How can we understand and best manage the feedbacks between (a) the growth and closer integration of the global economy and (b) changes in the biosphere, hydrosphere and atmosphere?

While it is important to understand environmental changes that are independent of human behavior, the most fundamental research questions facing us concern the large-scale environmental changes induced by human behavior, and that in turn induce an alteration in that behavior. These are the changes over which human societies have some control. The sustainability of global demographic and economic change depends on this set of feedbacks.

Demographic and economic changes have multiple and interconnected environmental impacts, but our understanding of these impacts is typically partial. The global change research programs, for example, tend to address subsets of impacts. At the same time human adaptation to environmental change tends to be problem specific – focusing separately on, for example, climate, biodiversity or disease risks. Understanding the interconnections between environmental changes and human responses to those changes is critical to the development of management strategies at the appropriate scale. It requires a research effort that spans the global change programs, and that embeds the adaptation and mitigation strategies adopted by human societies within that research effort.

How can we better connect people so that we work together from within disparate, separated communities to support common values like sustainability?

People are very separated by geography, demographics, types of governments (e.g., repressive regimes), technology and other variables. This separation puts people and communities into “information silos” that tend to keep valuable information from each other.

For example, US computer users may not know where their discarded computers go and how they affect those in proximity to where they are discarded. Computers contain all sorts of chemicals that harm the ecology and human health. If they were aware of the consequences of discarding computers in certain unsustainable ways (dumping in landfills for example) they might take action to ensure that chemicals are recycled and kept out of ecosystems and communities.

The Agent Orange debacle in the Vietnam War is another such example.

Sustainable population size is another area of concern. When people in one town have children, we are blind to how this affects our local, regional, national and global sustainability. How can we manage all nations’ populations at a sustainable size globally and for each nation and region?

In general, how can we organize people to first learn about and understand our common values–like health, love of nature, support for ecology?

Then how can we act on those values to create systems that support people, economies, communities, ecology, species, biodiversity, natural processes, etc.–locally, regionally, nationally and globally?