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Innovation Incentive Initiative - Urban Environmental Health and Sustainability |
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There is a growing awareness of the urgent need to develop environmentally sustainable alternatives for fossil fuel energy, for agricultural chemicals, for conservation of natural resources and for urban development. To meet this challenge at a national level, federal funding agencies such as NSF, NIH and EPA have launched major initiatives for research on the underlying principles of environmental science and the development of environmentally sustainable practices and technologies that will underpin our economic future.
The modern urban environment is shaped by public policy that regulates spending on a variety of critical infrastructure systems. These infrastructure systems affect population mobility, economic choice, and environmental quality – in short, the quality of life for the urban dweller. While some interactions between infrastructure policy and the urban environment are obvious – drinking water and transportation systems precede most economic development – the long term effects of public policy decisions regulating critical infrastructure are nonlinear and hence difficult to predict or understand without a suitable theory and framework for analysis.
Urban environmental sustainability is especially critical for the State of Ohio, as we must simultaneously deal with the need for remediation of “brownfields” (the environmental contamination leftover from the industries of the past), contend with present-day impacts of urbanization and fragmentation of our natural and agricultural landscape, and prepare for the transition to environmentally sound economies of the future.
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