Environmental science is an interdisciplinary academic field that integrates physics, biology, and geography to the study of the environment, and the solution of environmental problems. Environmental science emerged from the fields of natural history and medicine during the Enlightenment. Today it provides an integrated, quantitative, and interdisciplinary approach to the study of environmental systems.
Diversitas was an international research programme aiming at integrating biodiversity science for human well-being. In December 2014 its work was transferred to the programme called Future Earth, which was sponsored by the Science and Technology Alliance for Global Sustainability, comprising the International Council for Science (ICSU), the International Social Science Council (ISSC), the Belmont Forum of funding agencies, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the United Nations University (UNU) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).
The World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) is an international programme that helps to coordinate global climate research. The WCRP was established in 1980, under the joint sponsorship of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the International Council for Science (ICSU), and has also been sponsored by the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC) of UNESCO since 1993.
An environmental factor, ecological factor or eco factor is any factor, abiotic or biotic, that influences living organisms. Abiotic factors include ambient temperature, amount of sunlight, and pH of the water soil in which an organism lives. Biotic factors would include the availability of food organisms and the presence of biological specificity, competitors, predators, and parasites.
The Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) was built by the Group on Earth Observations (GEO) on the basis of a 10-Year Implementation Plan running from 2005 to 2015. GEOSS seeks to connect the producers of environmental data and decision-support tools with the end users of these products, with the aim of enhancing the relevance of Earth observations to global issues. GEOSS aims to produce a global public infrastructure that generates comprehensive, near-real-time environmental data, information and analyses for a wide range of users. The Secretariat Director of Geoss is Barbara Ryan.
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.
The International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) is an independent international research institute located in Laxenburg, near Vienna in Austria, founded as an East-West scientific cooperation initiative during the Cold War. Through its research programs and initiatives, the institute conducts policy-oriented interdisciplinary research into issues too large or complex to be solved by a single country or academic discipline. These include climate change, energy security, population aging, and sustainable development. The results of IIASA research and the expertise of its researchers are made available to policymakers worldwide to help them make informed and evidence-based policies.
The Earth Institute is a research institute at Columbia University that was established in 1995. Its stated mission is to address complex issues facing the planet and its inhabitants, with a focus on sustainable development. With an interdisciplinary approach, this includes research in climate change, geology, global health, economics, management, agriculture, ecosystems, urbanization, energy, hazards, and water. The Earth Institute's activities are guided by the idea that science and technological tools that already exist could be applied to greatly improve conditions for the world's poor, while preserving the natural systems that support life on Earth.
The International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP) was a research programme that ran from 1987 to 2015 dedicated to studying the phenomenon of global change. Its primary focus was coordinating "international research on global-scale and regional-scale interactions between Earth's biological, chemical and physical processes and their interactions with human systems."
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".
The Earth System Governance Project is a long-term, interdisciplinary social science research programme originally developed under the auspices of the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change. It started in January 2009.
The United States Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) coordinates and integrates federal research on changes in the global environment and their implications for society. The program began as a presidential initiative in 1989 and was codified by Congress through the Global Change Research Act of 1990, which called for "a comprehensive and integrated United States research program which will assist the Nation and the world to understand, assess, predict, and respond to human-induced and natural processes of global change."
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.
The European Consortium for Ocean Research Drilling (ECORD) is a consortium of 14 European countries and Canada that was formed in 2003 to join the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP) as a single member. ECORD is now part of the International Ocean Discovery Program, which addresses crucial questions in Earth, Ocean, Environmental and Life sciences based on drill cores, borehole imaging, observatory data, and related geophysical imaging obtained from beneath the ocean floor using specialized ocean-going drilling and research vessels and platforms. As a contributing member of IODP, ECORD is entitled to berths on every IODP expedition.
Sustainable land management (SLM) refers to practices and technologies that aim to integrate the management of land, water, and other environmental resources to meet human needs while ensuring long-term sustainability, ecosystem services, biodiversity, and livelihoods. The term is used, for example, in regional planning and soil or environmental protection, as well as in property and estate management.
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.
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.
Land systems constitute the terrestrial component of the Earth system and encompass all processes and activities related to the human use of land, including socioeconomic, technological and organizational investments and arrangements, as well as the benefits gained from land and the unintended social and ecological outcomes of societal activities. Changes in land systems have large consequences for the local environment and human well-being and are at the same time pervasive factors of global environmental change. Land provides vital resources to society, such as food, fuel, fibres and many other ecosystem services that support production functions, regulate risks of natural hazards, or provide cultural and spiritual services. By using the land, society alters and modifies the quantity and quality of the provision of these services.
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 Centre for Development and Environment (CDE) is an interdisciplinary research centre specializing in sustainability science and land systems at the University of Bern, Switzerland. It conducts research in many countries worldwide, with a particular focus on the Eastern Africa, Southeast Asia, South America, Europe, and Switzerland. In terms of teaching, CDE offers courses in the field of sustainable development at the bachelor’s, master’s, doctoral, and postdoctoral level.
