How to deal with the uncertainties associated with Earth system research, especially policy-relevant areas?

In addition to climate change uncertainties, we are still lack of knowledge about interactions of land-atmosphere, Atmosphere-sea, aerosol-climate, chemistry-climate, and more importantly human-environment relationships.

What are the key regional drivers of future climate change?

Globally, greenhouse gas forcing is the key driver in policy-relevent climate change (ie. over the next 20, 50, 100 years). Regionally -at the scales people live, ecosystems function, water is obtained and crops grown, other forcings can dominate. Land cover change, urbanization, industrial aerosols etc can all have regional fingerprints that while globally small are locally dominant. Other modes of variability, ocean-atmopshere coupling, land-atmopshere coupling, orographic effects etc all can be locally dominant drivers even if they are lost in any global measure of climate change. A research program to understand drivers of climate change at the scales that people live is hugely challenging at a scientific level, technical level for the modelling and in terms of research at the interface of risk and vulnerability.

Current trajectory of human action is not sustainable at a global scale: how can scientific understanding of complex systems and human perturbations devise sustainable development pathways across the scientific, policy and resource management divide, particularly at the regional level where most decisions are taken?

During the last 50 years the human population has risen from to 2,5 to over 6 billion. The use of land, water, minerals and other natural resources has increased almost ten-fold over the last two hundred years and approximately 50% of the ice-free land surface has now been significantly modified by humans and most of the rest is managed for human purposes. This phenomenon, which has obvious implications, creates the need to study the interactions, which occur on different temporal and spatial scales, affecting the biosphere and which are particularly susceptible to human actions, especially the efforts to provide a growing human population with food, energy, shelter and employment.

A global change research perspective which places primary emphasis on the global scale often misses a vast amount of work, frequently done under other guises, which is directly relevant to the study of global change phenomena. Such work is crucial for understanding the underlying processes which when aggregated constitute global change. Ultimately global change research will provide much of the underlying scientific understanding of complex systems and human perturbations that is required to devise sustainable development pathways at regional level. The drive for sustainability – the desire to make the development of the growing ‘human enterprise’ more compatible with the natural evolution of the Earth system – gives global change research its most fundamental rationale and connection to applications in policy and resource management. Where global change research is weak – application of the work through interaction with the policy and resource management sectors, sustainable development science is strong; and where sustainable development work is often weak – understanding the fundamental dynamics of complex environmental systems, global change research is strong. Clearly, the two fields of enquiry should work in much closer harmony in the future.

How will the growing human population change the land cover (albedo), water and atmosphere composition in the next 20-50 years and what feedbacks will occur as symptoms of our planet resilience?

Feedbacks will create new conditions for our species that will have to evolve to adapt to polluted air, polluted water and a changed climate. The sooner we start paying attention to these feedbacks that will cause diseases, migrations, wars, famines, the sooner we can invest in creative strategies to improve or maintain human’s livelihoods and stop wasting time and energy on useless pursuits.

How will the land surface and lower atmospheric interactions affect human and other species well being?

There are still lots of uncertainties about the quality of human life and other species in view of the rapidly changing land-surface and its consequent interactions with the lower atmosphere. Gathering more information about this will help to redirect investments and draw up appropriate response to ensure human survival.