Nola Reporter

The news is full of stories detailing the negative impact humans have  had on the environment and the potential peril of precious natural  resources, such as water, that sustain life on this planet. But John  Sabo, director of the Tulane ByWater Institute and  professor in the Department of River-Coastal Science and Engineering at  the School of Science and Engineering, is one of a new vanguard of  scientists who are moving away from analyzing the problems to finding  solutions to them. 

“I’ve characterized this old kind of science as going to hell in a  handbasket faster science. So, I started thinking about pivoting towards  the future and really framing science in how to make the world a better  place,” Sabo said.

Sabo has a 10-year history of working with big business — Coca-Cola,  Intel, PepsiCo and Levi Strauss, to name a few — on sustainability and  water stewardship. His newsletter, Audacious Water, began three years ago when he was at Arizona State University, where he also founded Future H2O-B, a private-sector benefit corporation partnering with Fortune 500 companies to transform the global future of water.

When Sabo came to Tulane last August, he immediately began expanding  his communications efforts by adding a companion to his newsletter, the podcast Audacious Water. He also began writing a column for Forbes magazine, with the intention of reaching a much wider audience. 

“It’s a fun column to write because you can color out of the lines a  little bit more than you can in science, and it’s important to do that,  because it makes people read it,” Sabo said. “When you start doing  multidisciplinary work, you’re communicating to a wider audience that  may not know your mission by heart. It’s a nice opportunity to refine  the messages so they land in important places.” 

And Sabo’s mission? He believes that it is possible to solve the  planet’s water problems by using goal-oriented interventional science —  what he calls “clinical trials for planetary health” — and what his key  partner — the Army Corps of Engineers — calls “engineering with nature.”  Clinical trials are Sabo’s call for using natural infrastructure to  meet modern-day challenges (such as storing floodwaters in aquifers for  use in times of drought). For Sabo, it is a question of being  courageous, experimenting and collecting data on what works and what  doesn’t. One of his goals is the creation of a national lab for the  Mississippi River, which is the fourth-largest river in the world and a  major pathway of commerce. 

Sabo believes that scientists should work in conjunction with  corporations to build a strategy and to finance the research needed to  transform dysfunctional waterways into healthy ones, as well as  addressing other pressing water issues.

“One company can’t fix the problem, but many companies acting  simultaneously can raise substantial resources and also serve as a  catalyst for other sorts of funding to get the job done at a bigger  scale, whether that’s public money, philanthropic money or other sorts  of money,” Sabo said. “It’s all part of the intervention-based  approach.”

Inspired by the success of his Forbes column, Sabo plans on  writing a book within the next 18 months, further exploring the idea of  how we can engineer nature to solve the problems of the Mississippi  River Basin. 

“When you do public scholarship, it has to be motivated by a mission  that’s bigger than just yourself,” he said. “For me, it’s about  translating scholarship into lasting change for the world at a time when  the world most needs solutions.”

_{Source: https://news.tulane.edu/news/bywater-institute-director-sees-better-way-science-change-world}