What are the possible policies for meeting the problems of climate change, overfishing, and depletion of mineral resources? What is the effectiveness of tradeable permits and taxes, how can they deal with tradeoffs over time, and especially how are they compatible with the need for economic growth among the poorer nations who are, at the same time, contributing to the problems? What is the scope for directed technological change?

Recognizing the importance of challenges to the Earth system is only the beginning. We must ask how to meet them. This requires a great deepening of our knowledge of economic and social systems and of changes in values to accompany the changes in needs.

How can the human dimensions of the Earth system be appropriately factored into our understanding of the Earth system, including questions of meaning, value, interpretation, and identity?

Put simply, understanding the biogeophysics of the Earth system is incomplete without understanding the changes humans bring to bear within it and why humans choose to make those changes. This incompleteness impacts our ability to explain why changes in the Earth system happen as well as to design appropriate policy responses to those changes.

What changes in policies (global to local) and human behavior will most strongly reduce human pressures on the planet’s life support systems, and how can the scientific community influence their implementation?

Humanity has perhaps a couple of decades to radically reshape the relationship between society and the biosphere. This requires research on human perceptions and motivations as well as communications between scientists and society. Very little global change research is focused on these critical issues which will determine whether more basic research on global change will have any impact at all.

What political and economic changes can reverse climate change and the loss of biodiversity?

The world’s economy depends upon a system of capital accumulation that does not support a sustainable relationship between the nature and the human communities. Natural resources are exploited above the threshold to sustainability. Political changes are required.

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.

Given the predominant theme:”to take action against global environmental change”, and the fact that environmental change is an ongoing process with long term consequences, what is being done in terms of research to find solutions leading to adaptation as well as mitigation of the effects on the earth and humanity to these changes?

Negative environmental change is widely perceived and agreed upon by most scientific and policy formulation circles. Too much effort is going into how to stop it, rather than how to adapt to it, for it is now inevitable and beyond the immediate control of humanity, therefore adaptation must take precedence over, or at the very least run parallel to mitigation, in order to ensure long term solutions for the earth and humanity.

What model of collective action has proven to be the most effective in harmonizing social development with the functioning of natural systems?

Much is known already about anthropogenic change in natural systems and the consequences of such change for societies, both positive and negative. The scale of the role of human beings in the functioning of the Earth system is such that, barring cataclysmic events, it can be reasonably expected that the future evolution of the biosphere will depend on this particular species. It will require a conscious, collective effort by societies to modify certain behaviours to be up to this challenge.

On the other hand, much research has been made in economics, sociology and anthropology about individual and collective behaviour. But little research seems to have gone into understanding and identifying which models, systems, institutions, norms or other forms of organizing collective action result in a social development that recognizes human systems as part of a larger natural system, and how such development harmonizes these two.
This question should be addressed in conjunction with the question (already posted) What factors determine the resilience of the full set of interacting ecosystem services that support human well-being and allow for adaptation to a changing environment? As the Millennium Assessment showed, the main reason why societies change natural systems (of which they are part) is the search for food, fuel, fibers and other ecosystem services. These changes have reached a planetary scale, posing serious risks for all systems (natural and social) involved. Hence, the two most important questions that need to be answered as soon as possible are: (i) what are the limits of natural systems from the human point of view (the question about resilience stated above), and (ii) what can we do as a species to sustain our development (the question about collective action proposed here).
The main obstacles in answering this question are two: (1) it requires interdisciplinary research, and (2) it has strong political and ideological implications. This latter difficulty requires a careful design of the research process.

How do we best understand the set of power relations between governments, corporations and civil society in a globalized world that keep us on unsustainable pathways? How do we transform these relations?

The key reason why we face so many ecological and human crises is because we are locked into development pathways sustained by certain power relations in this world. It is thus imperative to understand these relations in order to know how to tackle and transform them. Obstacles include diverse and conflicting conceptual models in the social sciences on how best to understand the operation of power in a globalized world. Obstacles also include a serious dearth of funding for such research, and an overwhelming importance given to economics amongst the social sciences (which does not address issues of power).

There are large disconnects between the world of scientific (including social-scientific) experts and the general public on subjects such as risk, vulnerability, and socio-ecological change. This presents challenges to generating the political change we need for embarking on more sustainable development pathways. In what ways does this disconnect affect the creation of appropriate policy, and how do we deal with it?

The public is growing increasingly distrustful of politicians and of what academic Tim Mitchell calls “the rule of experts.” For real, transformative changes, we need mass buy-in and political pressure. What is our responsibility, as academics, in terms of making our research accessible, relevant and usable by the public? How do we bridge this gap?

How do we meet the human wellbeing requirements (e.g. food and nutritional security, health, livelihoods) of current and future human populations without increasing pressure on already vulnerable ecosystems?

Increasing evidence suggests that demands on food production are likely to reach a peak mid-century. At the same time, our ability to produce and transport sufficient food is predicted to be reduced by climate change (temperature and water dynamics), carbon costs (chemicals, transport), and the loss of land to energy production.

There will therefore be increasing pressure on:
• natural resources (land and associated water and soil, biodiversity), leading to trade-offs for ecosystem service provisioning (with impacts on livelihoods, ecosystem and human health, security) and other land uses (agriculture, biofuels, urban planning, conservation, recreation)
• agricultural practice leading for the need for new and innovative techniques and technologies, and the concomitant risks for environmental and human health

To stand a chance of tackling these inter-related issues, mechanisms and funding for regional and global projects that move beyond assessment are required. Projects should be interdisciplinary and participatory incorporating researchers, practitioners and the people whose wellbeing is under investigation. Such work should not only allow conceptual and theoretical development in the fields of environmental and sustainability science but must also have impact on the ground, creating opportunities for improved human wellbeing and increased resilience not just for now, but into the future also.