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?

This question requires interdisciplinary research among physical, biological and social sciences. It raises significant conceptual or theoretical issues, as well as significant needs for empirical research at global and regional scales. The question quickly gives rise to a host of important more specialized questions. Answers to this family of questions are relevant for applied questions of sustainability science.

Definitions: (1) Resilience is the capacity of a system to persist within thresholds or “guardrails”, adapt to changing circumstances, or transform to something new when the current mode of operation is unsustainable. (2) Ecosystem services are benefits that people receive from nature, such as provision of food and water, regulation of water flows and quality, and cultural values. They can be analyzed at the global scale or for specific landscapes and seascapes.

Challenges: A key challenge is that changes in ecosystem services generally have strong correlations. That is, changes that cause increases in one group of ecosystem services often cause decreases in another group of ecosystem services. These tradeoffs among bundles of ecosystem services are not well understood. In management, they lead to unintended adverse consequences. These consequences often take systems across thresholds, degrade resilience, and impair the capacity of the system to respond adaptively to future environmental changes. Thus understanding the tradeoffs has fundamental importance for sustainable management.

Obstacles: In order to address this question, new frameworks for interdisciplinary collaboration are needed. Also there are significant needs for conceptual development, theoretical research, monitoring at global and regional scales, and empirical research at global and regional scales.

What are the regional vulnerabilities in the availability of fresh water to support human needs and sustain freshwater biodiversity, and how can these vulnerabilities be mitigated?

Fresh water is multi-user resource subject to multiple threats including over-exploitation and contamination such that both quantity and quality of water is absolutely limiting for humans in many parts of the globe. Freshwater ecosystems support around 10% of global biodiversity (in less than 1% of the Earth’s surface area), and provide valuable ecosystem services upon which humans depend. Growing human water demands are placing increasing pressure on the ability of freshwater ecosystems to meet human needs, and degrading the capacity of fresh waters to sustain biodiversity. There is evidence that freshwater biodiversity is already undergoing pandemic decline, but responses to these declines at regional or larger scales are lacking. Global climate change and burgeoning populations will exacerbate present conflicts between humans and nature as demands for fresh water increase, but the vulnerability of fresh water biodiversity to impacts arising from this conflict will vary regionally. It is imperative that we identify which regions are now – and which will be – most vulnerable with respect to human needs for water and potential biodiversity loss. These data will provide an essential first step to devising adaptation and mitigation measures intended to ensure that human water requirements can be met without loss of biodiversity or irreparable degradation of freshwater ecosystem function.

How will different landscapes on Earth react on future climate change?

It is important to find out about future climate change (especially by reconstructing the past), but I think it is even more important for the adaption to future changes if we know how the landscapes we are living in will react on it and how sensitive what kind of landscape is to climate change. Landscape means the natural or semi-natural area where people are living and which can be affected by direct and indirect changes in the hydrological and geomorphological system, e.g. (soil)erosion, vegetation loss or gain, desertification and so on, which all needs to be looked at in a holistic way, subordinated over and including different parts of earth system sciences considering various scales in time and space. The best way to find out about the future then is to look into the past and interpret and combine it with modeling of present landscape processes in different climate regimes. Then we might get a glance on how we have to or can adapt to different future perspectives and climate change however it will be, preserving human’s livelihoods.

Given the escalating severe impacts on the hydrological cycle, how can we effectively respond to the challenge of climate change adaptation?

Water is the primary medium through which climate change will affect livelihoods, shape economies and alter the natural environment. Recent climate research shows that impacts on the hydrological cycle are likely to be more serious than originally thought. For this reason an assessment of how the resource is managed by humans is crucial.

What are the most effective ways for people to develop an understanding of the causes, respond and adapt to global change?

The question is important because it gets past mere causes and focuses on the moral issue that underpins global change; what is the best means for people to adapt to it in the long run? I suspect that the main obstacle to understanding and responding to global change has to do with human institutions or rules.

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.

How can we better monitor, model, and predict the interdependent impacts of alternative strategies for managing the global environment in support of future decision making?

Significant changes are already under way in the Earth’s environment at local, regional, and global scales. Increasing attention is being given to proposals for mitigating or modifying human drivers of environmental change, as well as to alternative strategies for adaptation and environmental management. These policy alternatives could themselves have important impacts on the environment and on human activities and welfare, and may also have unexpected or synergistic interactions, e.g., mitigation strategies that increase or shift vulnerabilities to climate change. The Earth systems research community will be increasingly called upon to assess the potential benefits and risks of specific options and of alternative strategies (e.g., geoengineering vs. adaptation). A particular concern is the potential for conflicting approaches to be adopted by different nations, groups of nations, or other stakeholders. It is essential to start now to develop the data, models, tools, and strategies needed to support better and more rapid decision making with regard to management of the global environment, even in the face of continuing scientific uncertainties and incomplete information.

How can semi-arid agrosystems adapt to expected changes in climate and anthropogenic forcing?

Due to growths in water scarcities and population needs, agrosystems in semi-arid region have to increase their agronomic performances in terms of water use efficiencies and yields, where both can be regarded at the scale of regional watersheds that include several compartments (shallow and deep aquifers, crop mosaics, hydro-agricultural constructions) in relation with distribution of blue and green water. Decision support systems for the benefit of stakeholders have to be strengthened by relying on biophysically based modeling platform that encompass the aforementioned compartments and the related water flows. This requires first parameterizing and calibrating the modeling platform components, where the use of remote sensing if of prime interest for constraining models in a spatially distributed manner, and then setting up realistic scenarios from the calibrated modeling platforms. In this context, special efforts have to be made over relief areas, where hilly structures allow water harvesting for irrigation purposes, and therefore the maintaining of agricultural populations along with their economical activities.

Model experiments, intercomparisons and data evaluation are needed to quantify and help with management decisions and, ultimately, to provide scientific knowledge to improve the sustainability of the living Earth. Which interactive physical, chemical and biological processes – including the role of human activities from global to regional and at short and long timescales – are fundamental to study in order to gain a deeper understanding of the Earth System and priority areas such as vulnerability, impacts and adaptation?

The International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (www.igbp.net) is embarking on a series of scientific syntheses to be completed by 2014. the initial synthesis topics, try to bring together some of the issues raised in the above question and include

• Global limits to growth
• Geoengineering
• The role of changing nutrient loads in coastal zones and the open ocean in an increased CO2 world
• Global nitrogen assessment and a future outlook
• Earth-system resilience: Earth-system prediction
• Earth-system impacts from changes in the cryosphere
• Megacities and coastal zones
• Global environmental change and sustainable development: the needs of least developed countries
• The role of land cover and land use in modulating climate
• Aerosols
• Additional themes forthcoming (e.g. freshwater cycle; global to regional predictions on shorter timescales)

The scientific effort, much along the lines of what the recent review of ICSU advised for IGBP, is open to the global change community and partner programmes and will
- be guided by scientific excellence;
- Identify knowledge gaps, focus future efforts, and set priorities at IGBP core project level and beyond;
- Complement and draw from IGBP’s core projects and other global change research;
- Frame the Earth as an integrated system strongly affected by humans;
- Integrate the multiple stressors on the Earth system, its limits and its resilience;
- Develop a suite of products for a range of audiences, primarily the research community to identify future priorities and policymaker to formulate policy;
- Provide policy-relevant information and solutions on mitigation, adaptation, key uncertainties, tipping elements, integrated effects and responses in critical regions;
- Engage with a wide range of stakeholders to assist us develop a consistent set of guidelines for the syntheses and identify key science- and policy‐relevant themes. Stakeholders include IGBP scientists and core projects, other policy‐oriented scientists, policymakers, national committees, international ICSU unions, key leaders involved in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment and other large international activities.

What would life in a warmer and ocean-acidified world be like, and how easy will it be to adapt?

Only when we can communicate a scientifically defensible but more detailed picture of what a higher-CO2 world would be like to live in, can the average person really decide how hard we should work to avoid it. We often assume that we will adapt, but without quantitatively examining whether anticipated adaptations will work, how they will interact with each other, and how they will affect human well-being. This requires an interdisciplinary push of the sciences beyond their comfort zones, aggressive use of integrated assessment and adaptation models, some storyteller’s imagination as to possible future scenarios where aspects of life that we now take for granted might no longer hold, and examination of how required adjustments would affect people mentally and physically.