How can we identify and manage looming thresholds in social-ecological systems arising from resilience – development trade-offs, especially those across scales?

Rising human numbers and increasing use of natural resources are lowering resilience in most regions of the world. Some of the changes will result in irreversible, or very hard to reverse, regime shifts in the coupled social-ecological systems concerned. They are already happening (salinized agricultural regions, desertified rangelands, collapsed fisheries, degraded ex-forest areas, etc.). We need to know how to identify such threshold effects before they happen, and how to manage them.

what is the carrying capacity of earth system to climate change?

Taking into consideration the environmental changes, frequent natural disasters, growing impact of man made disasters, growing poverty and popultion, widening the gap between rich and poor, unjust distribution and use of land and other natural resources, investment in war industries, gender gap in all aspects of life and deteriorating moral values, it is important to estimate generally as to what extent the pressure of earth system can be put? and what can be a limit to it, if there is such thing as limit.

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 much land cover change (population growth) can be tolerated by ‘GAIA’ before irreversibilty takes its path?

Remember, soils and genes can be lost only once (irreversible). Soil losses reduce the planet’s capacity to store essential plant nutrients (all cations) and carbon (humus), both intimately linked to the presence of clay and, thus, intact soils. The number one driver behind this issue is growth in number of and consumption by humans.

How can policy options best be developed to adapt human life to the worst-case scenarios of climate change?

The political or technical processes to mitigate climate change may well not succeed. Ecosystem/social science needs to define survivable adaptions for environmental services under likely climate extremes.

Late in this century, policy makers world-wide are likely to need well-founded options for the support and movement of their populations, depending upon which path of development climate change follows. Defining and evaluating potential strategies now would be a sensible precaution, one that could lead to posing many engineering and scientific questions that we can address successfully during the next decade (and beyond).

What is the sustainable human population of the planet/continent/country compatible with maintaining biodiversity ?

At the moment most effort is focussed on debating the symptoms that affect the planet, and few are prepared to link them together and debate the common underlying cause. Failure to treat this cause is likely to produce far worse outcomes than treating each individual symptom. The main obstacles are political, religious and social.

What technologies and strategies should we adopt in order to minimise our non carbon neutral emissions with the limited resources available without having to make drastic changes to our way of life?

On the basis that global warming may cause catastrophic climate change, if left unchecked, leading to catastrophic effects for the humanity and many other living things and that the evidence indicates that human activity, specifically our desire for energy using technologies, is probably the major cause of climate change.
Considering also the following:
> Generally speaking people like the energy-using technologies, travel, computers, central heating, modern medicine etc. and it would be almost impossible to turn the clock back to the pre-industrial age and in any case it would also require a massive population reduction to be viable anyway.
> There is no shortage of clean energy, the Sahara desert alone receives about 150 times more solar energy daily than the energy used by entire human population each day, the world receives nearly 10,000 times more.
I believe we need an integrated global strategy that integrates energy supply, distribution and use of energy, the latter includes use reduction from efficiency measures and population control but not banning private cars, etc. Population control is actually more important with regard to food and water supply, at the current population growth rate of 1%, then in a about 1,170 years we would run out of dry land for everyone to stand on let alone for growing crops.

How do we prevent the collapse of civilisation by quick global mobilisation for the human right of family planning (1968, Tehran), for eradication of family planning illiteracy (even in the rich countries), for contraceptives that are more effective, cheaper and can be used even among hard circumstances of violence, poverty, and illiteracy?

Why family planning is privilige of the rich? “Unmet need for family planning undermines achievement of all Millennium Development Goals.” (UN)

“Family planning could bring more benefits to more people at less cost than any other single ‘technology’ now available to the human race. But it is not appreciated widely enough that this would still be true even if there were no such thing as a population problem.” (UNICEF)