Can networked knowledge help communities thrive on a turbulent planet?

By Andrew C Revkin

Science has long been focused mainly on knowledge frontiers, with universities often seeming to track “impact factors” of published papers more than a researcher’s impact in the real word.

But there’s been a welcome effort, of late, particularly in fields relevant to sustainable development, to shift priorities toward helping communities address challenges as humanity’s “great acceleration” plays out in the next few decades. An early iteration of this call came in a 1997 essay on “the virtues of mundane science” by Daniel Kammen of the University of California, Berkeley, and Michael R. Dove of Yale. (I discussed the essay in a lecture last year.)

It seems such efforts are gaining steam. For example, consider the growth of the Thriving Earth Exchange, an effort by the American Geophysical Union to help connect its global network of scientists with communities seeking science-based solutions to a variety of vexing problems...