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.

What can we learn about the Earth’s response to anthropogenic forcing from geological records of natural perturbations to the carbon cycle?

There are many lines of evidence in the geological record that point to massive major natural rapid perturbations to the cycles of carbon and other elements. These represent our only direct evidence of the long term repsonse of the Earth system to climate forcing. It is therefore of great importance to understand how these events compare and contrast in rate and scale with our own carbon cycle modifications to better understand the feedbacks, long term consequences and recovery of the Earth system. For instance it is only now that literature is beggining to appear linking de-oxygentation of the oceans to modern climate change. However, many of the geological events are associated with evidence of widespread ocean anoxia and their study can give us some insight into the factors controlling the distribution in time and space of these low oxygen waters.

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.

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.

How far is the earth system away from its natural variability due to anthropogenic factors?

When we talk about the impact of human activities upon the earth system, we must be sure what is the background of the natural varibilities. We already know throughout the earth history, the earth system has been changing without human being. It is critical for us to know what is the extent of human factor over the natural factors before we talk about further issues.

What are the consequences of land cover and land use change for human societies and the sustainability of ecosystems?

The environment of the Earth has many close connections and relationships with human activity. It is also now more widely recognized that a profound transformation of the Earth’s environment is taking place and that many of these changes are the result of human action. Growing world population and increasing wealth are driving demands for more food production. Croplands and pastures occupies today roughly 40% of the land surface and global land cover and is according to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) the main modification humanity makes to land cover, and therefore a main driver of ecological change, and biodiversity loss at the global scale.

Current trends in land use allow humans to appropriate an ever-larger fraction of the biosphere’s goods and services while simultaneously diminishing the capacity of global ecosystems to sustain food production, maintain freshwater and forest resources, regulate climate and air quality, and mediate infectious diseases…
Modern landuse practices, while increasing the short-term supplies of material goods, may undermine many ecosystem services in the long run, even on regional and global scales. Confronting the global environmental challenges of land use will require assessing and managing inherent trade-offs between meeting immediate human needs and maintaining the capacity of ecosystems to provide goods and services in the future. Assessments of trade-offs must recognize that land use provides crucial social and economic benefits, even while leading to possible long-term declines in human welfare through altered ecosystem functioning.
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In hierarchical terms, what human-driven forces can potentially trigger abrupt transitions and non-linear response in biosphere? What critical thresholds and feed-mechanisms are involved and how do they operate?

We need to improve our understanding about still unknown functional mechanisms operating at the global Earth system scale that can be involved in unpredictable catastrophic events. Such knowledge is necessary to predict, prevent, adapt to and eventually manage unexpected consequences of human action on global change.

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.

We humans monopolize much of the earth’s productive potential, and need to find better ways to take our harvest while maintaining some natural services. What incentives should be offered to encourage conservation plus production, and how can it be funded?

Vitousek has warned repeated about the excessive impact of humans on the environment. In many places, production has become more intensive, and increasingly excludes natural services. We urgently need to find ways for production and conservation to co-exist.

How much biodiversity exists and how does its change or loss affect the system as a whole, and how modern methods of scientific investigations on biodiversity (including Artificial Intelligence) can help in solving this problem?

Biodiversity underpins the life-support system of our planet. But several factors, including natural and anthropogenic factors, have brought us to a critical point. The world is experiencing an unprecedented rate of species extinction, which may have far-reaching consequences for all life forms.