Environmental foresight and models; cities of the future; sustainable technologies and business

How could urban water infrastructures be re-engineered so that cities may become forces for good in the environment? Can we entertain in any form the notion of "smart law" in the life cycle of an environmental policy? Could the fastest route towards a sustainable economy and society be through inspired corporate leadership? What might be the grand challenges of the future for environmental modeling? Answers to each of these questions share a common basis in the interdisciplinary research of applied systems analysis at the core of my research activities, in particular at the intersections of ecology, engineering and biomedicine.

For more than a decade, the Environmental Process Control Laboratory has been generating uniquely comprehensive databases on aquatic environments and urban water/wastewater infrastructures in Georgia.  How computer models are reconciled with such complex and complete observation records raises many methodological and algorithmic challenges, not least in respect to the way uncertainty in those models should be accommodated in studies of the kinds of questions raised in the foregoing Vision.

Georgia, Alabama, and Florida are in conflict over equitable access to the scarce resources of water in the Southeastern US. The issue is nothing less than that of whether economic development can be sustained, in particular, in metropolitan Atlanta and north Georgia. Adding value to every drop of water circulated and re-circulated around an economy of tightly interrelated activities, yet maintaining the benefits of a restored aquatic environment in the face of increasing risks of infrastructure failure provides our program with a natural prototypical laboratory exemplifying the challenges we must address in seeking to be less unsustainable.