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.

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 improve the decision processes that affect the ecosystem services for human well being?

Day by day it is becoming more evident what has been obvious: if we dont answer this question it will not matter how much more we learn about the workings of the earth system

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 do we develop coupled climate-social models that take human society into account?

We need to establish a robust relationship between human society and climate/exploitation of nature. Otherwise the underlying pressure for growth will lead undesirable situations.

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 will human and natural systems co-evolve into the next 50 years?

The interaction between natural and human systems is a two-way street; the impacts are jointly determined by what happens in both systems and the feedback loops that lead to adaptations and change. Understanding better how humans and environmental systems co-evolve–the likely direction and trends–is vital for allocating scarce resources to protect the earth.

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.

What is life ? (question raised formerly by Schrödinger) When did it start ? What is the difference between a living organism and a non alive organism ? Description of the different species of the ecosystem.

empathy to all forms of life is absolutely necessary to cope with the present disequilibrium between human species and the planet ecosystem, which diversity is declining as a result of human unconsciousness.