Earth System science as correlated biophysical, socio-ecological and humaniora spaces: how can mutually bound subsystems be studied and understood in an integrated way, with the dynamics of all components, and their interactions, being considered together?

The study of global change is still dominated by a framework in which the Earth system’s natural biophysical processes at a global scale are viewed as the appropriate scale and discourse of study. Global mean temperature seems to be the barometer of the planet, and we are told at the end of each year that that year was the ‘warmest on record’. Carbon cycle budgets are constructed with single numbers for fossil fuel emission, and ocean and land uptake of carbon. Yet the phenomenon of global change is driven by the interactions of humans and their activities with their environment at a number of spatial and temporal scales. Ultimately, however, societies depend upon the ‘Earth System’ and the resilience of biophysical components that provide for multiple and fundamental services sustaining economic and social activities, including life itself. Until recently we could tolerate much experimentation, disciplinary-based thought and institutional frameworks in explaining the evolving interaction between humans and their activities and the biophysical environment. The dynamics of the Earth system operated on such a large scale that human activities were not perceived as a significant factor in the overall functioning of the planet.

Much has however changed in the last couple of decades: the need to study complex set of drivers, interactions, feedbacks and impacts in a holistic, systems-oriented approach now requires ‘creative tensions’ in the international global change research community challenging us to engage into finding a much needed scientific breakthrough.

How can we establish and maintain a sustainable relationship between humans and the rest of the living world?

This is without doubt the most important and challenging question that has ever faced our species.

Our present use of the planet is not sustainable. Achieving “a sustainable relationship between humans and the living world” will require a huge intellectual, scientific, technological and social effort.

Whatever sustainable means, maintaining the current number of humans is not an option, and we cannot continue to extract services from the natural world at the rate we do today. Stopping soil erosion is not enough; nor stopping climate change; nor is stopping the fragmentation of habitats or the damming of rivers. Sustainability is not just a matter of making sure that the rate of use does not exceed the rate of replenishment. We must reverse many trends, overhaul our organisations and the way we do things, and considerably improve the processes we use to grow and prepare food, clothes, and other material goods, and to transport them and us around the place.

If we are to meet this grand challenge one thing is essential: the contribution of science in all its many flavours.

Understanding how to establish and sustain a balanced relationship between humans and the rest of the living world will certainly need reductionist, rational, value-free and quantitative knowledge of the natural world and its interaction with our activities. But it will also require holistic, partly intuitive, ethical and qualitative knowledge, accumulated empirically over a long time and through learning by doing.

Let us direct every effort towards understanding, and increasing the capacity to understand, our living planet as a single, complex entity.

We need many more socio-ecologists out there doing anthro-geo-physiological fieldwork. We also need philosophers and communicators and people who delight in studying and understanding complex, interacting, self-regulating, far-from-equilibrium, self-organising, ambiguous, borderless systems.

Let us learn how to expect the unexpected.

How can existing knowledge from the natural and social sciences be combined into an interdisciplinary effort to overcome the key challenges facing the earth system?

Many of us believe in interdisciplinarity/multidisciplinarity but few of us really practice it. This question is of a conceptual and methodological order which if addressed might enable us to forge the kinds of scientific partnerships that take in insights from different disciplinary points of view and produce a comprehensive framework for tackling global challenges.

How can we best combine different knowledge systems to co-produce knowledge?

Bridging different knowledge systems provides a wider range of knowledge that can be applied to problems. Even though various initiatives and organizations such as MEA have devoted some attention to this question, there is still much work to be done.