Universities and industries can collaborate to improve the sources of knowledge. Industries are able to influence markets. Universities can have an impact on learning. However, governments affect markets and learning as well. Therefore, problems caused by the inefficiency of governments will only be tackled if universities and industries can work together integrally and powerfully towards sustainability principles and goals.

For more information about the relationship between university, learning, government, market, industry and knowledge see the following paper:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/241755976_An_Advanced_Triple-Helix_Network_Model_for_Smart_Cities_Performance

Thanks for your input Aryan. Agreed, Industry and Universities need to collaborate more closely to bring sustainable solutions to market faster. Governments can certainly support this by investing more in R&D. As an example, Canada appears to be the only developed country out of most European and Asian countries, that has actually invested less and less, year over year, in Innovation (R&D) as a % of GDP the last 5 years. The complex issues facing humanity, to ensure our survival and co existence with other species, seems to be paralyzing, as expected, decision making and actionable behavior, The intention of my post is to elicit input and feedback from a wide variety of scientists on Research Gate to see what everyone thought was the simplest, fastest global strategies we could employ to make a whopping difference to the current (environmental) state of the world. The huge amount of private sector investment in space technologies, by companies such as Space X, Blue Origin, VirginGalactic and Stratolaunch (the Billionaires Space Race), is in a way admitting defeat and planning for a future Earth that is uninhabitable. If the same finances and brain power were directed to solving our current issues, we'd be much further ahead than we are.

I think about this from the other side. In about 25 years, we're going to see Peak World Fossil Carbon, and after that there will be no planetary economic growth that is tied to increasing fossil carbon consumption. Before that happens, we have to (at least partially) disconnect our economies from carbon. If we have to do that in 25 years, then there is nothing really gained by not figuring it out today. In fact, I would argue, that figuring it out today is required so that we have 25 years to implement it with a minimum of collapse.

Following Peak Fossil Carbon will be Peak per capita Usable Energy, which looks like another 25 years after that. So it doesn't matter how we switch to any combination of known technologies, when we include improvements in efficiency, we will see peak usable energy in the mid-2060 (very fuzzy error bars, I'm afraid). After that time, no planetary economic growth will come from increased energy production and consumption. So we also have to figure out how to get by with less per capita energy, and find a way to have the benefits that come from economic growth, without that growth. Again, nothing is gained by not doing this now - I suspect it will take that long to get it in place.

And yes, climate change is an existential problem. So is soil loss, collapse of open ocean fisheries, clear-cutting of rainforests, etc, etc, etc. All of these together make up a very weighty Wicked Problem.

The first step to solve any problem, Wicked or not, is to adequately define the problem. In this case, all of these problems come from over-consumption (of all kinds).

So the first step in the solution is to reduce consumption by those who have an ecological footprint larger than their biocapacity, down to what one's own ecosystem can support. If your ecosystem can't support all of your demand, you'll need to negotiate with your neighbours to that you can co-manage some of their resources (they will likely want to co-manage yours, too), so that you can be sure that your biocapacity doesn't decline from over-harvesting. This isn't technological in nature - it's resource policy, thus politics.

The second step is to find ways to ensure that everyone has their needs met. That probably means that the poorest people in your community must get access to more resources (of all kinds), which likely means that the richest people in the community must give up some of that access. This is difficult politically, because there is some status that comes with accessing those resources (be that a 3rd home in the Alps, or a yacht off the Great Barrier Reef), and these people have enough clout to make the rules. But the good news is that the loss of access to the resources for the very rich makes next to no change in their quality of life, but the access to those resources make a huge difference to the poor. It has to be done carefully, ensuring that the loss of resources is made up for through some other means to improve quality of life (free yoga lessons? Massage becoming part of the national health act? Dunno, not my thing...)

Then, finally, we come to technology. We have to find ways to be more resource efficient and more effective at meeting our needs with the resources we are using. That means things like creating barrier free cities, and moving more people with less carbon, and finding ways to close the nutrient cycle, are all good ideas. In a technologically rich community, this is the last thing to do. In a technologically poor community, yeah, some wonderful things can be done with a little battery and a solar panel.

So to answer your questions - it depends on where you are and what needs are currently unmet in your community. Yes, of course it can be commercialized - people have a need and they will pay to have it filled. But stop with meeting wants instead of needs, and subsidizing polluters and the like.

Thank you for raising this topical issue in applying R&D for a fast fix for climate change as a result of the current alarm bells from the scientists that we have reached the point of no return regarding climate change.

I think, the most urgent fast fix for climate today is the mental, attitudinal, and behavior change by all the key stakeholders from individual to global activities.We should now stop calling climate change a hoax or a chinese propaganda. We should now commit to the spirit and letter of the 2015 Paris Club Agreement

There is now a global unisom on the adaptation message worldwide. It is a global partnership that could be driven the world governments who should coordinate or made to do so with active participation of the key partners led by the private sector without whose efforts, all the adaptation dreams will never materialise.

Global response will require compliance with the Paris Club commitments, regional or national policies and legislations in addition to local government decentralised climate actions. Given that GHGs are a product of economic production, consumptions, environment management, and business investments, the private sector is at the centre of the entire adaptation technologies, clean energy technologies, CPMs, and carbon trading protocols.

in this case, we need to mainstream climate change adaptation into all production sectors with a focus on social, economic, environmental, legal, and political development issues.

The most important intervention in favour of climate change adaptation success, is mainstreaming gender equality in all climate services including climate information services.. As a result, the fastest and most effective way to stop/reverse/slow/adapt to climate change from a commercial point of view is to practice private sector lled green or blue economy, mainstream gender equality for empowerment of women and girls, practice SDG 17, and promote business ethics.

If we practice the Paris Club Agreement which provides for 100 billion USD per year, it will possible to make a significant progresses in building green technologies or assemble/commercialize what is needed to achieve the goal of the PCA, which is the agreed framewwork for making progress to SDG 13.

Best regards

Wilson

Douglass, I hope it is true that at least some world economies could be weaned from carbon as the primary energy source in 25 years, however, the amount of carbon that is already and will still be released, would apparently have climatic impacts for centuries if not millenia. Unless there is some mechanism that can sequester excess?

The current US and Canadian Governments do not seem to be moving in a direction that suggests a commitment to moving away from carbon and there is really not significant global deployment of new carbon free technologies is there?. No doubt a lot of the situation we find ourselves in is a result of corporate interests that have influenced governments and academia.

Paleoclimate reconstructions suggest climatic changes can be quite abrupt, and seems to me we might be caught off guard as a species and there’s no global coordination to plan for something like that. At this point, it’s each to his own then. Perhaps an algorithm analyzing big data can come up with a solution, since humans seem incapable....or capable of many wonderful things, except connecting the dots?

We're are going to be Sustainable.  That's not in doubt.  The challenge comes from predicting who (and how many) will be here when that happens, and what the lifestyle is going to be.  The existing power structures want the answer to be 'Us, doesn't matter about the rest, as rich as we possibly can be.'  Which means the answer will be 'Lifeboat mentalities get caught in the undertow, which leaves the survivors clinging to wreckage all around the world'.  The only acceptable answer is to keep the Titanic from sinking.

There is a proposal to convert the martian atmosphere into plastics for use on a colony.  If that can be done there, then we could take the CO2 out of our atmosphere using surplus power.  Increase baseload for all nuclear reactors to cover peak external demand, and then use the surplus as it is available to convert CO2 to carbon, and drop it into old coal mines.  It would take all of the reactors in the world 100 years to accomplish this, and it would exhaust the known supply of uranium fuel, and we would then have to figure out what to do with the waste fuel, but it could be done.

It's not that it's impossible to fix our problems.  We all want someone else to bell the cat, though.

Designing an Optimal 'Tech Fix' Path to Global Climate ... - siepr

https://siepr.stanford.edu › default › files › publications › 12-029_paper_6

by A van Zon