SCIENCE FOR SUSTAINABILITYOur research is broadly motivated by the challenge of providing sustainable energy, water, and food to a growing human population in a fast-changing world.
Directed by Dr. Rafael M. Almeida, the ECS Lab is housed in the O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University, Bloomington.
We address pressing environmental challenges facing global energy, water, and food systems—both independently and in an integrated context. These include greenhouse gas emissions, land-use change, water quality and quantity, hydrological alteration, and biodiversity conservation. We frequently focus on renewable energy systems, particularly hydropower and solar, as well as human-made aquatic ecosystems like reservoirs and aquaculture ponds. Our analyses are solutions-oriented, aiming to understand trade-offs between benefits and impacts while exploring strategies that maximize climate resilience and other positive outcomes. Our approaches are interdisciplinary, encompassing ecological fieldwork, spatial analysis, and data science to gain insights across multiple scales—from global syntheses to regional studies of aquatic and agricultural ecosystems across the Americas.
Read more about some current focal themes of research in the ECS Lab below.
Strategic hydropower development
Hydropower is the world’s largest source of electricity, and dam construction will continue proliferating as global economies shift away from fossil fuels.
How can we balance social-ecological costs and energy benefits to inform better dam siting decisions? How will climate change affect future hydropower portfolios? How can greenhouse gas emissions from carbon-intensive hydropower dams be avoided or mitigated?
Floatovoltaics and agrivoltaics
Decarbonizing the global power sector will require the deployment of solar panels over vast areas worldwide. Two nascent solutions to reduce land-use conflicts of the solar revolution are to deploy solar panels over already converted land such as reservoirs, irrigation canals, and agricultural fields.
We are interested in evaluating multiple sustainability dimensions of ‘floatovoltaics’ and ‘agrivoltaics’, including GHG benefits, ecological advantages and risks, economic viability, and barriers to implementation. Where and under what conditions will floatovoltaics and agrivoltaics be more promising or challenging? How does shading from panels affect ecological processes in aquatic environments and agroecosystems?
Aquaculture sustainability
Aquaculture is the fastest-growing sector of the global food system, and farmed fish production already exceeds wild fish catch globally. We are especially interested in the expansion of freshwater aquaculture in biodiverse river basins such as the Amazon.
What drives emissions of greenhouse gases from aquaculture systems, and how do these emissions compare with those of other animal food sources? What practices and conditions could reduce the greenhouse-gas and land-use footprint of aquaculture? Which aquaculture species are most suitable to balance economic, nutritional and environmental objectives?