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.

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.

When it comes to reducing environmental degradation, what specific challenges are presented by globalization (in terms of the free-flow of money, commodities, and people, and the global power of multinationals) vis a vis the institutional limits of national government jurisdictions?

In a world of unequal wealth, different governmental regimes, and very different laws and law-enforcement capabilities, how do we regulate/transform processes of environmental degradation that span the globe? e.g. the felling of the rainforest in Amazonia is in part linked to demand for ethanol in the U.S. Conflicts over oil in Nigeria are linked to the ongoing global growth in demand for oil in the world. What are points of leverage for halting these practices up and down the commodity chains? How does “the world” regulate such processes (given the failure of the WTO to come to even basic agreements that seem fair to all players)? Obstacles include conducting research on the entire length of commodity chains, parts of which are heavily protected by authoritarian governments and secretive corporations.

Can humankind figure out a way to rid itself of the money system and economies that human civilisation are run on and replace it with another system if need be? Like we replaced the barter system.

It seems to me that the main reason and incentive for inaction when it comes to climate change is money.It was humankind that imagined up the value of money and attached it to objects like paper notes, coins and golden rocks. If we got rid of our self-imposed need for it to survive then perhaps we could learn to co-operate for the benifit of the whole and freely share around the resources needed to combat climate change. Then if enough resources are in a country to implement an idea to combat climate change the government wouldn’t go: “We can’t do it because we haven’t got enough money to buy the resources. Then people wouldn’t have the incentive of extra money for the moment to not take steps to avoid runaway climate change. Then fossil fuel companies would not have the incentive of more money to keep sales up. I am also worried that if we don’t learn to share then after the economy is damaged by the effects of climate change that the governments will again use the economy as an excuss to not do much.

How do we develop the tools to ensure the changes in societal behavior needed to achieve a sustainable socio-environmental dynamic within the short timeframe available?

In essence, solving the environmental issues we face is to be done by society, and is therefore a social challenge. We know much more about its natural and environmental dimensions than about the social ones. How do we remove the political, economic, cultural, social and other obstacles to sustainability, and how do we most efficiently leverage the human capacity to learn and change?

How should the human community reorganize its activities towards a healthy relationship with Earth?

The focus of Earth System Research (ESR) involves, according to Reid et al. (2009), the interaction between land, atmosphere, water, ice, biosphere, societies, technologies and economies. Eventually ESR should lead to the prediction of global environmental changes.

Amongst these eight sectors of the system, those capable of some control by the human community are ‘societies’, ‘technologies’ and ‘economies’. These then are the sectors where human-induced unwarranted changes should be confronted with priority. We know much about the other sectors through research in the natural sciences but we have no control over them beyond the effects of the above three sectors. Limited predictability leads to social uncertainty, consequent unpleasant and intense but fruitless debate as in the field of climate change.

Despite voluminous research on societies, the predictability of social dynamics is also limited. Yet, the required confrontation seems, in principle, rather simple. We just have to realize that with its increasing complexity the human community has soiled and continues to soil its own nest in the widest sense and in ever greater measure, local counteraction over the last two decades notwithstanding.

Society, technology and economy can, of course, clean the nest and keep it clean. This is all that mankind can do to confront and possibly contain the well-known undesirable human-induced changes in the environment. It is not a matter of further natural and social science research but of political will because of the myriad of serious conflicts of interest that have to be resolved. Against this background a new ESR agenda is not as urgent as Reid et al. (2009) suggest. The priority is in cleaning up System Earth.

Given boundary conditions (e.g. budget constraints; human kind’s need for food and shelter; present state, pace and length of physical processes, etc.), what is, from an economic (but not only) point of view the right mix of mitigation/prevention and adaptation actions and policies to deal with (and cope with the consequences of) natural resource (land, water, climate, biodiversity, etc.) and sustainability problems?

Policy makers have to make real life choices which include accepting that some/most impacts of human activities on nature are unavoidable. The question is what is the most efficient way to deal with them: mitigation or adaptation, or more likely which combination of the two.

Analysis to arrive at answers will be complicated not in the least because of its interdisciplinary nature.

What kind of tourism should we promote for the next decades?

Tourism is a major economic activity in the world, and also a basic need for all populations. However the patterns of this activity are obsolete, based in a short-term economic perspective and producing a high level of negative consequences. The aims of tourism are now very far from the ecological and social needs of mankind. We must find and promote new paradigms to promote an adequate development of this activity, using scientific outcomes and an interdisciplinary knowledge in order to aspire towards (really) more sustainability. The new tourism should be a tool to educate people to respect the last natural relics of the planet and to use properly the few natural resources still available.