Between the goals of climate stabilization and sustainability, which goal can better deliver paradigm shifts in the development pathway and life style choices of nations, irrespective of which stage of development they are at?

Threat of climate change is almost unanimously accepted but while the question of action comes several other priorities overshadow the importance of climate responsiveness. Still it is believed that climate response will generate loss of human welfare in the short term and so more development oriented goals dominate the choice. The position taken by many cannot be ignored when the question is of global dimension. Given the very wide range of inequality among the people on earth at the moment in terms of access to basic needs of living to luxury, whether need based or right based approach both would favour reduction in wastage and relative disparity. Through human civilization and history it has been over and over again proved that in real world theoretical best practice-be it policy, technology, behaviour never works, so also cooperation. Under this hypothesis it is important to understand what operational principles can best manage the activities across various groups given multiple goals. It is also relevant to understand if there will be any paradigm shift and if so within what time scale?

How to ensure that solutions for climate stabilization optimize adaptation and mitigation, maximize the co-benefits and minimize the unintended consequences for health, ecology and the global economy?

Life cycle analysis to assess the health, environmental and economic costs of proposed technologies and practices is a methodology for making healthy and sustainable energy choices. Some measures, like burning ethanol/gasoline mixtures produce ground-level ozone that contributes to the heat island effect (worsening adaptation to heat waves). The coal life cycle, from mountaintop removal to pulverization to combustion has multiple health and ecological impacts. Carbon dioxide capture and storage address only the very end of a long stream of hazards and emissions.

On the other hand, some solutions offer multiple benefits.

 Transport: Plug-in hybrid vehicles (PHEVs) and electric vehicles (EVs) minimize the burning of all substances and are suitable for cars, trucks, buses, trains, ships and planes. By reducing black carbon emissions, ozone precursors and CO2, they clean and cool cities.

 The grid: Such vehicles must plug into a cleanly-powered smart grid. Al Gore’s proposal for a smart grid in 10 years for $1.5 to $3 trillion provides the goal, timetable and economic stimulus needed to move to a robust, job-creating, well-adapted and climate-stabilizing backbone for the low carbon economy.

 Healthy cities: A healthy cities initiative – with green buildings, rooftop gardens, walking paths, biking lanes, tree-lined streets, open space, congestion control, smart growth and improved public transport – will decrease vehicular miles traveled, promote exercise, save money, create jobs and advance climate-stabilizing technologies. Green cities connected by electric light rails and railroads will reduce highway and short-haul airway traffic.

Ecological design principles: Making our energy system resilient, robust and adaptable requires using ecological design principles: combining hybrids of power generation at all scales, “smart technologies,” and new generation of batteries. Triangulation of distributed, regional and central generation decreases vulnerabilities in the face of more heat waves and storms, and loss of hydropower from disappearing glaciers.

How can a sustainagility science concept be developed to complement current sustainability and efficiency focus, by acknowledging that continuous change is needed?

Current sustainability concepts tend to focus on status quo. Reconciling Millennium Development Goals 1-6 with Goal 7 has not made much progress, beyond words on paper. A sustained agility rather than resilience concept may help us move forward. The new concept of ’sustainagility science’ is emerging as complement, providing more depths to ‘option value’ in diversity appreciation, and complementing ‘adaptive capacity’ as human capital trait.

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?

What is the source of ore deposits?

The resources of the Earth are limited. We still don’t know the origin of ore deposits, except some materials like oil, salt and coal. Understanding is the key of a sustainable management. But if the source is too deep, it will be very difficult !

What kind of tourism should we promote for the next decades?

Tourism is a major economic activity in the world, and also a basic need for all populations. However the patterns of this activity are obsolete, based in a short-term economic perspective and producing a high level of negative consequences. The aims of tourism are now very far from the ecological and social needs of mankind. We must find and promote new paradigms to promote an adequate development of this activity, using scientific outcomes and an interdisciplinary knowledge in order to aspire towards (really) more sustainability. The new tourism should be a tool to educate people to respect the last natural relics of the planet and to use properly the few natural resources still available.