How does mankind, responsible for climatic and other anthropogenic changes including geo-political and cultural processes, interact with biodiversity, ecosystems and the services they provide?

The widespread recognition of the considerable value of biodiversity and ecosystems for man kind has led to an increasing need to understand and assess the role of biodiversity and ecosystem services and to assess the changing state of biodiversity and ecosystem services, and public attitudes towards them. Understanding the changing state there is a need to analyse the impact of the most significant drivers, including human behaviour, and their interactions on biodiversity. Analysing options for the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity and evaluating the effectiveness of policy and communication instruments should help with what to do about the changing state of biodiversity and ecosystem services (quoted from the Common Research Strategy of ALTER-Net, a long-term biodiversity, ecosystem and awareness research network.

Can products and services be labeled in such a way to allow proper quantification of environmental impact at the consumer, household, and institutional levels?

Any attempt to link educational efforts, social campaigns, and even the spread of Earth Systems scientific knowledge with behavioral change capable of causing significant positive environmental consequences will require quantification of environmental impact at the individual, household, and institutional levels. However, such quantification is still very complex, coarse, and innacurate. Basic and applied reasearch, as well as standardization and policy making will be fundamental in this area. Just like WeightWatchers count calories based on product labels, so ClimateWatchers should be able to count GHG emissions. Environmental impact labels should be mandatory, but we don’t have such labels, neither the science to provide the information to print on these labels.

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.

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.

How to quantify for smallholders their contribution to mitigating climate change by small scale actions such as cutting or planting trees, replacing wood stoves by simple devices for cooking with solar energy?

Many smallholders in developing countries are willing to respond positively to reduce global warming but do not know the importance of the (potential) actions. Governments of developing countries will get more opportunities to promote CO2-emission reductions. The huge diversity in situations on farms will provide a challenge to provide practical solutions.

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 to model future scenarios considering anthropocentric activities and suggest solutions which are strategic, targeted, and more fundamental in nature which will have positive outcomes/results for ecosystems, their services and human well-being?

Human activities threaten the Earth’s ability to sustain future generations. Increasing population obtains its resources has caused irreversible changes that are degrading the natural processes that support life on Earth. This burgeoning world population drove an unsustainable rush for these natural resources. To decrease stress on earth systems requires changes in consumption patterns, better education, new technologies and higher prices for exploiting ecosystems. The range of current responses is not commensurate with the nature, the extent or the urgency of the situation that is at hand.

How can we get the public to understand how to make BIG changes in carbon dioxide emissions?

Individuals are trying to do “their part” but we need BIG solutions: e.g. policy changes that force large populations to behave “better”.

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?