Mette Bendixen was awarded the 2020 Science for Solutions Award at the virtual AGU Fall Meeting in December. The award is for “significant contributions in the application and use of the Earth and space sciences to solve societal problems.”

For outstanding contributions that set a new agenda to solve a pressing societal challenge—the scarcity of sand resources.

Dr. Bendixen has worked on coastal processes in the Arctic region and, using unique archival imagery and remote sensing data, showed how Greenlandic deltas are now growing more rapidly than earlier in the 20th century. She innovatively applied statistical techniques to quantify the impact of major controlling physical factors such as the melting Greenland ice sheet. She published her findings in Nature (Bendixen et al., Nature, 55, 101–104, 2017). It turned out that with a rapidly melting ice sheet Greenland’s deltas receive a large and steady supply of sand.

Dr. Bendixen realized, in a pivot from her initial interests in just the physical system, that if sediment loads to Greenland deltas are indeed so large, could they be a part of the solution to the global sand scarcity problem? She published this idea first in a commentary for Science, bringing together the new knowledge of the enormous sediment load originating from Greenland and the fact that sand is becoming a sparse resource globally. The world needs sand for infrastructure, housing, road bases, and coastal defense but has been running out of this most basic resource. Mette’s paper demonstrated her ability to relate her geomorphologically based research to societally relevant solutions and innovations. This was a highly original idea with an implication for Greenland to potentially make use of the sand accumulating at their coastlines for export. The initial idea was further developed by putting the shear sand volumes into a context of modeled future economic value and scarcity of sand.

Moreover, in her current work, Dr. Bendixen is building collaborations between research, industry, and policymakers to work toward defining a sustainable future for sand. She now collaborates on research on sand scarcity and is seeking information from Greenland’s citizens directly through surveys. Her research agenda further broadened and also investigates sand mining in Africa—perhaps one of the most understudied continents in the sense of river sediment fluxes and, consequently, sand resources. Providing these insights in the rate of mining and resource extraction will be vital information for regulation and sustainable use.

Congratulation, Mette, for a well-deserved recognition of your creativity and persistence to bring your interdisciplinary science to contribute solutions to societal challenges!

—Irina Overeem, University of Colorado Boulder

I am exceptionally honored to receive the AGU Science for Solutions Award for my work on global sand scarcity and potential solutions to solve the growing demand. I am deeply grateful for the nomination and want to thank my colleague and nominator, Associate Professor Irina Overeem, for being supportive and enthusiastic about my work and my colleagues for supporting this nomination. Specifically, I am deeply thankful to my doctoral adviser, Professor Aart Kroon, for having trained me to think holistically and critically about my research and for supporting my curiosity throughout my academic career. With a background in physical geography and geomorphology, I have come to appreciate the growing interdependence and linkages between geosciences and human activities and how these links are increasingly adding challenges to our environment and society. Being open to cross-disciplinary collaborations and not being afraid to ask sometimes even basic questions are fundamental when trying to solve these global challenges. Receiving the Science for Solutions Award makes me exceptionally proud, and I am confident that I could not have advanced my work to this point if I hadn’t had the opportunity to work with and receive support and guidance from a broad set of researchers and colleagues, indeed also from outside the academic community. In a time when global challenges are rising, I believe it’s extremely important we are tackling these challenges across disciplines and through an integrative and interdisciplinary approach. I trust that this can only be done through respect for, with inclusion of, and in collaboration with Indigenous communities. I want to also take the opportunity to thank AGU for supporting early-career researchers and Peter Schlosser for establishing the Science for Solutions Award. Finally, I would like to thank the Carlsberg Foundation for their support of my work.—Mette Bendixen, Department of Food and Resource Economics, University of Copenhagen, Denmark