Sustainable Enivronmental Decisions Group

Prinicipal Investigator: Professor Mark Borsuk

 

Located in the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth, the research of the Sustainable Environmental Decisions Group focuses on the development and application of mathematical models for integrating scientific information on natural, socioeconomic, and technological systems.  The goal of this work is to improve insight into system functioning and provide a rational basis for environmental policy and management.

 

What is Sustainability Science?

The need to reconcile society’s development goals with the limitations of Earth is a challenge to humankind that will never be fully resolved.  Sustainability science seeks to address this challenge by studying the interacting roles of human values, knowledge, governance, and technology in management of the environment.  Research in sustainability science focuses on the essential complexity of human-environment relations, recognizing that to understand the individual components of a system does not necessarily imply an understanding of the system as a whole.

Within the broader framework of Sustainability Science, the research of our group at Thayer is organized around three main questions:

  1. How can today's relatively independent activities of environmental research, monitoring, assessment, and decision-making be better integrated into systems for adaptive management and societal learning?
  2. How can organizations, governments, and individuals make decisions that lead to a sustainable future despite the presence of significant uncertainty?
  3. What systems of incentive structures - including markets, rules, norms, and scientific information - can most effectively guide society toward more sustainable trajectories?

 

Current and Past Projects

Click on pictures to link to more detailed project description.

 

Climate policy modeling

Modeling the trophic transfer and bioaccumulation of mercury in estuarine species

Design and use of social and biological indicators of mercury contamination to motivate sustainable behavior

Development and application of novel statistical techniques for using satellite and in-situ monitoring data to establish causal relations between environmental conditions and shellfish toxicity in the Gulf of Maine

Use of Bayesian networks and satellite imagery to implement adaptive management of eutrophication in the Neuse River watershed