How can we boost agricultural output and improve rural livelihoods in the developing world (especially sub-Saharan Africa) without attendant land/forest degradation and resultant biodiversity loss?

Sub-Saharan Africa is the poorest region of the world and experiencing high rates of land degradation, desertification, forest degradation and loss. The ecology-welfare link in this part of the world is very strong and most people live outside formal institutions and markets. Declining crop yields have meant agricultural expansion and in places like the Eastern Afromontane Hotspot this means large potential for the loss of endemic species. Livelihoods here are also closely tied to annual rainfall patterns and any near term changes in these as a result of climate change may also rationalize further agricultural expansion (e.g. to areas with more stable rainfall, or as an insurance mechanism to ensure a certain level of output). Here we have a nexus of severe poverty, high biodiversity, poor agricultural productivity, climate vulnerability and potential loss of carbon stored in woodland and forest ecosystems.

What are the feed back mechanisms between biodiversity and climate, how will they change over the next decades and what are the consequences?

Climate change and biodiversity change are interacting in feed-back loops that are poorly understood and unquantified and modelled. This applies to changing land (agriculture, desertification, cities, etc), and oceans (colour and physical stability of the ocean surface, acidification and calcifying organisms etc.) alike. The changing physico-chemical environment will exert important selective pressures on biological species and communities. Extinction of vulnerable species and explosions of adapted species are to be expected. They will change surface characteristics such as temperature, colour and albedo, gas exchange and atmospheric composition (CO2, NOx, methane). To predict the consequences a good understanding of these feed-back mechanisms is required, both on land and in the oceans.ue

How can biodiversity serve a role in agricultural resilience to climate change, both in supporting ecosystem services, and for adaptability of livelihoods?

Biodiversity has formed the basis for human food production systems and human livelihoods for millennia. Due to agricultural intensification, land use change, and global warming, agricultural biodiversity is at high risk. The in situ genetic resources of crops and livestock are threatened, and also, many stress-adapted landraces are being replaced by modern high-input varieties. These losses create important problems for generating the genetics and breeding programs to adapt to climate change. Resilience can also be potentially accomplished with greater reliance on complex multispecies systems, including microbes, soil fauna, and beneficial insects. To increase adaptive capacity, appropriate social, cultural and economic contexts are needed for research programs that involve the participation of those who are intended to benefit from research. This will require adaptive management and long-term alliances between diverse stakeholders that increase the coping ability during unpredictable periods of resource limitation, e.g., drought. In a wider context, at the landscape scale, biodiversity serves important functions that enhance the environmental resource base upon which agriculture depends, e.g., water purification in nearby wildland waterways, and regional effects on microclimate and water availability due to forest cover. There is still much to be learned about how decision-makers at various scales can work together to support research and coping strategies to manage the mosaic of ecosystems in a landscape in ways that support sustainability and high productivity as the climate changes, and to enhance diversification that will permit adaptive responses in response to extreme events.

Can we quantify uncertainties in complex models of the complete Earth System?

The models we are using to base our judgements on are all imperfect. We must acknowledge this and attempt to address quantitatively how these uncertainties affect the judgements we are able to make on the basis of these models. Without uncertainty estimates (error bars if you like) any decision making will be arbitrary. With them it is more complex, remains subjective but at least can be justified and explained. This will be essential if the hard choices that we face are to be effectively communicated and acted on. Addressing uncertainty is central to all aspects of modelling, from the dynamic climate models to models of ecological systems, society and economics. Coupling such models makes uncertainty quantification even more essential. I believe this is a fundamental question to address before we can even start to answer specific questions about the Earth System.

How will humanity manage peak oil and climate change impacts and promote an ordered and gradual transition to low carbon economies?

The strong environmental effects of greenhouse gas emissions derived from oil use and the negative socio-economic consequences of future oil scarcity make it urgent to shift to alternative affordable energy sources. A recent assessment of the International Energy Agency, an OECD prestigious institution, alerts that oil shortage and increased energy costs can easily be an immediate reality after the current financial crisis if massive and strategic investments in oil industry are not rapidly and massively implemented.

Multiple economic, scientific, technological and political pathways should be implemented to achieve this global energy transition. States should empower their national strategies to improve the efficiency in energy generation, transmission and consumption and thus reduce progressively carbon emissions. States should also facilitate the massive deployment of renewable energies and public transport, promote the progressive electrification of the car industry, and globally shift to sustainable strategies in many other economic sectors. At the international level, governments should rapidly promote multilateral and bilateral cooperative agreements on energy and climate policies. In addition, states might promote the creation of a United Nations international programme to facilitate and coordinate a world-wide ordered and non-traumatic transition to low-carbon and energy-efficient economie. This UN international programme could develop or facilitate multilateral regulatory agreements to avoid the emergence of speculative dynamics and volatility on oil prices that ultimately damage economic stability and increase ongoing global food-security crisis. Finally, I advocate for a much greater scientific effort urgently placed on the interactions between peak oil, climate change and global society change. The scale, urgency and severity of peak oil and climate change mean that no action is too small to matter, too large to contemplate, or too soon to begin. There is not much time left.

What are the components and dimensions of biodiversity that are necessary for particular ecosytem processes, functions and services, now and in the future?

Biodiversity has many dimensions (composition, variation, richness, phylogenetic, interactions and networks). We understand that diversity and variability provide insurance against future changes (~resilience). But which measures of biodiversity will best predict the quality and quantity of ecosystem processes, functions and services that biodiversity supports and on which we depend? When, where and how is biodiversity most significant? Answering this question, even in very general terms, is a necessary pre-requisite to an effective biodiversity monitoring system, to predicting damaging impacts of biodiversity loss, and will contribute to fully integrated earth system models.

How will the release of Siberian methane affect global warming? Can climate models predict its signature?

Because it’s a complicated process, and we can’t predict how much of the released gas may be re-absorbed by plants and the oceans, how quickly it will be released, or whether the sudden increase in methane will trigger an, as yet, un-predicted event. It is estimated that a Siberian thaw could push 500 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide gas into the atmosphere. The U.N.-sponsored Panel on Climate Change has published its estimate for global warming over the next one hundred years, producing a rise of between 3 and 11 degrees F. The addition of Siberian gas releases could change these predictions to 5 to 15 degrees F.

What are the levels of sustainable development within each country and can these levels be quantified and compared to other countries?

Although complex, a standardized sustainability index per country, comparable to other countries, should be researched and presented. This would indicate levels of sustainability within countries, taking population growth/age, natural resources, pollution levels, etc. into account. Based on this, areas for education/action can be identified. This is both a earth system & social science topic combined, and the final outcome should be to raise awareness within these problem sectors.

How to deal with the uncertainties associated with Earth system research, especially policy-relevant areas?

In addition to climate change uncertainties, we are still lack of knowledge about interactions of land-atmosphere, Atmosphere-sea, aerosol-climate, chemistry-climate, and more importantly human-environment relationships.

How can we get past the debates between natural and anthropogenic causes of global changes, and shift our attention towards reducing and dealing with the impacts of these changes?

How to minimize the natural vs anthropogenic controversy on global changes/warming issues? It seems that there is no more scientific doubts that climate changes are moving the earth system to a warmer period. It seems that the actual controversy on how much is natural and how much is human related is a worthless discussion in many senses. We have to focus on how to diminish the impacts rather than finding which is the guilty mechanism or process. Whatever the solutions, they have to be implemented in the human dimension first.