How does mankind, responsible for climatic and other anthropogenic changes including geo-political and cultural processes, interact with biodiversity, ecosystems and the services they provide?

The widespread recognition of the considerable value of biodiversity and ecosystems for man kind has led to an increasing need to understand and assess the role of biodiversity and ecosystem services and to assess the changing state of biodiversity and ecosystem services, and public attitudes towards them. Understanding the changing state there is a need to analyse the impact of the most significant drivers, including human behaviour, and their interactions on biodiversity. Analysing options for the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity and evaluating the effectiveness of policy and communication instruments should help with what to do about the changing state of biodiversity and ecosystem services (quoted from the Common Research Strategy of ALTER-Net, a long-term biodiversity, ecosystem and awareness research network.

What factors determine the resilience of the full set of interacting ecosystem services that support human well-being and allow for adaptation to a changing environment?

This question requires interdisciplinary research among physical, biological and social sciences. It raises significant conceptual or theoretical issues, as well as significant needs for empirical research at global and regional scales. The question quickly gives rise to a host of important more specialized questions. Answers to this family of questions are relevant for applied questions of sustainability science.

Definitions: (1) Resilience is the capacity of a system to persist within thresholds or “guardrails”, adapt to changing circumstances, or transform to something new when the current mode of operation is unsustainable. (2) Ecosystem services are benefits that people receive from nature, such as provision of food and water, regulation of water flows and quality, and cultural values. They can be analyzed at the global scale or for specific landscapes and seascapes.

Challenges: A key challenge is that changes in ecosystem services generally have strong correlations. That is, changes that cause increases in one group of ecosystem services often cause decreases in another group of ecosystem services. These tradeoffs among bundles of ecosystem services are not well understood. In management, they lead to unintended adverse consequences. These consequences often take systems across thresholds, degrade resilience, and impair the capacity of the system to respond adaptively to future environmental changes. Thus understanding the tradeoffs has fundamental importance for sustainable management.

Obstacles: In order to address this question, new frameworks for interdisciplinary collaboration are needed. Also there are significant needs for conceptual development, theoretical research, monitoring at global and regional scales, and empirical research at global and regional scales.

What are the levels of sustainable development within each country and can these levels be quantified and compared to other countries?

Although complex, a standardized sustainability index per country, comparable to other countries, should be researched and presented. This would indicate levels of sustainability within countries, taking population growth/age, natural resources, pollution levels, etc. into account. Based on this, areas for education/action can be identified. This is both a earth system & social science topic combined, and the final outcome should be to raise awareness within these problem sectors.

What are the deep evolutionary (neurobiological) and cultural drivers perpetuating poor decision-making in relation to the environment and sustainability and how can we use these insights to identify leverage points for supporting meaningful, lasting individual and collective change toward ecocultural sustainability?

This question is transdisciplinary and requires collaborative exploration into evolution, human origins, our relationship to primates (and other culture-creating species), evolution of culture, neurobiology, organizational learning, evolutionary psychology, ethics and morality, game theory, decision theory, systems dynamics, social learning for sustainability, as well as many other fields.

It gets at the heart of the matter that while information is a necessary condition for meaningful change, it is by no means a sufficient condition for meaningful change.

What political and economic changes can reverse climate change and the loss of biodiversity?

The world’s economy depends upon a system of capital accumulation that does not support a sustainable relationship between the nature and the human communities. Natural resources are exploited above the threshold to sustainability. Political changes are required.

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.

Why, considering the meaning of humans (A), also the integrity of the Earth system (B), the results and its use of ESR (C) and the lessons learned in development(D), we are not getting the appropriate global, continental and national sustainable well-being?

With humility, we recognize that we were not prepared for the above challenge; leadership was absent even with the availability of guidelines to set real role models. It means that we should be better prepared to deal with (A), (B), (C) and (D), to go the extra mile with new paradigms, models and actions, but this time all the conditions/drivers are in our favor (habitability of Earth is at stake).

The “tune up” required will need to see and foresee our reality with a unified conception, using the Earth language, an universal language understood by anyone that occupies an space on Earth. This “template” could be converted to a three dimensional figure (systems, realms and information)that could help navigate U.S.A.L. (understanding/scheme/action/love) and also could be the forerunner of a Strategic Framework for ESR and Development(SFESRD). It could also facilitate the involvement of multidisciplinary teams to detect the gaps and connect the dots when we superimpose the “template” on any ecosystem of Earth.

And last but not the least, we need to break the current inertia. The potential of ESSP to involve a significant part of our collective intelligence is there. The advances made(MA/MDG/IPCC, CGIAR/CRSP, NLEducation, etc)should lead to cover the remaining realms and systems but at the continent/region/country levels(part of SFESRD).Our education/research system should also be involved, at least the enthusiasm and success of our youth, as part of the K-1 to K-51 landscape(future stewards of planet Earth).

To get faster results(before 2015), we could announce that every member of the scientific community is donating one hour/week for the next 10 years, that could trigger involvement of our civil society and give meaning to the splendor of the human species.

What is the role, responsibility, and accountability of Media and Information technology and society in Earth system research?

The media today is oriented to sustainability of development rather than sustainability of life. The question is based on premises (hypothesis) that the post-modern technology can be used without harming natural resources or destroying the biosphere and ecosystem.

In September 2008, the world was shattered by a “global crisis” which struck in a decade, marked as “globalisation”. The crisis was neither sudden nor unexpected. Besides the prevailing “sustainability of development” backed by the international capital, the counter argument voiced as “sustainability of living” by ecologists was not given a fair opportunity. The crisis has over shadowed globalization. The world agenda today is surviving the recession or reviving the market. Purposes and policies of the “globalising world” have fallen from the headlines.

How did the so-called information society come to this impasse, and what was the role or responsibility of Media?

In a formal proposal to ICSU, I have summarily concluded that, if not technology, the information technology can perhaps be domesticated. The ultimate challenge is not the technology but the MAN —dependent on technology,

Key Words: Sustainability, technology, information society —growth or survival

Can we define a sustainable equitable ecological footprint for humanity within the 21st century and the changes needed to achieve that?

For humanity to not only advance but to survive as guardians of the planet, this question needs to be answered

How do we develop the tools to ensure the changes in societal behavior needed to achieve a sustainable socio-environmental dynamic within the short timeframe available?

In essence, solving the environmental issues we face is to be done by society, and is therefore a social challenge. We know much more about its natural and environmental dimensions than about the social ones. How do we remove the political, economic, cultural, social and other obstacles to sustainability, and how do we most efficiently leverage the human capacity to learn and change?