What is an acceptable level of competition with natural ecosystems ?
The Chair " Innovations for a Sustainable Future " was created as the result of a convergence of values between EPFL and Landolt & Cie, Swiss Private Bankers : to contribute to build a sustainable world for the future generations. On one hand, EPFL is educating future leaders, as well as developing cross disciplinary research, both for facing sustainability challenges. On the other hand, Landolt & Cie, Swiss Private Bankers are promoting high ethical standards and awareness of transmitting patrimony to the future generations. The new Chair, anchored in our School of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering, was officially inaugurated in September 2008. It will build its strength from a multitude of concrete and innovative initiatives in teaching, research and technology transfer. As its primary objective, the program will bring every year to the EPFL campus a world-renowned specialist in an area essential to sustainable development. While at EPFL, this invited professor will extend their research, teach EPFL students, help guide semester and Master's projects and organise interdisciplinary and public-oriented activities.
Amilcare Porporato is the first occupant of the new Chair. He comes from Duke University, where he's professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and an expert in Ecohydrology. This emerging, interdisciplinary field studies the critical role of water in all kinds of ecosystems.
Even though he's an engineer, Porporato is interested in plants. They underpin our very survival, sitting as they do at the bottom rung of the food chain. Plants suck up sixty percent of the available fresh water on the Earth's surface, and return it, through transpiration, back into the atmosphere, to fall as rain on other plants somewhere else. Plants thus play a critical role in the planet's hydrological cycle - and hence Porporato's intense interest.
The problem of sustaining a society is not only a problem of providing water to drink, but also providing water for growing food. And as water is diverted from biologically diverse natural ecosystems into huge swaths of single-crop agriculture to feed livestock and growing populations (or produce biofuels), concerns about biodiversity and sustainability become more and more worrying.
Porporato and other ecohydrologists would like to answer the milliondollar questions : what is an acceptable level of competition with natural ecosystems ? How much water can we take for our own needs without catastrophically altering planetary biodiversity and thus shooting ourselves in our collective feet ?
As if that were not complicated enough, climate change also threatens to throw everything for a loop. Rising temperatures in themselves are not the biggest problem, but rather the resulting change in rainfall patterns, which could have catastrophic consequences. And because rainfall drives ecosystem dynamics-not only natural ecosystems, but agricultural and urban ones as well-ecohydrologists agree that it's critical for us to get a grip on what these changes might be.