Abstract
In the coming decades, the countries of Latin American have the opportunity to improve living standards, move toward a more rational and sustainable use of natural resources, benefit from a favorable demographic structure, consolidate democratic governance, and maintain sound economic policies.1 At the same time, however, these countries face many economic, social, political, cultural, and environmental challenges that may inhibit their progress in the aforementioned areas. Given the complexity of the challenges, traditional strategies will almost certainly be of limited utility. Challenges such as environmental protection and poverty are, in essence, “equations of state.” Every challenge has numerous etiologies, is difficult to describe fully, and certainly does not have only one right answer. Horst W.J. Rittel and Melvin M. Webber of University of California at Berkeley have labeled such challenges as “wicked problems” (Rittel and Webber, 1973). Given the complexity of these “wicked problems,” the creation of new, integrated knowledge and the education of holistically thoughtful practitioners and leaders capable of addressing them is essential to Latin America's future success.
The challenges facing the countries of Latin America have not developed overnight but rather over time, as the influence of humans has grown. In the late 1800s, Italian geologist Antonio Stoppani suggested that humanity's significant and unparalleled influence on the planet had ushered in a new, human-influenced era, which he labeled Anthropozoic. Stoppani's concept languished for decades until the Nobel Laureate and Dutch chemist Paul Crutzen resurrected it as Anthropocene, noting that “We are no longer in the Holocene. We are in the Anthropocene” (Kobert, 2011). There is no question that many of the changes that characterize the Anthropocene era have improved both the quality and longevity of human life. The National Academy of Engineering (2012) has identified the 20 greatest engineering achievements of the twentieth century. It would be virtually impossible to contemplate modernity without such achievements as electrification, clean water, radio and television, and computers.
These great strides, which have been heterogeneous both geographically and socioeconomically, have also regrettably been accompanied by climate change, the latent costs of which must be borne by all without regard to how much they have contributed to that cost. In its report, The Weight of Nations: Material Outflows from Industrial Economies, a study of the material outflows from five industrialized economies (the United States, Japan, the Netherlands, Germany, and Austria), the World Resources Institute estimated that 50%–75% of annual resource inputs are returned to the environment as wastes within a year; of these inputs, the majority are greenhouse gas emissions associated with the consumption of fossil fuels for energy (Layke et al., 2000). In contrast, the entirety of Latin America is estimated to be responsible for only 6% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Clearly the impact of greenhouse gas emissions on the region is incommensurate with its contribution to them. Furthermore, in the future, various regions of Latin America will bear disparate burdens. For instance, according to global circulation models, the anticipated temperature increases in the Andes will greatly exceed those of the surrounding lowlands, and the rate of increase in this region is projected to be two or more times the regional average (Vergara et al., 2007).
Deforestation is the major contributor to climate change in the region. Today, deforestation is proceeding at a rate of about 2% per year, with an estimated 40% cumulative loss of original forests (University of Michigan, 2010). While tropical forests once occupied 16 million km2 worldwide, today, only about 8–9 million km2 remain. Although still covering about 30% of the earth's land area, aggregate forested regions equivalent to the size of Panama are lost annually. With the loss of forested lands comes a loss in carbon sequestration during photosynthesis, which is a major benefit of these lands. As these regions are burned, degraded, or cleared for other “economically beneficial uses,” not only is the sequestration capacity lost, but carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere along with other greenhouse gases, including nitrous oxide, methane, and other nitrogen oxides—a significant economic externality (Food and Agriculture Organization 2006). The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (2006) has estimated that deforestation can contribute nearly 2 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere annually.
Considering the myriad of factors, only one of which is deforestation, that will influence a sustainable and efficacious development strategy for the future of Latin America in the face of climate change, one is struck by the enormity and complexity of the task. Michael Porter of the Harvard Business School has done an excellent job of defining Peru's current position and resources, challenges and opportunities. His paper, “A Strategy for Sustaining Growth and Prosperity for Peru,” (Porter, 2010) discusses the determinants of competitiveness—determinants that may apply to every Latin American country. Notwithstanding the important factor-input conditions that he has identified—administrative infrastructure, physical infrastructure, education, workforce skills, financial system, and science and technology infrastructure—his analysis is neither linear nor deterministic. Latin America is and will continue to be a complex system of systems (governance, financial, technological, ecological, and legal) with nonlinearities, feedbacks, and emergent behavior that will require modification and adaptation to shifts in global financial markets, demographics, and many other foreseeable and unforeseeable changes, as well as climate change.
Derek Bok, the former president of Harvard University, once noted “Of all our assets, a trained intelligence and a capacity for innovation and discovery seem destined to be the most important” (Bok, 1986). It goes without saying that any successful adaptable plan of sustainable development will have these assets underpinning it. Thus, those seeking individuals to develop such a plan should turn their attention to their universities, which have long been recognized as breeding grounds for these assets. But what kind of environment best fosters universities? New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has written, “The best of these ecosystems will be cities and towns that combine a university, an educated populace, a dynamic business community, and the fastest broadband connections on earth. These will be the job factories of the future” (Friedman, 2012). When we look at Latin America through this lens, however, we see only three institutions of higher learning listed in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings (2012): the University of São Paulo (Brazil) in the top 200 and, in the top 400, the State University of Campinas (Brazil) and the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile.
As the nations of Latin America work to develop plans, policies, instruments, and technologies to encourage robust economic development, they may find that their most worthwhile investment lies in the development of institutions of higher education that are competitive with the very best research universities in the world. Given the range of GDP per capita in Latin America—from 3.2k $PPP (purchasing power parity) in Guyana to 14.5k $PPP in Argentina (in 2009; Economist, 2011)—it is difficult to envision more than an initial handful of these institutions on the entire continent. However, working together collaboratively in public/private partnerships and across national borders and interests, a few well-selected and well-designed programs could be launched to conduct the research and education so desperately needed. Such a home-grown, organic approach is an opportunity to think beyond the traditional educational hegemony to institutions that are cutting-edge in vision, holistic (Grasso and Burkins, 2010) in philosophy, and Latin American in focus. These institutions would not only train the next generation of broad-minded, responsible, ethical leaders and innovators but also create the new knowledge that will be needed to lead Latin America through the challenging times ahead to a prosperous, sustainable, and equitable future. Just as Frederick Terman, provost of Stanford University in the 1960s, built Stanford's science, statistics, and engineering departments into international “spires of excellence,” and Stanford into one of the world's preeminent universities (Epstein, 2010), a collaboration of Latin American governments and private enterprises could develop institutions that would create “spires of excellence” in areas critical to the future of the region. Over time, as the spires matured, these institutions would develop more spires until each institution was uniformly excellent.
As precursors to actual universities, developers may want to consider collaborative online graduate programs similar to the Lived Experience of Climate Change E-learning project supported by the European Union Erasmus Program (Open University, 2012). This program was initially piloted using six universities and has developed postgraduate online learning resources and virtual learning communities on the local impacts of climate change (e.g., how individuals and groups experience extreme weather and/or biodiversity changes). Most students in the pilot studied for credit, and some used it to support master's theses. While students were accredited in their home institutions, they learned together on a virtual mobility platform that included participation in a learning community with practitioners from Europe and beyond.
Over the past several decades, Latin America has made significant progress toward becoming prosperous and sustainable. Rich in natural, human, and social capital, many countries in Latin America have already made important policy choices toward a better future. If Latin America, in the face of the many sociopolitical, cultural, and environmental challenges that lie ahead, is to seize the opportunities associated with democratic governance, sound economic policies, and its demographic structure, the region must have educational institutions of the highest order working on issues of local relevance with global consequences. The private businesses and governments of Latin American countries would be well-advised to convene a high-level working group to explore this approach. No exogenously derived plan, no matter how well conceived, will be successful in outlining a sustainable future without world-class research and educational institutions to consider the important questions of our day and develop relevant research agendas to address them. In the words of Louis Pasteur (1854), “le hasard ne favorise que les esprits préparés” (Chance favors only the prepared mind).