Mobilizing Research and Ingenuity for Sustainable Options
Ismail Serageldin, Director, Library of Alexandria in Egypt

John Mutter: Jeff, thank you so very much for those insightful, comprehensive and important remarks to begin the conference. We'd like to now move into the first session of the four sessions I described in opening the conference. Session One deals with science and ingenuity, the role of science and ingenuity in understanding the feasibility of sustainable development. This session will look at how research and ingenuity can provide and protect resources of energy, water, biodiversity, particularly as they affect and contribute to climate change. Now the way each of these four individual sessions is going to run is as follows. There is an individual moderator for each of those sessions. It's not me. So a moderator will come to the stage and introduce the panelists whose names you see here. They will each give their presentation, then they will be brought back to the stage, and the moderator will animate a discussion among those speakers.

Now, importantly, all of you I'm sure have questions you want to ask and questions you want to have answered. It's been our experience with conferences this large that trying to achieve that by having questions from the floor basically fails. Too many people have questions that they don't get to ask and don't get answered. Some people get quite disappointed and in our experience some get quite angry. So what we've done is borrowed from a technique that's used in large freshmen undergraduate classes, and all of you can provide written questions, there's an opportunity to do that outside, and we will collect all the written questions and provide answers to them. We do this now in these large undergraduate classes. I must admit I was deeply skeptical of that idea when it was first introduced, but believe me it works. We will ensure that all of these questions do get answered. The final panel that will be conducted by John Rennie of Scientific American we will collect a group of the most diverse, interesting and challenging questions, and John will use those to animate discussion at the final panel.

Now it's my pleasure to introduce the moderator for the first panel, she's Darcy Kelley, the Howard Hughes Medical [he actually says “Memorial”] Institute Professor of Biological Sciences at Columbia University, and she will be introducing this panel. She is, as I said, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor, she's co-director of the Natural Sciences and Behavioral Course in the marine biology lab at Wood's Hole, and she founded the Columbia Doctoral Program in Neurobiology and Behavior. She edits the Journal of Neurobiology, and she has given many distinguished lectures, including that of the Forbes Lectureship of the Grass Foundation. She has a BA from Barnard College, just across the road and up the street, Ph.D. from Rockefeller Institution where she was also a post-doc. But I know Professor Kelley in a different role. She is in fact in part of my life my boss. She is the originator, the chief architect, and chief promoter of our Frontiers of Science course which is now introduced into Columbia's core curriculum in which all students in the entering freshman class learn about a diverse range of science, including Darcy's, which she gives several lectures on. I have a the pleasure of conducting one of the seminar sections in that series. So I welcome to the stage Professor Darcy Kelley.

Darcy Kelley: …solving the problems that we face, which are many and profound, but also for the purpose of educating and enlightening our policies. And so it's in that spirit that we founded Frontiers of Science, we want our future educators to think that a subscription to Scientific American is a natural way to behave. And in this first session we're going to address the issues of research and ingenuity as they relate to sustainable development.

Our first speaker is Ismail Serageldin, distinguished scientist and political force in Egypt, educated at Cairo University there and also here in the United States at Harvard. He is the Director of the Library of Alexandria, and he has founded a number of very important projects, including the Global Water Partnership and the Consultative Group to Assist the Poorest. He has published a very large number of books, ranging over an extraordinary large set of topics, all of whom [which] are central to sustainable development, biotechnology, world development, and the value of science to society. And his title today is “Mobilizing Research and Ingenuity for Sustainable Options.” Let's welcome Ismail.

Ismail Serageldin: Well, thank you, Darcy. It's always a very difficult task to come after Jeff Sachs. We haven't coordinated our talks, but I think I had sort of understood from the assignment that I will try to give the promising avenues of the future, in response to some of the problems that he's done. I put the big question mark because, like Jeff, I'm concerned, not about our technological abilities, as I am about our abilities to actually give the priorities of our scientific research where it needs to go. So that's why I put the big question mark. Otherwise I'm an incurable optimist on all sorts of things.

Let me start out, I will give a prologue briefly, then I want to define what I think of our sustainability in terms of opportunity, define its components and how technology and science and research is ongoing, and then maybe coming back to saying why we need to organize for action, because if we don't then the science will not happen, the technology will not be deployed, and the outcomes we wish for are not going to come about.

So when you see these divider sheets like that, these headings, I'm getting closer to the end, so don't worry. Definitions. Research and ingenuity as given to me, I've taken to imply science and technology, science meaning the knowledge which we gain about the functioning of nature, and technology being utilitarian ends derived from it. And sustainable options are those that make a sustainable growth path possible, hence the title is defined, it affects all nations. And today I think we are living through a remarkable period where the planet is interconnected by the ICT revolution as never before. In fact I was delighted with this little cartoon at the end of the millennium with the old year passing on the new century, and the little new century saying, “Can you e-mail it to me?” It captures the spirit of a new generation where in fact political boundaries are far less important than they have been in the past, and that new generation, I think, will change a lot of things.

In terms of content of the knowledge that we are now processing, it's amazing. We have over a thousand books published every day, but seven million new documents added to the web every day, about five hundred billion pages. We've produced more information in thirty years than in five thousand years. Now we need to organize that into knowledge, as Jeff I think gave us a very clear presentation of how information can be organized into knowledge, and I think he challenged us to transform that knowledge into wisdom.

Now the problem for many people to act upon and mobilize is that in the past we used to be parched for information. And as a result it was received like a drop of water to drink, and that was not enough, it was far too little. Now we're getting far too much. And knowing the good stuff from the bad, and being able to judge is difficult. So we need to find portals and ways of organizing the enormous amount of contradictory data. The media reports today that coffee is going to give you cancer, tomorrow it's something else. There's a lot of confusion out there and we need to mobilize people around key, clear themes, like Jeff did so well. We need to ensure that this information is available for the wealthy and for the poor. And yet today, as was said before, so many of the poor are in fact scraping in the bottom of mud holes for their water.

I am a librarian now, I was vice president of the World Bank for environmentally sustainable development for many years, but I think that there is a new function for us, to help frame the debate in filtering information and organizing it, and I think part of the help for the world to cooperate will require inter-operabililty of systems. We all know the problems between Macintosh and PC, that is a small example of standards. We have a preference for open standards like we see with Linux where people can add and build on and participate, because they makes them belong more than proprietary systems, but the question is always who sets the standards? Frequently those that have the power abuse it for national or commercial reasons at the expense of the consumer or the user, especially in developing countries. Take a goal like fifty by 15, to connect 50% of the world by 2015. That's important in order to provide medical information, or to provide cultural information ????? information. It's not going to come about without standards, there must be common standards that enable all of these interfaces to work. And they should be market driven and governments must provide frameworks for antitrust and for public goods. Public goods, ladies and gentlemen, are those that are defined in the economic literature as being non-viable and non-excludable. Adam Smith, he of “the invisible hand” wrote about them, and we need to recognize them, but it is the function of the government to do it.

The digital future is here, and it has enormous promise. But at the same time it has also a downside. Today there are huge efforts underway to make the literature available, to make information available, to make science available all around the world. I live in a country where the subscription to something like IEEE cost $110,000 a year, but where in fact the engineer makes $200 to $300 a month. So tell me how that is going to work. And we need therefore to discuss how and what we're going to present. These digital libraries of the future are being built now, and I'm hoping that they will contribute to spreading the information, spreading the message, that Jeff so eloquently gave us at the beginning of these proceedings.

Now, let me move to sustainability as opportunity. It is something I've worked on a lot with a number of colleagues through a series of publications, but I think that we went off on a wrong track from the Bronson Commission's definition that said sustainable development is that which meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. It's nice, it's elegant, it's totally impossible to operationalize. What is the meaning of “needs?” For people who are starving that's fairly clear, but what about those who have already two cars and three televisions and two VCRs and a PC at home? Yet it is the latter kind that really consume 85% of the world's consumption. And thus we can't define a path based on the idea of needs. So we came up with an unsatisfactory way of saying well, let's try to test the proposal against economic, ecological and social sustainable aspects, relying on different ??? of indicators, but somehow it never came together, never gelled in a quantitatively feasible way that would satisfy us. So we came up with this new definition as sustainability as opportunity. It's very close, but very different from the Bronson definition. It says sustainability is giving future generations as many opportunities as, if not more than, we have had ourselves. Now that can translate to give future generations as much, or more, capital per person than we have had today. If my son has more capital than I've had, he has more opportunity of generating a service and income stream. The question becomes what kind of capital? Well, in terms of economic sustainability it's fairly clear. You don't deplete your capital and call it an income stream, so manmade capital or produced assets is it. On environmental sustainability we have natural capital. But when we come to social sustainability we have human capital, education, health, nutrition, imbedded in me, I take it with me if I migrate. But there's also social capital, the glue that holds societies together. This is manmade capital, buildings, roads, cars, etcetera. Natural capital are the ecosystems, the services that are being provided that Jeff mentioned. Human capital, capacity imbedded in an individual. And social capital, that which holds society together, allows transactions to take place. And we have seen that the absence of social capital results in disasters, from Somalia to Yugoslavia, where differences in human capital were very large, but where in fact both countries fell apart, Lebanon and Liberia, and so on.

Now that means that we have four types of capital at a certain mix level, and we want to increase them over time, or at least hold them constant per person. Now what is happening will also accept that the mix between them will change with time, and that's an important point, because it says, for example, for non-renewable resources like copper, yes, it does make sense to deplete copper in the ground and invest in educating little girls in Zambia. And that tradeoff between capitals is important, but it's not all of it, because if you were to close your eyes and try to imagine any one of those four kinds of capital equal to zero, you can not imagine anything taking place. So they are partially substitutes, partially complements, and therefore we need to have a mix change over time, but being careful how that mix change is over time.

We tried to measure this on two occasions when I was at the World Bank. In '95 we did an audit on environmental progress, with nearly 200 country estimates of the stock of real wealth, as measured by these four kinds of capital, and here's the result. Surprisingly in every case produced assets, manmade capital which is the heart of economic analysis, macroeconomic analysis, is less than 20% of the real wealth of nations. 80% comes from human and social, which we've shown together here as red, and natural capital which varies in various countries. These were the small population gulf oil exporters that gave this 44% here. We did it again two years later with more robust estimates but not our country coverage for 100 countries, and the result is still stunning. It's almost 60% is in human and social resources, produced assets are barely 20%, and natural capital is about 20%. And this enabled us therefore to really analyze the question and come back saying that we need to understand better how that social capital works because there's been a lot of work done on the human capital, and with Partha Dasgupta, whom I hope will come to this conference later on, we did some work on that.

So what can we conclude? That capital is comprised of four kinds, manmade, produced assets, or natural, human and social capital, that they are partially substitutes, partially complements, and the mix can change over time but critical boundaries must be respected for each type of capital separately. Now with that we may have a little bit of a definition that enables us to operationalize it. So analyzing what happens to capital and wealth as an important new perspective that is not captured by conventional analysis of income flows ?? government, GDP, whether it is measured in local currency, PPP, or other forms of exchange rates, valuations, is a flow measure, it measures flow. In fact, not only does it measure flow, countries behave in ways that they wouldn't allow corporations to do. Countries in fact can deplete their capital and call it income. If a corporation did this in New York they would be put in jail for fraud. You can not deplete your capital without showing it on your balance sheet, because countries do not maintain balance sheets. So we need some policy formulation that will require both the flow and the stock analysis, and to recognize that the bulk of real wealth is in human and social capital, and therefore investing in human capital, in the well being of the poor, is very important.

Now I'm delighted with what Jeff said before because it leads directly to this point I'm going to make now, is that we don't have to get the poor to the same income level, $40,000 per capita, in order to achieve that. In fact what we notice here is that for roughly $1,500 per capita in 1980 dollars you can get almost 85% of what you will get with $20,000 per capita. And that means that yes, this is an achievable target for the poorest of the poor, and I think Jeff, being true to the tradition of Ketterle [?] properly quantified it as saying 4% and 6% on the GDP and the CO2 emissions.

More importantly, and the good side, of the application of research and technology is this family of curves that I've shown here, which Greg Ingram drew, and this is 1950, 1961, 1970, 1980, 1987. What is important there is that if you notice for the same amount of per capita income you're getting significantly increased life expectancy. And that means that by deploying a proper technology, we now understand about vaccination of children, we understand a lot of other things, oral rehydration therapy, etcetera, etcetera, you can get significant improvements for even the same amount of per capita income. That's important.

Now let's move therefore to what can research and technology do? Actually I'll just say two things about that very quickly. I'm very fond of history, as Jeff knows. The word “scientist” came into our language only in 1840. It was invented by Whewell. He said I need to find the word for the cultivators of knowledge, and I think we'll call them scientists. It's 1840. The word research and development, R&D, comes into the language only in 1923. And yet in less than a century it has transformed the world with the involvement of corporations and others to link science and technology as never before.

So what can we do with manmade capital? Well, we can reduce the input per unit of output. That's something that the ??-based economy is doing, and there's a lot of promise in the BINT area, biotechnology, IT and nanotechnology coming together. I'm not going to talk much about that. I just want to show that in fact even in the United States you can increase population, increase GDP, but reduce consumption, in this case, of water. And Peter Glick and I spent time arguing about what this meant, and it turns out to be a primary impact on the Clean Water Act, which resulted not just in water consuming companies reducing their pollution, but in fact changing the technologies.

Look at this comparison of India and the USA, for example, in emissions per capita. US is twenty-four times the India. But per unit of GDP it's three times more efficient, partly because we don't have people who burn dung, and we don't have people burning wood to generate their basic energy, but because of the poverty, which is again a point that Jeff made. But therefore it is conceivable that as we go up in terms of material well being, and I agree with Jeff, it's absolutely necessary, as we move out along this line that with judicious thinking about research and technology we can reduce the per unit of GDP requirements of inputs. In addition, the production of manmade capital has an impact on natural capital, which was discussed by Jeff in his magisterial presentation, and therefore I would argue that assets produced with less inputs will have less negative effects when used, and they are more valuable. And here the new sciences can help a lot.

How? Well let's take agriculture. The primary interface between humans and the environment is agriculture. About 70% of all the land transformed, and about 65% of the water globally is drawn for agriculture. In developing countries it's about 80 to 90% of the water. Over the last fifty years fertilizer use has been increased twenty-three-fold, pesticide use has been increased fifty-three-fold. This is an amazing thing. And now with science in the industrial countries we can go for precision farming, where you try to dose those things much more effectively than you did before. But it is going to be in the developing countries that the battle will be, because for the next twenty years or so we will need a huge increase to meet population expectations, and we would have to increase water withdrawals by 14% and irrigate the land by 22% under current technology, and that we must transform this technology to be more effective.

This is my scariest statistic. When you say to people “How much water does somebody need?” For drinking two liters a day, for washing another ten, fifteen, take fifty, make it a hundred. But for food that you eat we on average take 2,700 liters. And the statistic is easy, one calorie, one liter, approximately. US takes about 5,500 liters to produce around 3,200 calories. Pastorialists in the ??? take about 980 liters to produce seventeen, eighteen hundred calories. But the average turns out to be 2,700 for 2,700. So every calorie we eat we've taken away a liter of water. So we need more crop per drop, a nice statement invented by the IMMI director. And guess what? Well known technologies can help a lot, and this is another - Jeff didn't say it today, but he gave us beautiful talk about how we should think about very off the shelf technologies. We know irrigated land is more productive than rain-fed land. But if you think of it in terms of kilogram per cubic meter of water rather than per unit of land you get a very different picture. Yes, it's more efficient, but supplemental irrigation is almost three times more efficient, and that means just coming in with a little bit of additional water at the appropriate times in the season, and relying on a combination of rain-fed land and irrigation. And then reusing treated waste water. This is sorghum and ??? irrigated with treated waste water in Kazakhstan, for example. It is certainly a feasible solution to reuse water. And of course we touch upon the genetic imperative.

Now here the issue comes back not to the feasibility of the science, or the feasibility of the technology. We will have it. But as we look forward the question is who is going to have it, and who is going to control it, and who is going to deploy it for the benefit of whom? We will be very soon assembling genomes like Lego sets. And the question becomes what is going to be the product of that? For the American farmer in the Midwest - this is a cartoon obviously, but this is not, this is real, this is a cucumber, this is a real cucumber. Now are we going to sort of fool around with that? Well, how about this, this is my proposal. Super upland rice for the poor around the world, that has high yield, disease resistant, cold tolerant, pest tolerant, perennial stems, erosion minimizing, weed suppressing, drought tolerant, adapted to adverse soil, nitrogen fixing, and deep rooted, and it can be done. New plant types can be designed. The question is not whether these scientists will be able actually to produce the new kinds of plants, it is whether the benefits of that research is going to go for additional flavors for the wealthy consumers, or to assist this farmer. She is the one who produces 80% of the food and not only to improve her lot, but also to make sure that they get some of it. And these are the poorest of the poor, these are the ones that we must lift up from poverty where they are. So the new sciences can help. The question is whether they will or not.

Next is industry. Now we had lots of hopes for the chemical industry. This is an ad I found in a 1954 magazine of National Geographic. It's unfortunately about saying how chemistry, new chemical industry, will change India's future. Well, the same company, Union Carbide, produced the Bhopal, India, probably the largest industrial toxic waste we have. We now have other problems with toxic wastes, including radioactive wastes, and when they're buried in the ground sometimes with leakage you have these moonscapes where nothing will grow anymore. And here industrial biotechnology can be extremely helpful. It is already being helpful as we move from chemically-based processes to biological processes, biodegradable, renewable resource, energy efficient, we can recycle and reduce waste, and we have benefits in detergents, textiles, baking, animal feed, biofuel, enzymatic-based processes. This is from a study OCD did for Europe. In textile treatments the savings in use of caustic soda was ten times, and in water was two and a half times. And in many other industries you could give similar statistics. They are three to ten times more energy friendly and more environmentally friendly than conventional processes. So the new biotechnology enzymes a la carte [?] become very helpful.

Now the other part of it is waste from human consumption. We talked about the poor, but the rich cause a lot of waste. The poor actually even scrounge for food amidst the waste that you see here. The rich create this enormous dumping ground of used tires, as an example. Pollution from industry. Distressing oil slicks. Will we be able to have bacteria do that work for us? I think it is feasible. We're getting now to be so precise we can even put our molecules where we want them.

In natural capital what it's all about is really protecting natural capital by reducing the ecological footprint, which is the impact we have, as I mentioned for example, with 2,700 liters a day, that's part of our ecological footprint. We need to reduce that, and the new life sciences can help us understand the ecosystem better and help us conserve it better by going into that system, understanding the use, for example, of biocontrol for pests and diseases, other ways of dealing, understanding the links between the species through their DNA, which was not possible until recently, now we can map the relationship between species much more accurately, we can in fact do a lot more than we did before from phytoplankton and atoms in the oceans, all the way to the coral reefs that are rapidly disappearing around the world.

Human capital, we have to recognize the enormous differences that now exist. PCs per 10,000 persons in the OCD countries is 1,800, middle income countries 230, in the low income countries of sub-Saharan Africa it is 1. So we have to keep moving on that. If you look at what's happening on the gross tertiary enrollment ratio, for example, this is the way it was in 1980. By 1996, fifteen years later, yes, the lower income had improved but the high income had improved even more, and therefore the links were being lost. This is not mentioning even what happens in the primary schools before you get to the high level schools. This is one of my favorite pictures, a little girl studying math in the US, this is a primary school in sub-Saharan Africa, not even a blackboard, children sitting on the floor, as you can see here. And it's these children who are the lucky ones because they're already enrolled in schools. We have to think about those who are not enrolled in schools.

Now it is possible with internet connectivity to bring materials in a different way to different people in remote areas that was not possible before. But that means that in addition to the conventional way of instruction we have to think in terms of guided learning, and self-learning as we have seen in India and Hole in the Wall. And again, the libraries would help in part of that.

Increasing human capital is going to be important. How? Because we'll get better health, better nutrition, and longer, more productive lives, and I don't mean just by better pills and so on, better nutrition such as, for example, Vitamin A rice, the so-called golden rice, iron-fortified rice, dealing with iodine deficiency, iron deficiency, Vitamin A deficiency, this required very advanced science and it ran into problems of regulation and patterns, but it's now being deployed finally.

This is not a picture about pigs, although I'm happy to hear about transgenic pigs that Jeff mentioned. It's one of my favorite pictures because it makes the case very clearly. These two pigs are twins. One was fed regular maize, one was fed quality protein maize. That's more powerful than showing you graphs of lysine content and the like. So more generally as we deploy some of these new findings we'll have longer, more productive lives for people.

Now social capital is important, it's how people come together and they build together their future. It is difficult to do, but important to maintain. And I believe that communication technology is making that more possible, not less possible, and that it is going to create national rather than local networks, and emerging global networks as well, only possible by the new connectivity that didn't exist before. We can think of easy access to materials, twenty-four hours, seven days a week, where you don't need to be physically located at these places, and there are examples from Vietnam and turning these little village hubs into knowledge villages. In India as well, ??? did some of the same material as well. Creativity will flourish in this new world. I'm a very believer in that, and as we move from the conventional view of creativity to one that is connected to the digital future we will be able to connect to global knowledge, not just local knowledge. And that's a big transformation for people in developing countries.

So I demand all knowledge accessible to all people at all times, and that requires rethinking about the huge cost barriers that now are being deprived. We should have the information of the world at our fingertips, learn more about distant cultures, and understand they will displace conventional books. The iPOD is important. You know, not only was this a good business model for a new technology, but you could carry twelve million scientific articles in an iPOD. Isn't that amazing, that that's already here? But is it being used for that? I don't think so. And now you can even carry movies if you want. So we have to move.

How do we get there? Well I think harnessing science, research and ingenuity can help increase the four kinds of capital, but we have to organize for action. We need to support science, and recognize - here's another very scary statistic, that if the difference between the rich and the poor is forty times in income, in research terms they're investing 220 times as much per capita. So the divide in science and technology capacity will probably increase unless we redirect some of that research, as Peter Singer suggested for example, and Canada proposed 5% of their annual budget for research on developing country problems, the mystery of economic growth will be deeper.

I'm not going to go on how to build a better capacity. That was the result of the Inter-Academic Council, you can get the report there. I had the privilege of co-chairing that with Jacob Palace [?]. Here's myself and Jacob Palace presenting that on behalf of all the scientists of the world to the UN with Mark Malloch Brown, who will speak later today. We need to support science by solving the problem of science and society, a policy framework. Secondly focusing on human resources, including the brain drain and turning it into brain gain. Institutions of excellence, recognizing the boundaries between the public and the private, and then dreaming up financing mechanisms. We need to go beyond the market and the state, to think in terms of the public support and striking the right balance between IPR - I'm not opposed to private sector, I would be foolish to move away from two-thirds of the funding of science which we would have. The problem is going to be to translate rhetoric into action. We've had many past declarations, many government announcements, but these are not equal to action. And this cartoon from the AU is very telling. English-Arabic, Arabic-English, French-Arabic, we're still missing a key translator, ladies and gentlemen. Many good declarations but it is still within our grasp. So let us go forward together to create this better world where mobilizing research and ingenuity will feed the hungry, heal the sick, protect the environment, bring dignity to work, and allow the joy of self expression. And working all together there is so much we can do for a whole generation, and indeed for the whole world.

Thank you.