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Leadership, business and the public good
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By Johan Pauw, Managing Director, SAEON
The growth in stature that SAEON has achieved during the first decade of its existence, is well-illustrated by many of the articles in this issue.
In (typical) subtle but effective ways, SAEON has provided local leadership and support for a number of relevant initiatives and groups. Leadership is provided in a collegial fashion that allows for sustainable partnerships and synergies to develop, avoiding destructive domination by any of the parties.
In some cases, a small amount of funding from SAEON has made all the difference; in other cases our intellectual and/or logistical contributions helped shaped initiatives to become landmark events.
Given that public funds drive the competitive South African research sector, inter-organisational politics often constrain research progress. How may this be avoided? One way would be to play the role of a neutral facilitator, a role that SAEON seems to be playing fairly well. SAEON’s neutrality is made possible by three key aspects of its design.
In the first instance, SAEON is based at the National Research Foundation (NRF), a grant maker that supports the full disciplinary spectrum of research at a wide range of research organisations. The NRF therefore occupies a neutral position in the National System of Innovation.
Secondly, SAEON exists purely for public good and delivers public value through its focus on long-term environmental observation and research, longitudinal data sets, data portals with geospatial analytical capacity, and its environmental science education outreach programme. SAEON therefore has no commercial interests and is able to commit to mutually beneficial partnerships without any restraints.
Thirdly, SAEON nodes are hosted by five different host organisations and receive advice from stakeholders representing the greater organisational network of SAEON. This broad organisational support base of SAEON implies that its agenda cannot be self-serving, but has to aim for shared successes.
SAEON is therefore ideally placed to play a leadership role in the environmental sciences sector of South Africa. This position is further enhanced by SAEON’s nodal structure that covers the South African landscape and surrounding oceans, offering six permanent platforms supporting external researchers and students who need a base from where to do fieldwork and who need access to research sites/areas with established longitudinal data sets.
SAEON scientists are predominantly under 40 years of age. This holds the promise that they will continue to expand their individual leadership roles from within SAEON.
SAEON and business
Over the past three years I have come to realise that big business holds the potential to become major supporters of environmental observations and research.
This is not only because they often own large tracts of land, but also because it has become incumbent upon them to ensure the sustainability of their business through prudent environmental management and control of environmental impact on natural systems. Shareholders are demanding that businesses include environmental matters as part of their corporate social responsibility reporting, which implies that they would need to monitor certain environmental indicators over time.
It would be a pity if the data so gathered did not enter the public domain. The individual cases equate to ecological experiments; when analysed collectively, these data would make a tremendous contribution to new knowledge and understanding. To maximise this opportunity would require formulating appropriate scientific questions and designing appropriate monitoring programmes. It is unlikely that businesses would go all the way along this route, but by allowing SAEON access to their research sites and data, a win-win situation may be achieved.
A case in point is the controversy surrounding the fracking for Earth gas in the Karoo. During a recent Long-Term Ecological Research (ILTER) network meeting in Portugal, we were informed about the government of Portugal's license for the construction of a large dam in the Sabor River for hydro-electricity generation - on condition that the dam is monitored and managed independently over a 70-year period following construction.
This condition resulted in the Portuguese LTER network being able to establish an LTER site at the dam, with funding by the dam owners guaranteed for the next 70 years.
Through SAEON's Arid Lands Node in Kimberley and collaboration with the University of the Free State, the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University and others, SAEON intends to pursue the opportunity of establishing a long-term environmental monitoring and research programme for fracking impacts. This programme should be funded by the businesses involved, as a condition for the government's license for exploration (now) and possible gas production (later). We believe this type of outcome would be a win-win situation for all stakeholders.
It therefore makes sense for us to explore relations with big business in terms of monitoring and research collaborations. However, it is important to note that SAEON is not an environmental consultancy and should therefore avoid performing environmental impact assessments and environmental management consulting.
Value for money
Considering that SAEON's core funding from the South African Department of Science and Technology (DST) is only R19m for the year, and that this has to pay for the running of six nodes, a coordinating National Office and 46 permanent staff members, it has to be conceded that SAEON is delivering an excellent return on this investment of public funds.
We are currently running some 169 research projects, of which 17 benefit from international funding. In the first six months of this year, we published six co-authored ISI papers, with several more in the pipeline. We are currently supervising 29 Masters, PhD and postdoctoral students and mentoring 12 interns.
Last year's landmark publication "Observations on Environmental Change in South Africa", accompanied by the policy summary "Combat change with Change - both available free of charge - remain cornerstones in the DST's Global Change Grand Challenge.
With the news that the annual allocations to government departments will remain unchanged, and given that salaries are expected to rise along with the inflation rate (at the very least), it implies that SAEON's operational budget will shrink and that the excellent return on investment that we have been offering will drop significantly.
This is not only true for SAEON. Productivity across the entire National System of Innovation would be constrained, resulting in a reduced rate of scientific papers, degrees and patents flowing from the system.
With some creative thinking and prudent planning and management, we ought to be able to absorb a portion of the knock, but given that SAEON has been running efficiently all along, there would be very little fat to burn.
