Bridging the Gap: Interdisciplinarity and Global Sustainability – Interview with Prof. Steve Evans
How can the world’s leading scientific minds accelerate the transition to a sustainable industrial system? This is the central question in the latest Academia Europaea interview, featuring Professor Steve Evans, Director of Research in Industrial Sustainability at the University of Cambridge and a member of the Academia Europaea Board.
In this featured conversation, Veronica Lott of the Wrocław Hub speaks with Professor Evans—who also serves as the Treasurer of Academia Europaea—to explore the critical shift from traditional disciplinary silos toward a framework of “interdisciplinary excellence.”
Professor Evans argues that this evolution is essential for addressing the world’s most complex and urgent environmental challenges. The interview examines how Academia Europaea’s unique multidisciplinary network can leverage its intellectual capital to move beyond pure scholarship, fostering high-impact collaborations between industry and the academy that deliver solutions at the scale and speed the planet requires.
Academia Europaea
Welcome to Academia Europaea podcast where ideas meet and discipline merge. I am Veronica Lott and today I’m speaking with Professor Steve Evans, Director of Research in Industrial Sustainability at the University of Cambridge. Professor Evans has worked with Toyota, Chanel, Airbus and hundreds of other companies and has been shaping, in a sense, how industry and academia can actually deliver sustainability at the speed the planet needs now. Steve, welcome.
Prof. Steve Evans
It’s good to be here.
Academia Europaea
I would like to talk about interdisciplinarity. You are in Wroclaw Tech also on the occasion of the event devoted to interdisciplinarity: ArtTechScience Conference. You’ve spent decades standing between disciplines, engineering, business, design and even policy. When you look from the middle ground, how do you see interdisciplinarity? Is it a method, a mindset, or a way of seeing the world?
Prof. Steve Evans
Yes, what a great question. Because it’s all. If you want to be really, really competent at interdisciplinarity, it becomes a mindset to begin with. It’s a method. You have to, if you’re learning it for the first time, trying to escape your own discipline, you have to do it with a technique. So, I have to do this with my data, I have to do this with my language to communicate better with other disciplines. If you reach near the end of that interdisciplinary journey, it’s a mindset. And the mindset should be one of the joy of exploring new places with other clever people around you.
Academia Europaea
You said at the beginning, you need a method. This, in my understanding, would mean that somehow, the concept of method may be more characteristic for people who come from the technical background, rather the humanistic background. Do you think it is like that?
Prof. Steve Evans
Well, I can understand why you might ask that, but I think that you are potentially in danger of treating one set of disciplines. The science based disciplines are somehow less competent in interdisciplinarity than maybe the humanities and social sciences. But they all have their own histories and their own weaknesses when they want to invite others in. So although the weaknesses are different, they do still have weaknesses. The social sciences are not massively welcoming other disciplines any more than a physicist is massively welcoming of other disciplines. So I don’t think they’re different in essence. They’re not different in practice. They have different sets of skills and techniques. So how you gain mastery differs depending on your starting point.
Academia Europaea
Do you think that are we interdisciplinary enough to survive ourselves. I mean, are we open enough to be interdisciplinary?
Prof. Steve Evans
Two answers. So I’m interpreting the question in two ways. You choose which one you want to go. If we interpret survival as survival of the individual, then there are many people who will be able to manage their academic and other careers within a single discipline, but that number is diminishing. And if you want personal survival, being able to interact well with other disciplines is an increasingly important skill. So, yeah, please learn how to do that. You don’t have to be amazing at it, but you have to be welcoming of working with other disciplines. If I interpret the question to mean saving the world, the answer is undoubtedly yes. Yes, yes. No discipline can solve these enormous great challenges. And, you know, we could talk about geopolitical challenges, environmental challenges, social dislocation challenges. There is no discipline that I know of that can take one of those and offer us a clear pathway to resolve it. So we are going to have to work together to tackle the great challenges of our time.
Academia Europaea
I have another question somehow interlaced with the previous one: You spent years designing sustainable systems. If interdisciplinarity were a machine, what would its weak points be? If there are any at all
Prof. Steve Evans
I might be wrong, but my instinct tells me that the weak point of interdisciplinarity is that we have to communicate into a world which is expecting disciplinary excellence. I’ll give an example. If you want to influence policymakers, you almost inevitably have to speak in the language of economics. So interdisciplinarity’s weak point might be that embracing all disciplines actually makes it difficult to get your message across to different audiences. And policy and economics is only one example of the audience.
So we might have great answers, but nobody is listening. That’s what I’m saying is there also.
Academia Europaea
Is there a risk that as disciplinary borders blur, we may lose the focus required to identify the specific ‘weak points’ within a single problem?
Prof. Steve Evans
Well, I think that we are seeing the rise of degrees that include strong grounding in more than one discipline. So I don’t fear the loss of technical excellence within one discipline. Of course, what we can’t do is to provide, for example, an undergraduate education that covers all disciplines. That’s just asking too much. But the fear that somehow we forget the basics because we are aiming for the highest possible integrated knowledge achievement, I don’t think happens. Interdisciplinarity doesn’t happen fully in the head of a single person. So we don’t need a single person who can understand all subjects. Interdisciplinarity is a group endeavour and you hope across the entirety of that group that they’ve got all the basics that they need.
Academia Europaea
I understand. Thank you. You are also a member of Academia Europaea and now on its board, one of Europe’s leading scholarly networks. What can an academy like that actually do to accelerate sustainability?
Prof. Steve Evans
Academia Europaea exists to support excellence in scholarship and excellence can also mean impact. But we’re here to support it, not to drive it. As the world demands the bringing together of excellent disciplinary knowledge to solve the great challenges of our time, the world might ask, what can academies do to help? And in that case, Academia Europaea, I believe, is in a much better place than many others because of the range of disciplines that this particular academy can call upon. And that’s one of the reasons why I find it exciting to be a member of Academia Europaea. Sitting in a room with a linguist, having a conversation with an expert on media, as well as somebody who’s an expert on soil science, allows us to go and find problems and solutions in a way that maybe others find more difficult. I think sustainability, which is my own subject, of course, is sufficiently multidisciplinary that it would massively benefit from the competences that Academia Europaea can bring.
Academia Europaea
In many cases, the pace of industry and the urgency of planetary boundaries demand faster action than typical academic timelines. How can institutions like Academia Europaea and universities alike evolve the incentives, structure systems to support faster, more impactful research, rather than just slower, more incremental work.
Prof. Steve Evans
We’ve seen some. We’ve had some really interesting conversations today with younger academics who really want to tackle big challenges. And I think that we can’t run away from delivering as people.
Academia Europaea
We as academia.
Prof. Steve Evans
We as Academia. Yes, we as academia can’t run away from ensuring that the basic disciplinary competence exists. You know, we are teachers as well as researchers. We absolutely need that scholarship to be of the highest quality. But if we want to move to delivering impact, not just good quality research, then you’re right to worry about our timeline, our sense of urgency, our incentive. And right now we might have to operate outside most of the mainstream incentive structures. I believe there are increasing sets of funding and projects that have some of that sense of urgency in there. As a sustainability scholar, we really are in the world where weeks matter. We’ve gone from decades, to years and months. And I’m afraid we’re at the point where weeks matter. And I’m not sure that we’re within anyone’s time scales. I’m not sure whether we are now operating weeks within political time scales, within business timescales, within citizen society timescales, or academic timescales. So my feeling is, as with many human situations, we will have to have a type of car crash. We will have to have a big moment, and then we will organize our resources to respond after that moment. Academia Europaea and academies and universities in general will have to respond at that time.
Academia Europaea
Do you think that our situation is so catastrophic?
Prof. Steve Evans
I’m a very hopeful and a positive person. And when I do my teaching and my research, I speak about the future in hopeful and positive ways because I find the alternative. Well, there are many better speakers than me and I think that they do a really great job of explaining the size and scale of the problem we’re in. I’m on the solution side. I’m trying to solve that. But in order to do my job, I have to understand the size and shape of the problem. So I do a lot of reading about exactly how urgent things are. And I remember one poor person, after I was doing some teaching in Finland, she came to me the next morning and said, I really enjoyed and benefited from what you were teaching yesterday. But I went home and cried. Please, people, become informed. And if you are informed, you will understand what we mean when we use the word urgency.
Academia Europaea
Well, I understand. Let’s move maybe to a more neutral question.
Prof. Steve Evans
Let’s not make our audience cry.
Academia Europaea
You have both deep academic credential and a strong industry engagement pedigree. From your point of view, how can academia better prepare the next generation of researchers so that they are comfortable moving across disciplines like engineering, business to policy and also comfortable engaging with industry and societal stakeholders?
Prof. Steve Evans
I think we have to allow young people to gain a very solid grounding in their disciplines to begin with. Let’s not create confusion by taking people at the age of 18 or 16 and saying, hey, you have to go into the real world and apply this knowledge straight away. But I also think they mature very rapidly and do enjoy taking that knowledge and taking it into the real world to solve problems, whether that’s a societal problem, an economic problem or an industrial problem or a policy problem. In our experience, they love it. So let’s build that into the education. Let’s give them my view. We have to give them two years of solid grounding. By the time they’re 20, they want to use it. And their best way to get better is to start using that. And it might be in the lab. However, that experiment must come from understanding this research question is interesting because of the external context and let them go out and find that context for themselves rather than have a translator.
Academia Europaea
Very interesting view, thank You for this. I have the last question for you to close up our conversation. Looking forward five to ten years, what do you hope Academia Europaea will be doing differently or additionally when it comes to supporting modern thinking in sustainability, innovation, but also industry, academia, collaboration?
Prof. Steve Evans
I think we’re picking up a theme here, and it’s no surprise. It’s a theme that comes in part from my own enthusiasms and my own biases. And that theme is, let’s build on excellence. You can’t escape basic excellence. But Academia Europaea has that. It has excellence in abundance. And I find that when I’m with members, they love talking with each other because they know the other people are good at what they do. And if you leave them alone for long enough, they’ll find an interesting problem or an interesting theory or idea that somehow bridges their disciplines. So for me, Academia Europaea has this potentiality to tackle really exciting and really challenging problems. And in the next five to 10 years, I hope that we can learn how to bring the members together to do those exciting and to tackle those challenging problems. Much more than we’re doing at the moment.
Academia Europaea
Let’s hope. I really would like to see the transformation. Maybe the future will belong to those who can speak across the languages and the disciplines. Steve, thank you very much.
Prof. Steve Evans
Thank you.
