think they have a perpetual right to live there. Historically, we built the cities and towns based on the assumption that sea level was stable, and it was for more than 2,000 years; but this is no longer the case.
NR&E: The Washington Post had an article recently about the Outer Banks and sea level. The scientists’ views were being tapped down by the North Carolina legislators.
Boesch: I think that’s a wonderful example of the challenge that science faces. Projections of accelerating sea level based on contemporary science pose a threat to property owners and developers along the low-lying North Carolina coast, potentially by reducing their property values. Initially, the political forces mandated that only projections based on historic sea-level could be used in planning, but that flies in the face of science. Now, a so-called compromise is being offered to limit the use of sea-level projections in planning to the next 30 years, during which the differences are not so great. But sea-rise will not stop then; in fact, almost certainly it will be rising at an ever-faster rate.
NR&E: Does climate change demand that we think more about inland solutions to mitigate its ecological impacts?
Boesch: Inland areas are not immune to the effects of climate change but have their own set of issues, such as floods and droughts. These effects and how we respond to them will have effects on the coasts. Coastal ecosystems are productive because of their connection with land. They will continue to be productive, but we will have to manage them under the new reality of rising seas and changing climatic conditions on land.
NR&E: How do we manage the storm water?
Boesch: I attended a meeting today with the secretaries of Maryland state agencies engaged in restoring the Chesapeake Bay. We are spending billions of dollars upgrading waste water treatment and helping farmers control their runoff pollution We’re paying people to replace their septic systems if they live near the water and have been reducing nitrogen pollution by reducing emissions from power plants and automobiles. The one area where we’re moving in the wrong direction is urban and suburban storm water because every year sprawl enlarges our footprint.
NR&E: More impervious surface.
Boesch: Precisely. So what does this mean if we bring climate change into this equation? First, when—and not if—we make serious commitments to reducing GHG emissions, we will have to restrict urban sprawl. We need to find better ways to grow and develop that don’t involve energy-intense transportation. The other implication is that as we improve management of storm water, we should be planning for the storm water of the future rather than just past experience. We already have a well-documented trend toward more intense rainfall events and science indicates that this trend will continue.
NR&E: We’ll be soaking wet.
Boesch: Yes, during the times we are not bone dry, so we should be designing storm water management in a way that can accommodate more extreme events in the future. So, these are two examples of how we can begin to integrate climate change with Chesapeake Bay restoration: the first contributes to limiting climate change and the second helps adapt to inevitable changes that will take place.
NR&E: Most of our infrastructure was designed for 100 years. We’re getting fifty- and twenty-five-year storm events, and even hundred-year storm events, every five or ten years.
Boesch: The designation of 100-year storms, and so forth, is based on the principle that the frequency of such events in the future will be like that in the past. The assumption of stationarity. Because of the unequivocal evidence of climate change, six years ago a group of prominent hydrologists officially proclaimed “stationarity is dead.”
NR&E: What are the next big environmental issues?
Boesch: Obviously, we have other challenges. As an oceanographer, one of the big challenges we have is how do we use the ocean’s resources in a sustainable way? Science is challenged to provide some understanding needed to avoid overfishing and rebuild overfished stocks. Several colleagues in the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science do research in that area. Speaking of the ocean, another consequence of increased atmospheric carbon dioxide is ocean acidification.
NR&E: And the coral reefs are the canary in the coalmine.
Boesch: As more carbon dioxide is absorbed into ocean waters, it decreases the pH, makes the seawater more acidic. This has huge consequences to organisms like corals or oysters. Anything that has to form a shell is going to have a hard time doing it as seawater becomes more acidic. Some experts predict that most coral reefs, which have been around for millennia, would cease to exist. If we think about all of the spectacular and captivating life that’s associated with coral reefs, this is a pretty awful thought.
NR&E: How’s big data changing the way scientists work?
Boesch: That’s a very good question and it’s something that we are working to address within our center. It used to be that each scientist was responsible for his or her own data. They’d keep their data in notebooks. We now have instruments that make thousands of digital measurements. We have satellites collecting data continuously around the world and instruments on moorings in the Chesapeake Bay that take measurements at multiple depths every few seconds. There is great power in big data, but there are also some challenges. The first is just preserving it and managing it. This has to be more a responsibility of institutions than of individual scientists, and grantee institutions are now required by governmental research sponsors to make sure that data archives are maintained and accessible.
NR&E: But in 20 years, that might not be in a usable format.
Boesch: I am reminded of that when I remember punch cards and floppy disks. But, frankly, a more daunting challenge is how we are able to analyze these huge and complex databases. We have just hired two big-data statisticians in our center. They aren’t environmental scientists but will work collaboratively with our faculty researchers and will train our graduate students in innovative techniques to squeeze the full information value from massive datasets. A related challenge is presented by genomic data that many of our environmental scientists now routinely collect. Massive datasets of genetic sequences are produced, not just of one species but also of whole communities of micro-organisms—what is called the metagenome. Scientists are finding forms of life we didn’t know existed and can determine what organisms do in the environment by what genes are present and activated.
NR&E: Are ecosystem management and adaptive management still viable?
Boesch: By all means, both are difficult to implement but are essential approaches to effective environmental management. Whatever we wish to manage—water quality, toxic contaminants, essential habitats, or endangered or exploited animal populations—is connected to other parts of the ecosystem, so we have to manage activities in concert and with understanding of the related dynamics. Management also has to be adaptive because we seldom can fully predict the consequences of our management actions. We have to be able to determine if management actions are working and, if not, why not. That is the essence of adaptive management. It’s not that different from other things we do in life, but it’s clearly structured and accountable.
NR&E: What do you think about resilience theory?
Boesch: It’s a fascinating concept, and, at its core, it’s very important to take resilience into account. In practice, though, we are still trying to figure out how to do this effectively. But if we are thinking about how do we make human institutions, markets, communities, infrastructure, almost anything we can think of . . . more resilient, that would be helpful.
NR&E: So it’s almost more sustainable if it’s more resilient?
Boesch: Well, yes, generally, but resilient and sustainable are not synonyms. Resilience theory recognizes that systems will experience disruptions that change their state in ways that may make them more or less sustainable. It is interesting to note that today in technology and business, and even higher education, disruption is seen by some as a force for positive, if challenging, change. Resilient systems can adapt to disruptions, even take advantage of them, and continue to meet demands for goods and services.
NR&E: Anything else I should I ask?
Boesch: No, other than just to say, one of the things I’m trying to do as an educator in environmental science is to build bridges between environmental science and law. We train environmental scientists to address questions through experimentation and scientific method, preparing graduate students to be academics or research scientists. But only about one-third of our graduates go on to purely research or academic careers. Many of them find their way into agencies or industry, where they have to deal more regularly with legal issues constraints. How can we prepare our graduate students to be better equipped to deal with the interface of science and law? Even those who go to academic and research careers would benefit from knowledge of privacy and intellectual property law. For example, what are one’s rights and responsibilities concerning recordkeeping, emails, and Freedom of Information Act requests?
NR&E: You’re a public institution.
Boesch: Yes. But, even those in private institutions have responsibilities that come with public research funding.
NR&E: You need to hire a lawyer on staff. (Laughter)
Boesch: I often think I need one. But, conversely, what about the needs for students in environmental law to better understand the nature, uses, and limits of science? They will have to develop evidence and arguments from scientific literature and experts, depose scientists, and use them as witnesses. They would benefit from knowing more about environmental science, the process of science, and how scientists think and act. So, I am working with colleagues in the University of Maryland Law School to develop some short courses that would include a mix of environmental science and law students in the same class and rely substantially on interaction among them.
NR&E: There may be an opportunity for legal scientific case studies.
Boesch: Well, exactly right. An excellent case study would be one that we discussed earlier—development and implementation of the Chesapeake Bay TMDL. It is full of interplay of science, policy, and the law.
NR&E: Science will have the final say.
Boesch: I’m not sure of that, but we do have numerous legal briefs, filings, and decisions from the original case and the appeal that would constitute an intriguing and informative case study.
NR&E: President Boesch, thank you very much.
