The Earth System Governance Project [1] is a long-term, interdisciplinary social science research programme originally developed under the auspices of the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change. [2] It started in January 2009.
The Earth System Governance Project currently consists of a network of ca. 300 active and about 2,301 indirectly involved scholars from all continents. The global research alliance has evolved into the largest social science research network in the area of governance and global environmental change. [3] Since 2015 it is part of the overarching international research platform Future Earth. [4] The International Project Office is hosted at Utrecht University, The Netherlands. [5]
The Earth System Governance Project aims to contribute to science on the large, complex challenges of governance in an era of rapid and large-scale environmental change. The project seeks to create a better understanding of the role of institutions, organizations and governance mechanisms by which humans regulate their relationship with the natural environment. [1] The Earth System Governance Project aims to integrate governance research at all levels. The project aims to examine problems of the "global commons", but also local problems from air pollution to the preservation of waters, waste treatment or desertification and soil degradation. However, due to natural interdependencies local environmental pollution can be transformed into changes of the global system that affect other localities. Therefore, the Earth System Governance Project looks at institutions and governance processes both local and globally. [6]
The Earth System Governance Project is a scientific effort, but also aims to assist policy responses to the pressing problems of earth system transformation. [7] [8]
The concept of Earth System Governance is defined as:
... the interrelated and increasingly integrated system of formal and informal rules, rule-making systems, and actor-networks at all levels of human society (from local to global) that are set up to steer societies towards preventing, mitigating, and adapting to global and local environmental change and, in particular, earth system transformation, within the normative context of sustainable development. [1]
The Earth System Governance Project organizes its research according to a conceptual framework guided by five sets of research lenses according to their 2018 Science and Implementation Plan: [9]
These centre around four contextual conditions:
In 2001, the four then active global change research programmes (DIVERSITAS, International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme, World Climate Research Programme, and International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change) agreed to intensify co-operation through setting up an overarching Earth System Science Partnership. The research communities represented in this Partnership contend in the 2001 Amsterdam Declaration on Global Change [10] that the earth system now operates "well outside the normal state exhibited over the past 500,000 years" and that "human activity is generating change that extends well beyond natural variability—in some cases, alarmingly so—and at rates that continue to accelerate." To cope with this challenge, the four global change research programmes have called "urgently" for strategies for Earth System management. [1]
In March 2007, in response to the 2001 Amsterdam Declaration, the Scientific Committee of the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change (IHDP), the overarching social science programme in the field, mandated the drafting of the Science Plan of the Earth System Governance Project by a newly appointed Scientific Planning Committee. The Earth System Governance Project builds on the results of an earlier long-term research programme, the IHDP core project Institutional Dimensions of Global Environmental Change (IDGEC). [11] [12] In 2008, the Earth System Governance Project was officially launched.
In 2009, the Science and Implementation Plan of the Earth System Governance Project was published. [1] In the science and implementation plan, the conceptual problems, cross-cutting themes, flagship projects, and its policy relevance are outlined in detail. The Science Plan was written by an international, interdisciplinary Scientific Planning Committee chaired by Prof. Frank Biermann, which drew on a consultative process that started in 2004. Several working drafts of this Science Plan have been presented and discussed at a series of international events and conferences, and numerous scholars in the field, as well as practitioners, have offered suggestions, advice, and critique. [2]
Since then, the project has evolved into a broader research alliance that builds on an international network of research centers, lead faculty and research fellows. After the termination of the IHDP in 2014, the activities of the Earth System Governance research alliance are supported by an international steering group of representatives of the main Earth System Governance Research Centres and the global group of lead faculty and research fellows. [13]
Since 2014 first discussions were held at the Conferences around new directions and a new Science and Implementation Plan. In 2016 lead authors were selected and invited. After reviewing by the Earth System Governance community, the final plan was launched at the 2018 Utrecht Conference. [9]
In 2015 the Earth system governance Project is part of the overarching international research platform Future Earth. [4]
For its activities and implementation, the Earth System Governance Project relies on a global network of experts from different academic and cultural backgrounds. The research network consists of different groups of scientific experts. The Earth System Governance Project operates under the direction of a Scientific Steering Committee. The role of the Scientific Steering Committee is to guide the implementation of the Earth System Governance Science Plan. [14]
An important element in the project organisation is the global alliance of research centres that brings together the University of Ghana; the University of Brasília; Utrecht University; the German Development Institute; the CETIP Network; VU University Amsterdam; the University of Amsterdam; the Australian National University; Chiang Mai University; Colorado State University; Lund University; the University of East Anglia; the University of Oldenburg; the Stockholm Resilience Centre; the University of Toronto; the Tokyo Institute of Technology and Yale University. In addition, strong networks on earth system governance research exist in China, Latin America, Central and Eastern Europe, and Russia.
Since 2007, the Project has organized major scientific conferences addressing the topics of governance and global environmental change, including:
There are four major publication series of the Earth System Governance Project.
The Journal Earth System Governance was launched in 2019. [29]
The book series on earth system governance by the MIT Press is about the research objections of earth system governance. Interdisciplinary in scope, broad in governance levels and the use of methods, the books are aimed at investigating earth governance systems and finding conceivable amendments. They are hence addressing the scientific community and professionals in politics. [32] [33]
The Earth System Governance Project is also collaborating with Cambridge University Press to summarize the research conclusions of 10 years Earth System Governance Project. [48]
The Cambridge Elements series on Earth System Governance focuses on current governance research relevant for practitioners and scientists. The series is aimed at providing ideas for policy improvements and analyses of socio-ecological systems by interdisciplinary and influential scholars. [54]
The Earth System Governance Project organizes Task Forces, international networks of senior and early career scholars with a series of working groups focused on particular ideas or idea clusters. There are currently seven Task Forces:
Affiliated projects are the Norms of Global Governance Initiative (NGGI), [66] Innovations in Climate Governance (INOGOV), [67] Improving Earth Systems Governance through 'Purpose Ecosystems', [68] Governing the EU's Climate and Energy Transition in Turbulent Times (GOVTRAN), [69] Global Goals, [70] Environmental Governance in the Intermountain West: A study group of the Environmental Governance Working Group, [71] CROWD_USG: Crowdsourcing Urban Sustainability Governance, [72] and Behind the Scenes: Mapping the Role of Treaty Secretariats in International Environmental Policy-Making. [73]
Projects are the ReSET Programme 'Governance of Global Environmental Change', [74] Governance 'of' and 'for' the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), [75] Future Earth FTI 'Bright Spots: Seeds of a Good Anthropocene', [76] Future Earth Cluster 'Extreme Events and Environments from Climate to Society' (E3S), [77] Europe's approach to implementing the Sustainable Development Goals: good practices and the way forward, [78] Climate-Smart Agriculture in Sub-Saharan Africa, [79] and the BBNJ Initiative. [80]
In 2011, the Earth System Governance Project launched an initiative on International Environmental Governance. This initiative aims to provide a forum for discussion of current and ongoing research on international environmental governance and the institutional framework for sustainable development, in the period leading up to the 2012 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio de Janeiro, also known as Rio + 20. In addition, the initiative aims to target decision-makers and to contribute not just to a better understanding but also to actual improvements in international environmental governance towards an institutional framework that enables sustainable development. [81]
In 2012, 33 leading scholars from the Project wrote a blueprint for reform of strengthening earth system governance, which was published in Science. [82]
In 2014, the Project's chair Frank Biermann was invited to speak in the United Nations General Assembly. [83]
There is widespread support for the Earth System Governance Project in the scientific community, which is reflected in the size of the research network and in various publications by experts. [84] [85] However, criticisms of the Earth System Governance Project have also been made.
In an internal report of the International Human Dimensions Programme it is stated that the steering group of the Earth System Governance Project is too much dominated by experts from OECD countries. Since then, the Earth System Governance Project has actively sought ways to involve experts from different regions of the world. [86]
The idea of earth system governance has also been criticized for being too top-down, for placing too much emphasis on global governance structures. According to Mike Hulme, earth system governance represents an attempt to "geopolitically engineer" our way out of the climate crisis. [87] He questions whether the climate is governable and argues that it is way too optimistic and even hubristic to attempt to control the global climate by universal governance regimes. [88] This interpretation of the novel concept, however, has been rejected by other scholars as being too narrow and misleading. [89]
Global change in broad sense refers to planetary-scale changes in the Earth system. It is most commonly used to encompass the variety of changes connected to the rapid increase in human activities which started around mid-20th century, i.e., the Great Acceleration. While the concept stems from research on the climate change, it is used to adopt a more holistic view of the observed changes. Global change refers to the changes of the Earth system, treated in its entirety with interacting physicochemical and biological components as well as the impact human societies have on the components and vice versa. Therefore, the changes are studied through means of Earth system science.
Environmental policy is the commitment of an organization or government to the laws, regulations, and other policy mechanisms concerning environmental issues. These issues generally include air and water pollution, waste management, ecosystem management, maintenance of biodiversity, the management of natural resources, wildlife and endangered species. For example, concerning environmental policy, the implementation of an eco-energy-oriented policy at a global level to address the issues of global warming and climate changes could be addressed. Policies concerning energy or regulation of toxic substances including pesticides and many types of industrial waste are part of the topic of environmental policy. This policy can be deliberately taken to influence human activities and thereby prevent undesirable effects on the biophysical environment and natural resources, as well as to make sure that changes in the environment do not have unacceptable effects on humans.
The Global Land Project [changed to Global Land Programme in 2016] is a research initiative of Future Earth. It aims to understand the changes of the land systems given the prospects of rapid and massive global environmental change. The goal of GLP is "to measure, model and understand the coupled human-environment system".
Glenn A. Albrecht, born in 1953, was Professor of Sustainability at Murdoch University in Western Australia until his retirement in 2014. He is an honorary fellow in the School of Geosciences of the University of Sydney.
Sustainability science first emerged in the 1980s and has become a new academic discipline. Similar to agricultural science or health science, it is an applied science defined by the practical problems it addresses. Sustainability science focuses on issues relating to sustainability and sustainable development as core parts of its subject matter. It is "defined by the problems it addresses rather than by the disciplines it employs" and "serves the need for advancing both knowledge and action by creating a dynamic bridge between the two".
Sustainability is a social goal for people to co-exist on Earth over a long time. Definitions of this term are disputed and have varied with literature, context, and time. Experts often describe sustainability as having three dimensions : environmental, economic, and social, and many publications emphasize the environmental dimension. In everyday use, sustainability often focuses on countering major environmental problems, including climate change, loss of biodiversity, loss of ecosystem services, land degradation, and air and water pollution. The idea of sustainability can guide decisions at the global, national, and individual levels. A related concept is sustainable development, and the terms are often used to mean the same thing. UNESCO distinguishes the two like this: "Sustainability is often thought of as a long-term goal, while sustainable development refers to the many processes and pathways to achieve it."
Planetary boundaries are a framework to describe limits to the impacts of human activities on the Earth system. Beyond these limits, the environment may not be able to self-regulate anymore. This would mean the Earth system would leave the period of stability of the Holocene, in which human society developed. The framework is based on scientific evidence that human actions, especially those of industrialized societies since the Industrial Revolution, have become the main driver of global environmental change. According to the framework, "transgressing one or more planetary boundaries may be deleterious or even catastrophic due to the risk of crossing thresholds that will trigger non-linear, abrupt environmental change within continental-scale to planetary-scale systems."
The International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change (IHDP) was a research programme that studied the human and societal aspects of the phenomenon of global change.
William Lee Steffen was an American-born Australian chemist. He was the executive director of the Australian National University (ANU) Climate Change Institute and a member of the Australian Climate Commission until its dissolution in September 2013. From 1998 to 2004, he was the executive director of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme, a coordinating body of national environmental change organisations based in Stockholm. Steffen was one of the founding climate councillors of the Climate Council, with whom he frequently co-authored reports, and spoke in the media on issues relating to climate change and renewable energy.
Earth system governance is a recently developed paradigm that builds on earlier notions of environmental policy and nature conservation, but puts these into the broader context of human-induced transformations of the entire earth system.
Diana Liverman is a retired Regents Professor of Geography and Development and past Director of the University of Arizona School of Geography, Development and Environment in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences in Tucson, Arizona.
The Urbanization and Global Environmental Change Project (UGEC) is one of the core research projects of the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change (IHDP). UGEC aims to understand the bi-directional interactions between urbanization and global environmental change. The UGEC International Project Office is located at Arizona State University.
Future Earth is an international research program which aims to build knowledge about the environmental and human aspects of Global change, and to find solutions for sustainable development. It aims to increase the impact of scientific research on sustainable development.
The contributions of women in climate change have received increasing attention in the early 21st century. Feedback from women and the issues faced by women have been described as "imperative" by the United Nations and "critical" by the Population Reference Bureau. A report by the World Health Organization concluded that incorporating gender-based analysis would "provide more effective climate change mitigation and adaptation."
Planetary Health is a multi- and transdisciplinary research paradigm, a new science for exceptional action, and a global movement. Planetary Health refers to "the health of human civilization and the state of the natural systems on which it depends". In 2015, the Rockefeller Foundation–Lancet Commission on Planetary Health launched the concept which is currently being developed towards a new health science with over 25 areas of expertise.
The Stockholm Resilience Centre (SRC), is a research centre on resilience and sustainability science at Stockholm University. It is a joint initiative between Stockholm University and the Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
Michele Betsill is an American political scientist. She is a professor of political science at Colorado State University, where she has also been the chair of the department. She studies climate change and sustainability policies, with a particular focus on how non-governmental actors and sub-national governments respond to climate change. She is a co-founder of the Earth System Governance Project.
Steinar Andresen is a Norwegian political scientist and Research Professor at the Fridtjof Nansen Institute (FNI) in Lysaker, Norway. He holds a Cand. Polit. degree in political science from the University of Oslo, where he served as professor from 2002-2006, and he has been a guest researcher at Princeton University, New Jersey, the Brookings Institution in Washington DC, and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Austria.
Sander Ernst van der Leeuw is an archaeologist, historian, academic, and author. He is an Emeritus Foundation Professor of Anthropology and Sustainability, Director Emeritus of the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability, and the Founding Director of School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University.
Joyeeta Gupta is a Dutch environmental scientist who is professor of Environment and Development in the Global South at the University of Amsterdam, professor of Law and Policy in Water Resources and Environment at IHE Delft Institute for Water Education, and co-chair of the Earth Commission, set up by Future Earth and supported by the Global Challenges Foundation. She was co-chair of UNEP’s Global Environment Outlook-6 (2016-2019), published by Cambridge University Press, which was presented to governments participating in the United Nations Environment Assembly in 2019. She is a member of the Amsterdam Global Change Institute. She was awarded the Association of American Publishers PROSE award for Environmental Science and the 2023 Spinoza Prize.
{{cite book}}
: |website=
ignored (help){{cite book}}
: |website=
ignored (help)