What are the possible policies for meeting the problems of climate change, overfishing, and depletion of mineral resources? What is the effectiveness of tradeable permits and taxes, how can they deal with tradeoffs over time, and especially how are they compatible with the need for economic growth among the poorer nations who are, at the same time, contributing to the problems? What is the scope for directed technological change?

Recognizing the importance of challenges to the Earth system is only the beginning. We must ask how to meet them. This requires a great deepening of our knowledge of economic and social systems and of changes in values to accompany the changes in needs.

Is Passive Management Approach still practical for Managing Biodiversity in a Changing Climate within Least Developed Countries?

Most of the least developed countries are managing their biodiversity using passive management approaches; leaving nature to take its own course. With the climate variability, extremes and change species are suffering from extreme and persistent droughts, floods, wildfires etc. Seconded by the increasing population of people who also depend on climate-sensitive sectors (farming, fishing, pastoralism) the situation in worse. Following crop failures, massive death of livestock etc, people are relying directly on the biodiversity resources closer to their areas as well as from further away. The increasing population is also leaving most of the protected areas as isolated ecological islands. Given the harsh situations (floods, droughts, wildfires, etc) organisms are restricted to escape to various refuge areas. Therefore, more need to be done to inform the policy and possibly switch from passive to active management of biodiversity for sustainable development; biodiversity conservation and sustained ecosystem goods and services.

There are large disconnects between the world of scientific (including social-scientific) experts and the general public on subjects such as risk, vulnerability, and socio-ecological change. This presents challenges to generating the political change we need for embarking on more sustainable development pathways. In what ways does this disconnect affect the creation of appropriate policy, and how do we deal with it?

The public is growing increasingly distrustful of politicians and of what academic Tim Mitchell calls “the rule of experts.” For real, transformative changes, we need mass buy-in and political pressure. What is our responsibility, as academics, in terms of making our research accessible, relevant and usable by the public? How do we bridge this gap?

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

What are the most effective ways climate change and natural scientists can engage with politicians and natural resource managers to facilitate implementation of more ecosystem-based management approaches to natural resource use?

The basic processes of climate change are reasonably well understood; what is needed are appropriate methods of communication to decision-makers about the socio-economic and biophysical impacts of climate change. Information on impacts needs to be communicated in such a way that policians and resource managers can see why it will be their interests to act on this information sooner rather than later.

Obstacles? Short timeframe based on electoral cycles in many developed countries hinders long-term strategic view needed for more sustainable natural resource use policies.

How can the perceived imperative in market-economies for continuous open-ended economic growth, be reconciled with the need from a natural science perspective for the collective human impact on the biophysical Earth system to be stabilized or decreased in order to sustain human well-being indefinitely?

The conflict between economic and natural science perspectives addressed by this question is the ultimate driver behind the biophysical Earth System issues that are of concern and have led to the emergence of the idea of Earth System Science. Over the coming decade we can confidently expect socio-economic aspects to become much more strongly expressed in Earth System models. The reason that we expect ESS to attract community support is that we think it will help formulation of relevant actions & policies to address the ES issues. Unless the conflict between the socio-economic drivers of national and international policy can be reconciled with biophysical (environmental) drivers of policy, solutions to earth system probems at the whole-system level are doomed to failure. It will take a long time for the two world views to become reconciled into a single workable approach. So the sooner ESS starts addressing the issue the better.

How complex multifunctional landscapes will adapt to climate change: The role of science in identifying solutions to be implemented into planning and management.

Adapting landscape systems to climate change is an emerging topic in science. One of the most important challenges for future research will be to integrate research across different scales, including spatio-temporal scales within an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary framework. If we manage to follow this route, science will be able to move from analytical to actionable climate knowledge.

Science has played an important role in putting climate change on the world agenda. We have, now, to recognize and accept that the world’s climate is already changing and will continue to do so for decades. Considering the resulting impacts on land use and biota (Barker et al. 2007; Stern 2007), the option of adapting land use and landscapes to mitigate undesired implications by climate change is now appearing on the political and research agendas. The EU has now published a “white paper” on how it will focus its climate change adaptation policy (Commission of the European Communities 2009). The emphasis is on mainstreaming adaptation measures into EU policies: agriculture, forestry, health, biodiversity, ecosystems and water, coastal and marine areas and production systems and technical infrastructure. In terms of knowledge building, this calls for integrative approaches, crossing economic, social and environmental borderlines. Science is called to play a role in identifying solutions and ways to implement these in complex multifunctional landscape change. Is science ready for this? Our view (Opdam et al 2009) is that for science to get itself well-equipped for this major task, it has to evolve its emphasis from a reductionist, analytical approach aimed at identifying impacts, to a synthetic, design oriented approach aimed at generating solutions (Meinke et al. 2006). (For more details on the subject see: Opdam et al 2009 Landscape Ecology)

During the next decade, what are the minimum changes to global policy needed to ensure that negative impacts of anthropogenic environmental change on the majority of biodiversity, ecosystem function and services are still reversible?

Biodiversity supports ecosystem function and ultimately the delivery of ecosystem services to society. Human driven environmental changes are negatively impacting biodiversity, but in many systems it is still possible to reverse these impacts given sufficient political and socio-economic will. The challenge is therefore to understand what is the minimum we need to do in the short-term (10 years) to ensure sustainable ecosystem services in the longer terms (>50 years). The obstacles to achieving this are numerous and include: lack of understanding of the links between biodiversity, ecosystem function and ecosystem services and how these are impacted by multiple pressures; inappropriate national and global governance systems to react rapidly and effectively to negative impacts of biodiversity loss to ensure long-term benefits; lack of societal and political understanding of the consequences of biodiversity and ecosystem service loss; uncertainty of the expected impacts on society under various future scenarios.

How can we get the public to understand how to make BIG changes in carbon dioxide emissions?

Individuals are trying to do “their part” but we need BIG solutions: e.g. policy changes that force large populations to behave “better”.

What are the roles of national and subnational states in environmental policy-making and enforcement, especially in the Global South, and how do international environmental treaties affect domestic environmental politics, including design and enforcement of domestic policy?

Currently, environmental social science scholarship is dominated by studies of the impact of environmental degradation on communities and modes of resistance (sociology, anthropology) or processes of agreeing upon and signing international treaties (international relations). Comparatively, there is too little scholarship on the roles of national and subnational states in environmental politics. Given that international treaties are currently insufficient to ensure responsible environmental governance, an understanding of the interplay of conflicting domestic interests and the state in national environmental politics, especially in the Global South–which contributes ever more greatly to climate change and biodiversity loss–is essential to comprehending the possibilities for, and limits to, effective international cooperation and enforcement of treaties.