[Energy] Knowledge Systems for Sustainability

[Brian Wee]

Hello,

Following on from the email yesterday about the Knowledge Systems for Sustainability (KSS) collaborative, Dave LeZaks was kind enough to share a one-page write-up of KSS.  Here it is, pasted below.  You'll see concordance and alignment with the interests of this group.  FYI.


The Knowledge Systems for Sustainability Collaborative

The Knowledge Systems for Sustainability (KSS) Collaborative is formulating new types of knowledge systems that can more adequately contribute to decision-making about how valued services are accessed from landscapes that, in aggregate, determine longer term, larger scale trajectories toward “safe operating space” for human beings and the planet.

The Challenge: The grand challenges of the early 21st century affect every aspect of current social and physical frameworks. With billions threatened by food insecurity, diet- and climate-related health threats, radical extinctions of biota and threats to essential natural resources, the time to renovate global trajectories toward a "safe operating space" is past due.  More sustainable outcomes will occur by changing real decisions on the ground at scale. In the absence of robust, objective, useful information, critical decisions are made by default for political, financial, or other reasons, unconstrained by science and are likely to deliver outcomes that do not balance our individual and collective needs now or in the future. We lack mechanisms to learn from persistent, repeatable failures related to provisioning challenges at the land/water/energy nexus. A modernized knowledge system for the sustainable management of landscapes needs intensified investment and re-orientation of existing activities.  Elements of such a knowledge system already exist and can be leveraged to mobilize these resources toward providing decision-makers with insights on managing multidimensional trade-offs across landscapes.

The KSS Collaborative: The Collaborative is an international network of partners across academia, government and business who collectively seek to understand risks of defaulting to business as usual.  It dismantles traditional disciplinary boundaries to adapt, adopt and invent our way through the transition from an economy focused on maximizing productivity and growth at almost any cost, and an economy that better delivers sustainable livelihoods for all. It is built around a decentralized, shared virtual space across national, disciplinary and organizational boundaries to test the assertion that by linking disparate spatially and temporally specific information together that integrate human and ecological dimensions, we may build systems that better inform current and future decisions, and better describe, hence value risk.
KSS: Our concept of a knowledge system has five intersecting dimensions:  (a) Decision Processes and Decision Support; (b) User interfaces, participatory processes and learning systems; (c) Modeling and Scenario Building; (d) Data, information and knowledge assets relevant to sustainable provisioning at the land/water/energy nexus; and (e) Cyberinfrastructure. Together, these dimensions can shed light on the impacts of individual and collective choices on landscapes and ecosystems, and begin to communicate this knowledge to the people actually making the decisions, from the farmer to the supply-chain manager to the policy maker. An integrated, comprehensive and fully geo-referenced knowledge foundation, which scales from local to planetary frames, is an essential asset especially for projecting the consequences of climate change on productivity and biodiversity and land management decisions on weather and climate. We use geographically defined “cases” anchored in a common framework to work systematically across scales and geographies to access and link data, information and knowledge assets to decision-making. 
 Within each “case” and across the five intersecting “dimensions,” we are working to build communities of practice that generate, curate, and/or deliver data, information, tools, analytics, and knowledge assets relevant to sustainable landscape management.

Contact: Prof Molly Jahn (mjahn at cals.wisc.edu<mailto:mjahn at cals.wisc.edu>) or Dr David LeZaks (LeZaks at wisc.edu).

- BW
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