Theme 7 - Diversity, Integrative Research, And The Relationship University-Society

Cultural and biological diversity is a fundamental condition for the sustainability of socioecological systems. However, both forms of diversity are rapidly eroding, in an unprecedented ocioenvironmental crisis in history. The erosion of cultural diversity, expressed as a homogenization of practices, behaviors, and institutions, increases the similarity of human cultures (in spite of local resistance), and reduces the resources that humanity has at its disposal for adaptation to changing social and environmental conditions, often leading to the loss of resilience of socioecological systems. Erosion of biological diversity poses a serious risk of disruption in the provision of ecosystem services necessary for human quality of life and survival, and implies a serious ethical problem, either within an approach that assigns intrinsic value to biological and ecological processes and systems (according to a bio centric or eco-centric ethics that goes beyond the anthropocentrism focused on ecosystem services), or from the point of view of the assignment of responsibility to our species, responsible for a mass extinction that results from its choices and decisions (although this capacity of decision is not evenly distributed among humans, which adds a democratic dimension to the problem). Given this scenario, the scientific community and the institutions that shelter them, such as universities, cannot avoid playing their roles and responsibility. In seeking to do so, however, two noticeable obstacles emerge: the fragmentation of scientific knowledge in the face of the complexity of socio-environmental problems, and the interrelations of its various components; as well as the gap between the production of scientific knowledge and social practices, decision-making, management, which has been named research-implementation gap, or research-practice gap, or know-how gap. Therefore, it becomes central to the scientific community and to the universities, to conduct integrated research on diversity and to build bridges on the research-implementation gap. In such context, the Biology area of UFBA and the INCT in Interdisciplinary and Transdisciplinary Studies in Ecology and Evolution (IN-TREE) have accumulated experience that will be made available to UFBA for a better approach to this theme.

We will seek to raise the level of internationalization of research and postgraduate training related to this subject by supporting the means that favor the international circulation of knowledge. These include, inter alia, support for publication in foreign languages, in particular in English; support for doctoral internships abroad in the form of doctorate sandwich scholarships; support for the stays and missions of our researchers in the research centers abroad with which the theme is developed; attraction of researchers with internationalized experience for visits and stays at the Universidade Federal da Bahia.