RIHN research projects are organized through five research domains: circulation, diversity, resources, ecohistory, and ecosophy. In concept, the domains are complementary but to date they have operated largely as separate fields. In order to describe how their findings may achieve a higher level of integration - to form the field of ‘global environmental studies’ and achieve a qualitative improvement in human ability to address global environmental problems - the institute must further elicit and develop synergies between projects and domains. As we open RIHN’s second phase, we are developing a new set of initiatives to accomplish this task.

First phase research projects

In the first phase, individual projects conducted multidisciplinary research on key areas of environmental concern, including water circulation, atmosphere, climate, oceans, subsurface environments, islands, ecosystem and landscape change, food production systems, disease ecology, and environmental history.

First phase: Domain-specifi c project structure

Second phase initiatives

Beyond description, consilience entails “a jumping together of knowledge...across disciplines to create a common groundwork for explanation” (E.O. Wilson 1998). To this end, we now focus our efforts on conjoining the existing domain-based programs through a new set of cross-cutting initiatives. The goal of the initiatives is to elucidate the sources and essential qualities of the problems under study, and so to enable new consideration of the future potential in, and enhanced design of, interactions between humanity and nature, or what we call “futurability”.

The Futurability Initiatives

Second Phase Initiative Structure