What are the institutional, technological, and analytical requirements for monitoring biocarbon stocks and for distinguishing between changes in the stocks from “natural” drivers, general global socio-economic drivers, specific economic decision drivers (i.e. indirect land use change), and ecosystem specific management efforts to sequester biocarbon?

Biocarbon stocks are critical to the carbon cycle and climate change. Biocarbon stocks change in different places due to different combinations of drivers: social and natural, current and historic, direct and indirect. Determining whether we are making any headway in maintaining and enhancing biocarbon stocks will require considerable monitoring of the stocks, monitoring and analysis of the drivers, and credible models of how the drivers interact to affect biocarbon stocks.

Hopes for providing economic incentives for enhancing biocarbon stocks, especially if done through private markets as offsets in a cap and trade system, will require scientifically-informed public oversight to avoid creating fictitious assets that do nothing to mitigate climate change while having the potential to destabilize the economy with the acknowledgment of their fictitious nature. Non-market international agreements to manage biocarbon will also require scientifically-informed public oversight to assure national efforts are effective and agreements have meaning. If the institutional and technological requirements of managing biocarbon and determining the drivers of change are prohibitive, then there is a stronger reason to reduce fossil hydrocarbon combustion more quickly and directly reduce other socio-economic drivers of biocarbon stock change.

How do we design multilevel institutions for the Earth system?

“Think locally, act globally”, as a slogan, has been around for a long time. But it needs to be operationalized through new institutional arrangements that connect from local to global. Here we are talking about institutions that are multilevel (rather than multilateral). That is, the concern is not the fragmented or overlapping nature of institutions. Rather, the concern is about finding ways in which local – state/provincial – national – regional – international levels of discourse, knowledge co-production, and decision-making can be connected. This imperative follows from the fact that the Earth system is not “flat” but hierachical or multilevel. Hence the theory of complex adaptive systems tells us that there is no one “correct” level at which the system can be managed. Information and perspectives from all levels are equally important and valid in dealing with the problems of the Earth system. Co-management arrangements in some countries connect the local to the national, but even these face obstacles, as nation states have historically resisted sharing decision-making powers with other levels, both local and international.

The Arctic Council, with eight member countries, has come closest to using information and observations from all levels in its 2005 Arctic Climate Change Impact Assessment report (http://www.acia.uaf.edu). However, there are no examples in the environment and resources area of truly multilevel institutions that connect the local to the global, and that is a big challenge in managing Earth systems.

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.

During the next decade, what are the minimum changes to global policy needed to ensure that negative impacts of anthropogenic environmental change on the majority of biodiversity, ecosystem function and services are still reversible?

Biodiversity supports ecosystem function and ultimately the delivery of ecosystem services to society. Human driven environmental changes are negatively impacting biodiversity, but in many systems it is still possible to reverse these impacts given sufficient political and socio-economic will. The challenge is therefore to understand what is the minimum we need to do in the short-term (10 years) to ensure sustainable ecosystem services in the longer terms (>50 years). The obstacles to achieving this are numerous and include: lack of understanding of the links between biodiversity, ecosystem function and ecosystem services and how these are impacted by multiple pressures; inappropriate national and global governance systems to react rapidly and effectively to negative impacts of biodiversity loss to ensure long-term benefits; lack of societal and political understanding of the consequences of biodiversity and ecosystem service loss; uncertainty of the expected impacts on society under various future scenarios.

What are the roles of national and subnational states in environmental policy-making and enforcement, especially in the Global South, and how do international environmental treaties affect domestic environmental politics, including design and enforcement of domestic policy?

Currently, environmental social science scholarship is dominated by studies of the impact of environmental degradation on communities and modes of resistance (sociology, anthropology) or processes of agreeing upon and signing international treaties (international relations). Comparatively, there is too little scholarship on the roles of national and subnational states in environmental politics. Given that international treaties are currently insufficient to ensure responsible environmental governance, an understanding of the interplay of conflicting domestic interests and the state in national environmental politics, especially in the Global South–which contributes ever more greatly to climate change and biodiversity loss–is essential to comprehending the possibilities for, and limits to, effective international cooperation and enforcement of treaties.

What systems of earth system governance are likely to support a co-evolution of nature and human societies that leads towards sustainable development?

Earth system governance can be defined as the interrelated and increasingly integrated system of formal and informal rules, rule-making systems, and actor-networks at all levels of human society (from local to global) that are set up to steer societies towards preventing, mitigating, and adapting to global and local environmental change and, in particular, earth system transformation, within the normative context of sustainable development.

Earth system governance is a major analytical challenge for the social sciences. It involves questions of the emergence, design and effectiveness of governance systems as well as the overall integration of global, regional, national and local governance—that is, the quest for effective architectures. It also requires understanding the actors that drive earth system governance and that need to be involved—that is, the question of agency. Third, earth system governance must respond to the inherent uncertainties in human and natural systems; it must combine stability to ensure long-term governance solutions, with flexibility to react quickly to new findings and developments. In other words, we must understand and further develop the adaptiveness of systems of earth system governance. Fourth, the more regulatory competence and authority is conferred upon institutions and systems of governance the more will we be confronted with the need to understand the democratic quality of earth system governance and with questions of how to ensure the accountability and legitimacy of governance systems. Fifth, earth system governance is, as is any political activity, about the distribution of material and immaterial values. It is, in essence, a conflict about the access to goods and about their allocation—it is about justice, fairness, and equity. The novel character of earth system transformation puts questions of allocation and access in a new light.

(Based on the Science and Implementation Plan of the IHDP Earth System Governance Project)

How can we establish an effective global web of environmental institutions?

Global environmental governance is a fragmented landscape, with more than 500 multilateral environmental agreements in place, various international organisations dealing with environmental issues, and a disturbingly weak and underfunded UN Environment Programme. This complex institutional web poses difficult questions to the social sciences, including the effectiveness of single regimes, interactions between them, options for reform, and practical steering mechanisms. Figuring out how global environmental governance can be made more effective, more legitimate, and more coherent is as yet unanswered.

How can we ensure that the environment is integrated into all development activities?

With current rates of world poverty, socio-economic development is not only morally justified, it must be tempered by environmental protection and conservation. How to achieve this in the massive scale that is required, and through the different governance structures and motivations across different regions and states will be of major importance in the next decade. This not only relates to matters of the climate, but to all aspects of the earth system.

What are the main constraints to successful Earth System governance and what are our options for addressing these constraints in a timely, effective and accountable manner?

The failure to make adequate, or any progress on Earth System issues such as poverty, ecosystem degradation or greenhouse gas emissions are related to society’s inability to fully grasp the gravity of the situation, to envision acceptable outcomes, and to create a system of incentives, disincentives and accountability mechanisms that would make ignoring these as priorities by a wide range of social actors hard if not impossible.

We need to understand much more clearly what are the formal and informal barriers and biases in our policy mechanisms, public and private institutions (down to the role and interests of the individual decision-maker) that help prolong unsustainable patterns of practices and behaviour. We must also identify and tackle the barriers to introducing the necessary alternatives that often work at the pilot level already into the mainstream. This includes but should go beyond the study and reinvention of global environmental governance. Governance and policies that promote essentially unsustainable forms of behaviour are found in domains where other paradigms, such as economic growth dominate.

While the social sciences have come to grips with the analysis of governance, this has not generated enough momentum to integrate Earth System sustainability as a priority into mainstream development plans and strategies, witness the haste with which national governments were prepared to indebt future generations just to return to a path of GDP growth and increasing resource consumption.

There are many obstacles, ranging from the availability of longitudinal data on governance to political or cultural sensitivities. There are also strong vested interests in the status quo, but the momentum generated by the series of recent global crises represents an opportunity that mustn’t be missed.

Is the democratic system as practiced today an archaic and thus counterproductive human enterprise?

Searching “democracy” on this site (Aug7): none.

Democracy as applied currently will likely undermine many of the “answers” in this survey.

It started with the Rütli Schwur, creating Confoederatio Helvetica, Switzerland. Back then in 1291, several settings made that move a logical reaction, it was a frontier phenomenon. Don’t forget that until 1989 some cantons in Switzerland had only their men vote. Some basic features of democratic systems are useful today, like providing social security, protection for unfortunates, etc. Democracy however is now also being (ab)used to favor vested interests, many of which are responsible for several predicaments of the human enterprise. For instance:

- you have the right to choose, thus, just buy whatever tickles your fancy, even if unnecessary and degrading the earth

- make sure you vote against tax increases, needed to fix our world (learn from Schwarzenegger?)

- why not make another baby or two (Hall 1994. Environmental consequences of having a baby in the US. Pop Environ 15:505)

- as scientist I am a minuscule minority, it is not worth my time to vote, since I am against millions, mostly ignorant on technical grounds, and mainly preoccupied with their immediate world, one evolutionary trait we share with most living beings

- fast changes make it even hard for scientists to keep up: forget about democratic systems to allow corrections in a timely fashion

-decisions based on emotional, self-interested, and basically uneducated people, which mostly have no concept of long-term planning, make democracy a back-firing institution

-by breeding-brainwashing people into consumerism, their created faith into the State, the locomotive for maintaining the party is the ‘growth’ model, with democracy used as pretense to e.g.:
- create markets (e.g. China)
- increase exploitation of natural resources
- justify war industries, due to need to combat “bad men”, “bad countries” and any other sellable problem

** demo-crazy **