**Testimony of Robert C. Harriss**

**President & CEO, Houston Advanced Research Center**

**The Woodlands, Texas 77381**

**Before the Subcommittee on Energy and Environment, House Committee on
Science and Technology, Hearing on "Energizing Houston: Sustainability,
Technological Innovation, and Growth in the Energy Capital of the
World",**

**February 29, 2008**

Mr. Chairman, Thank you for inviting me to testify. My name is Robert
Harriss and I am president of the Houston Advanced Research Center
(HARC), a nonprofit organization dedicated to moving knowledge to action
to improve human well-being and the environment at the regional scale.
As an institution, HARC does not take positions nor engage in advocacy,
so the opinions expressed here are my own.

For the record, I have been involved with energy, environment, and
related sustainability issues as researcher, educator, and science
administrator serving universities, NSF, NASA, the National Center for
Atmospheric Research, and the Houston Advanced Research Center for the
past 43 years of my professional career.

My testimony today draws heavily on the work of the Board on
Sustainability and Sustainability Roundtable at the National Academy of
Sciences/National Research Council. The National Academy Press
publication titled *"Our Common Journey: A Transition Toward
Sustainability"*, published in 1999, provided a new foundation for
thinking about pathways to more sustainable futures. The continuing
leadership of Robert W. Kates, recipient of the National Medal of
Science, William C. Clarke of Harvard University, William Merrell at
Texas A&M-Galveston, and many others, continues to reveal and refine new
insights and pathways for advancing the well-being of both our nation
and the global environment.

**THE URBAN AGE**

The Greater Houston and Upper Texas Coast region, our nation, and Planet
Earth are nearing critical tipping points that will result in declining
economic prosperity, dramatic environmental degradation, and other
serious threats to human well-being. Prospects for today's children, and
especially our region's vulnerable populations, hinge upon more
aggressive and effective leadership in advancing the science,
engineering, and policies necessary to achieving more sustainable
futures.

The United States has demonstrated an extraordinarily successful
capacity for discovery and innovation in developing new technologies,
innovation processes, and public policies that serve commercial and
national security purposes. In little more than a century our nation has
moved from an agricultural, to an industrial, to an urban age.
Remarkably, today our top 100 metropolitan areas take up only 12 percent
of the land in the United States, but account for 68 percent of our
population and 75 percent of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product. The
urbanization of America and other advanced nations, combined with the
increasing role of cyberspace as the primary infrastructure stimulating
economic globalization, positions cities as the primary platforms for
addressing the major challenges facing the world today.

Cities are essential sources of opportunities for social advancement and
the creation of wealth, globalization, and creativity. But many cities
are also dysfunctional both environmentally and socially. They are large
consumers of resources, reservoirs of poverty, and concentrated sources
of pollution. The Houston metro area reflects the complexity,
opportunities, and challenges that we face in the urban age.

**URBAN SUSTAINABILITY: AN *EMERGING FIELD* OF "USE-INSPIRED" RESEARCH,
EDUCATION, AND INNOVATION**

Sustainability science is a new paradigm that aspires to integrate
research and knowledge from the natural, social, medical, engineering,
and policy sciences and to inform decision making and stimulate
innovation. It is defined by the practical problems it addresses,
specifically the problems of sustainable development. It is focused on
scientific understanding of strongly interacting human and environmental
systems. Sustainability science is generally place-based; at
metropolitan and regional scales where complexity is comprehensible and
integration is possible, innovation and management happen, and local
culture is understood.

Present systems for governing and implementing R&D encourage good
research that is anchored in single (or closely related) disciplines and
is either fundamental (e.g., university R&D) or specific to commercial
products (e.g., industrial R&D). The essence of sustainability science,
engineering, and policy is synthesis and integration of knowledge and
treating policies and projects as opportunities to learn. Relative to
conventional science less emphasis is needed on elite researchers making
discoveries and more on connecting diverse stakeholders in a sustained
collaborative dialogue on an important shared problem. The outcome of a
sustainability process and project is to increase stakeholder options
and make choices among them. HARC is committed to the goal of being an
effective, trusted bridging organization dedicated to solving
sustainability issues in the Greater Houston and Upper Texas Coast
region.

**THE NEED FOR A NATIONAL NETWORK OF URBAN SUSTAINABILITY CENTERS**

America has several times solved complex issues through the
implementation of a distributed network of centers that could facilitate
a knowledge dialogue aimed at use-inspired research and education. The
development of industrial age agriculture benefited from the Land Grant
College program. NASA's network of regional research and engineering
centers has been successful at integrating university and private sector
researchers into national space technology R&D programs. There is an
urgent need to provide an institutional framework appropriate to solving
the many sustainability issues facing the major metropolitan regions of
this nation. Regional urban sustainability centers would catalyze,
facilitate, and support the integration process necessary to creating
use-inspired solutions to the grand challenges facing American
cities---shaping the transition to a renewable energy future, adaptation
to climate change, sustaining biodiversity and ecosystems services,
reducing vulnerabilities to pollution and natural disasters, etc.

**A TRANSITION TOWARDS SUSTAINABLE ENERGY SERVICES**

Long-term sustainable development must be based on clean, affordable,
and renewable energy services. Today's most critical sustainability
issues like global climate change, energy security, and urban air
quality can be directly connected to energy systems. Current efforts to
design a transition towards future sustainable energy services will fail
because many of the objectives related to public goods (e.g., national
security) and externalities (e.g., air pollution) that are not currently
priced in markets. A fundamental transition in energy systems would also
be subject to "market failures" derived from abuse of monopoly power,
lack of information, perverse incentives, short-term planning horizons,
and other factors.

A transition beyond business-as-usual toward energy systems that support
socially, environmentally, and economically sustainable energy is
possible. Many technologies and scenarios are available that could meet
the requirements of lower costs of delivering energy services, lower
energy intensity of economic activity, lower emissions intensity of
economic activity, and enhanced resilience to climate surprise.
Conventional R&D is necessary but not sufficient to achieve the goal of
sustainable energy services. Creating usable knowledge that informs the
design of sustainable energy services requires solution-driven research
and innovation and must consider the place and scale of operation.
Regional urban sustainability centers would catalyze, facilitate, and
integrate the dialogue between stakeholders in civil society, business,
and government through which scientists and engineers learn what users
need and users learn what scientists and engineers can offer. As
America's energy capital, Houston would be the ideal setting to assemble
the expertise necessary to develop the goals and institutional framework
for a national network of regional urban sustainability centers focused
initially on the transition towards sustainable energy services.

**THE NEED TO MOVE QUICKLY TO SCALE**

Energy will be our most important technological and social challenge in
the 21^st^ century. America's metropolitan regions are likely to grow by
a further 100 million people in this century. By 2030, fully half of the
American built infrastructure in place will have been constructed since
2000. Our current federal technology and environment R&D programs will
not drive a transformational change in the design process or
implementation of a transition to sustainable energy services. There is
an urgent need to move quickly to scale and to maintain a long-term
commitment to funding sustainable energy programs by both public and
private sectors. This commitment is essential, given the long lead times
required for transformational changes in both technology and human
capital.

In summary, I suggest that urban centers are the focus of our
sustainability problem and they should be the source of innovative
solutions. We should employ models of innovation based on collaboration
and facilitated by organizations capable of bridging from basic research
to application. The first challenge to be addressed by this network of
urban sustainability centers should be development of systems for
sustainable energy services.