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 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.

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 connect every brain with every datum in near-real-time, so as to enable complete clarity about true costs of every product, service, and action? In other words, how do we create EarthGame as World Brain such that corruption, fraud, waste, and abuse are illuminated and then eliminated, while we educate the five billion poor one cell call at a time, creating infinite stabilizing wealth?

Buckminster Fuller had it right. The only thing we need is integrity. It is information asymmetries and information pathologies that are killing the Earth. Obstacles: the few who benefit now at the expense of the many.

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.

Do we have a policy for ensuring good sharing of future advances in computer modelling of complex systems – across all different areas including outside the climate change community?

There has been an explosion in data processing since the computer – is someone keeping track of it all, so any advances made in – for example financial modelling of an economy – are known by climate researchers ASAP

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.

How can we improve societal learning in dealing with complex challenges?

A unifying feature of all environmental and sustainability challenges is the complexity and uncertainty of the issues and relationships between goals, and problems. In order to deal effectvely with these issues we need to better learn about the interconections, and develop new approaches to policy making that reflect these lessons. Many tentative efforts have already been made in this direction.

Obstacles have to do with how communities of knowledge are organized and funded, and the possible trade offs between relying on technical expertise and democratic values. While they are not fundamental opposites, their potential contradictions do need to be considered and addressed.

In an ever-changing and evolving world, how can we harness all available knowledge, information and technology for the sole purpose of positively benefiting the human race?

Knowledge based decisions in an ever changing world are essential to the success of human organizations. From history, we know that catastrophic events have occurred, such as meteor and asteroid strikes, climate shifts/changes and mass extinctions, wiping out an unknown number of living species. These catastrophic events could not be stopped or their effects prevented in part because of the lack of knowledge and lack of organization of the inhabiting species. Human society has evolved into a knowledge driven society. We must begin to better organize ourselves and cooperate with each other in order to harness our growing knowledge and sophisticated technologies to focus our efforts on preserving the human race from the effects of future catastrophic events, both natural and anthropogenic. Catastrophic events impacting our earth’s systems will occur in the future and the degree of their impact will largely depend on human organizations and cooperation of, and decisions made by, the leaders of the world. The question is, “How can we ensure that the information provided to our leaders and policy makers is based on the most accurate and up-to-date knowledge, information and technology available, so that the decisions made will have the highest probability for success?”

We are in much need of a global effort to organize, assimilate, maintain and promote all available knowledge, information and technology so that the decisions made will have the highest probability for success. The current structure and institutions in place lack this capability, and until we figure out a way to integrate our rapidly growing knowledge, information and technology into a structure that has the capability to use it all, we run the risk of making decisions based on partial knowledge and information, thus leading to a decision that does not have the highest probability for success.

Scott Sellars
Graduate Student
Columbia University