How can we understand and best manage the feedbacks between (a) the growth and closer integration of the global economy and (b) changes in the biosphere, hydrosphere and atmosphere?

While it is important to understand environmental changes that are independent of human behavior, the most fundamental research questions facing us concern the large-scale environmental changes induced by human behavior, and that in turn induce an alteration in that behavior. These are the changes over which human societies have some control. The sustainability of global demographic and economic change depends on this set of feedbacks.

Demographic and economic changes have multiple and interconnected environmental impacts, but our understanding of these impacts is typically partial. The global change research programs, for example, tend to address subsets of impacts. At the same time human adaptation to environmental change tends to be problem specific – focusing separately on, for example, climate, biodiversity or disease risks. Understanding the interconnections between environmental changes and human responses to those changes is critical to the development of management strategies at the appropriate scale. It requires a research effort that spans the global change programs, and that embeds the adaptation and mitigation strategies adopted by human societies within that research effort.

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