Oxford University has embarked on a “large and ambitious project” to tackle the biggest problem of the 21st century — climate change.
Sir David King, former chief scientific adviser to the British government, is the head of the new Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, which opened in January. On a visit to South Africa to speak at the Science Festival in Grahamstown, King said the intention of the school is to “expose every student at Oxford” to the problem of climate change and to “avoid green compartmentalising”.
Oxford is one of those significant institutions that educates the future business and political leaders of the world, so King sees an opportunity to “mainstream the issue” particularly in the political, economic and philosophical choice of courses that many future leaders will make.
The school, which has been endowed by the Martin Smith Foundation, has several aims: to put the consideration of environmental problems into the teaching and research programmes at Oxford to draw together an interdisciplinary team of international researchers to find solutions and to make environmental solutions marketable and therefore possible.
The school has drawn a team of senior research fellows from all over the world to start this project. King is delighted with the “wonderful range” of knowledge and talent and the spread of countries from which they come.
The idea is not to create another entity that sits in an awkward disciplinary space in the university but to inject into already-existing research and teaching the necessity of considering these problems. This, says King, will “affect the nature of research”.
Ultimately Oxford will not only publish the scholarly outcome of its knowledge-generating work but also produce models for different business practices that can be made real.
The school has thus attracted big business partners — such as BP — to work with on these problems. The idea is to put the “best science” and the “best technology” together, he says.
King says Oxford is geographically within the IT hub of the UK (which includes London and Cambridge) — an area that is generating a great wealth of new technology projects and businesses.
King comes to this job as a world expert on climate change and a pragmatist about just how huge the problem is to change government attitudes and business practices.
He has formidable experience. In his time as science adviser he got the British government to enlarge its budget for science projects from £1,2-billion to £3,7-billion. His remit spanned the range of science challenges, from monitoring the possibilities of a plague of bird flu to advising other governments about carbon emissions. King has worked closely with both the Chinese and the Indian governments.
His approach to the range and complexity of issues was to identify particular problem areas and then to create what he calls “foresight” teams on each one. This meant he could call on field experts to help identify key problems in particular areas and then propose solutions.
The “foresight” idea is one of mapping scenarios for the next 20 to 80 years and then making decisions about how to avoid that future. This provokes innovative thinking and strategies about necessary changes.
Because he is so conscious that climate change is a global problem, King puts his energies into those strengths that a university has — education and research innovation.
He says: “I am essentially an optimist. Since Kyoto 1997 we have had 10 wasted years, but there is a big societal transformation in knowledge of the problem at the media level and in public. And we now know basically what needs to be done, we have to manage the impacts of climate change.
“We are not doing this for our generation; we are doing it for our children and our grandchildren.”