In a successor initiative to the International Advisory Panel on Environmental History & Policy (EnvHist4P) and representing exploration of new ground for CCHRI and Max Planck Institute-Jena's joint efforts to develop policy-relevance as a component of their research on human-induced environmental change through time (and its ramifications for human societies past and present), Katherine Snow is working on building a new research initiative on environmental realism.

A recent term put forward in 2018 in interdisciplinary environmental policy studies (by Kristan Cockerill and colleagues) and bearing mostly critical overtones, the research initiative on environmental realism will seek to develop deeper roots and more policy relevance for the concept by building up its philosophical, historical and sociological, and international relations/security studies dimensions, while at the same time finding case studies where it can point policymakers toward new ways of conceptualizing decisions available to them in the present, particularly with respect to biodiversity and climate challenges.