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.

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.

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.

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.