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Science has become increasingly effective in providing detailed knowledge on the broad effects of human impacts on the environment. The IPCC reports are a great example of how, through a global (well, almost) consensus-based process, such knowledge can fuel political and public policy and debate. However, the real challenge lies in tackling such global environmental risks, while simultaneously meeting the broad suite of socio-economic goals envisioned through the sustainable development agenda.
In a recent Policy Forum paper in the journal Science a prominent group of environmental and social scientists (including the Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom and Stockholm Resilience Centre director Johan Rockström) map out five "Grand Challenges" that will better align Earth system science toward sustainable development. The paper begins by asking:
"how can we advance science and technology, change human behavior, and influence political will to enable societies to meet targets for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions to avoid dangerous climate change? At the same time, how can we meet needs for food, water, improved health and human security, and enhanced energy security? Can this be done while also meeting the United Nations Millennium Development Goals of eradicating extreme poverty and hunger and ensuring ecosystem integrity?"
It then maps out the five great challenges that will have to be confronted in order to reach these goals
1) Improve the usefulness of forecasts of future environmental conditions and their consequences for people.
In essence this requires a huge step-forward in our capacity to build integrated Earth system simulators complete with ocean, land and atmosphere components. All this is very complicated, and still a long way off. But, when coupled with research on how environmental changes affect livelihoods, health and food security, such tools could give us improved capacity to forecast human impacts on the Earth system and the reciprocal effects.
2) Develop, enhance, and integrate observation systems to manage global and regional environmental change.
In order for decision-makers and the public to establish appropriate responses to emerging threats they need ways to filter through the huge amount of empirical data on changes in social-environmental systems. Improved and more effective observation systems (e.g., the Global Earth Observation System of Systems), are currently in progress, but future observation systems will need to be tweaked by scientific input on what needs to observed in coupled social environmental systems and at what scales, in order to respond to, adapt to, and influence global change.
3) Determine how to anticipate, avoid, and manage disruptive global environmental change.
Basically this means dealing with thresholds. It is likely that human activities will trigger non-linear responses in the global environment that in turn can trigger changes in the social systems. For example, a slow decrease in annual precipitation or soil fertility over time could suddenly ead to an abrupt change in the social system as residents abandon unproductive lands and become environmental refugees. Avoiding these non-linear changes requires an improved understanding of our planetary boundaries and related tipping points.
4) Determine institutional, economic, and behavioral changes to enable effective steps toward global sustainability.
As the title of this challenge suggests, we need to understand how to carry out the necessary reforms in order to create governance systems and carry out economic reforms that can steer us toward sustainability. This will require changing the focal scale of governance, which today is effective at dealing with local and regional scale issues over relatively short timeframes.
5) Encourage innovation (and mechanisms for evaluation) in technological, policy, and social responses to achieve global sustainability.
The road to sustainability requires thinking outside the box. It will require not only to abandon current policies, energy systems and scientific paradigms but needs new visions and innovations.
The authors end the paper with a call to action:
"These grand challenges provide an overarching research framework to mobilize the international scientific community around a focused decade of research to support sustainable development in the context of global environmental change. This will require new research capacity, including efforts to attract young scientists, particularly in developing countries. Research dominated by the natural sciences must transition toward research involving the full range of sciences and humanities. A more balanced mix of disciplinary and interdisciplinary research is needed that actively involves stakeholders and decision-makers."
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