What are the legal and institutional constraints and opportunities for a water transfer project or the alternatives?

Taking water from one basin to another will affect water rights, whether at the local level or if the basin of origin is a transboundary river. There are a number of ways through which an integrated approach based on multi-national agreements and associated institutional arrangements can result in effective and socially acceptable outcomes of water resources development and use.

What are the most effective ways for people to develop an understanding of the causes, respond and adapt to global change?

The question is important because it gets past mere causes and focuses on the moral issue that underpins global change; what is the best means for people to adapt to it in the long run? I suspect that the main obstacle to understanding and responding to global change has to do with human institutions or rules.

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.

How do we overcome the apparent unreadiness of the scientific community to take a leadership role in addressing the interrelated ecological, biological, social, and economic complexities of the global catastrophe we are currently experiencing before it is too late?

Actions taken by the scientific community must consider the complex interrelationship between the crises. It is the combined impact of Climate Change+ the Ecological Emergency+ Global Warming + the Global Economic Crisis + Armed Conflict + Public Health Emergencies + Extreme Poverty that has brought the planet and its people to breaking point. These crises have created an unprecedented catastrophe of unparalleled complexity.

Attention must also be paid to human life on the planet. We are a species first — biologically, physiologically, psychologically, and emotionally – before we are separated by gender, ethnicity, race, religion, politics or national identity. There is much that can be accomplished if we work with people to preserve biodiversity. It is critical that scientists harness both new and old media to engage with governments, financial institutions, industry, NGO’s, educational institutions, and people.

Global networks of scientists need to spend time in communities, understand local conditions and support local initiatives. Mathematical models will not help us understand human misery caused by the destruction of ecosystems. For many, harmony of living with the Earth has been destroyed by wars, the removal of natural resources by industry, and the co-opting of land for agribusiness. One billion people are already at the point of starvation. We will not reach those who live so close to death with our one hundred facts about the global crises. They are in crisis and it is already deadly.

It is also critical we make the health and well-being of women central to the ecological survival of the planet, and their education a global priority. Protect women’s reproductive rights and they will have fewer children – but their children will be healthy. The mantra should be “what’s good for the planet is good for the humanity,” and the shifts in thinking and behavior will begin to take place. The task is monumental. We should begin immediately.

Denny Taylor, ICEC, Hofstra Univerisity

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)

What are the effects of urban development and land-use change on biodiversity and ecosystem service delivery? How are different socio-economic groups affected by environmental changes in urban regions?

How do existing institutions, jurisdictions and legal systems in the urban areas impact on the delivery of, and access to, ecosystem services such as drinking water, clean air, recreation, etc.?

Urbanization represents an enormous challenge when it comes to resilience and equitable supply of resources

One huge challenge facing our ability to embark on more socially and ecologically-sustainable pathways is presented by the metrics through which governments measure “progress.” What are alternative ways to measure progress, do we even need to think in terms of “progress,” and what institutional changes are needed to change the ways we measure progress or change?

Measures such as GDP and even HDI have been critiqued in the social sciences for being inadequate in multiple ways. We thus need some better metrics that recognize the deep inter-linkages between social and ecological systems. Importantly, we also need accompanying political changes to change the way the world understands progress. Obstacles include a dazzling array of different measures of “sustainable development,” an equal number of critiques of these measures, and a dearth of research on how exactly we get from point A (our current political systems, focused on GDP, growth, etc) to point B (a new political system that uses better metrics).

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.

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 **