Which is the space weather for tomorrow?

The active Sun has an incontestable influence on our Planet and its environment. The effects of the solar-terrestrial relations are known as space weather. Forecasting the space weather conditions is crucial as they affect our life, via:

- Geomagnetic storms which are caused by impacts of coronal mass ejections on the terrestrial magnetosphere, leading to very rapid changes of the geomagnetic field. This can induce strong currents in the extended electric
conductors like high voltage lines or pipelines. The consequences are power outages and damaged transformers, or rapid corrosion of pipelines.

- Energetic protons and electrons that are produced by flares and coronal mass ejections, and which can damage the electronics of satellites, and endanger astronauts.

- Enhanced electromagnetic radiation, mainly X-rays from flares modify the upper atmosphere, which absorbs this radiation, is heated up, increasing the air density in the range of low satellite orbits. Satellites can deviate from their orbits due to the enhanced aerodynamic drag and eventually crash. This radiation can also change the structure of the ionosphere, which in turn can affect the short-wave radio communications, but also for navigation systems like GPS, since precise position requires exact modeling of the propagation of satellite signals through the ionosphere.

How can the human population explosion be curbed?

Obviously this is an extremely sensitive and political issue but the facts are simple – there are too many people in the world for the finite number of resources it holds. This issue must be raised fearlessly if the world is to survive as we know it. More people will only impact the earth further.

How can research help address the vicious circle of environmental change, resource scarcity, poverty, and poor health?

The Brundtland Report (WCED 1987, 27) stated “[m]any parts of the world are caught in a vicious downward spiral: poor people are forced to overuse environmental resources to survive from day to day, and their impoverishment of their environment further impoverishes them, making their survival ever more uncertain and difficult.” This statement and other aspects of the report have been debated for 20 years. The question, posed slightly differently here, remains one of the fundamental unsolved challenges for human-environment relations.

How long can the Earth System sustain the present rate of human-induced global-environmental change?

Humans are modifying the planet at an alarming rate. Cropland and pasture now cover almost 50% of the entire land surface. This has led to massive habitat destruction, fragmentation and pollution and, together with overhunting, is causing a critical loss in biodiversity. Agricultural pollution is also having a devastating impact on aquatic and marine ecosystems which, together with industrial fishing, is causing collapse of key species populations within these ecosystems. Industrial pollution and burning hydrocarbons is causing polar warming which threatens to destabilize the remaining ice-sheets and reservoirs of methane stored in the polar oceans and permafrost. With populations in the US, China and India still rising, these clearly unsustainable practices are set to continue. The critical question is how long can planetary environmental processes continue to function before these human-induced changes trigger negative feedbacks that result in a switch to an alternate and less supportive Earth System state?

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.

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.

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.

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.

What are the deep evolutionary (neurobiological) and cultural drivers perpetuating poor decision-making in relation to the environment and sustainability and how can we use these insights to identify leverage points for supporting meaningful, lasting individual and collective change toward ecocultural sustainability?

This question is transdisciplinary and requires collaborative exploration into evolution, human origins, our relationship to primates (and other culture-creating species), evolution of culture, neurobiology, organizational learning, evolutionary psychology, ethics and morality, game theory, decision theory, systems dynamics, social learning for sustainability, as well as many other fields.

It gets at the heart of the matter that while information is a necessary condition for meaningful change, it is by no means a sufficient condition for meaningful change.