Presentations
Presented in the panel "From global change toward sustainability science" at the Open Meeting of the Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change Research Community. 7 October, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Abstract
Some long term-trends in nature and society serve as beacons with which we can navigate directions towards a 21st century sustainability transition. This transition is seen as one where a stabilizing world population meets its needs, reduces hunger and poverty, while maintaining the planet''s life support systems and living resources. "Bending the curve" -- accelerating favorable trends, slowing harmful trends, understanding complex trends, and noting changes in direction and inflection that constitute significant departures -- is a grand challenge of sustainability science. Toward this end, we have embarked on a research project that strives to answer the following questions:
- Which of the many trends in nature and society are the principal drivers toward or away from sustainability goals and targets?
- Are these trends being adequately monitored and assessed at the relevant spatial and temporal scales?
- How may favorable trends be accelerated and harmful trends slowed?
- How may complex, long-term, "mega-trends" -- such as globalization or land use and cover change -- be better understood?
- It is possible to construct a sustainability index that can steer governmental, corporate, and civic decision-making?
This paper will present overall design and strategy for our research, and our results to date. In particular it will present: a core set of sustainability goals and targets; indicators with which progress toward meeting these goals and targets can be monitored and assessed, and the recurrent assessments that measure them; driving forces and associated indicators that explain progress toward or away from these goals and targets; and, efforts to define and implement consensus priority actions that accelerate or slow trends towards or away from these goals. It will also describe our efforts to build upon the I=PAT formula (impact = population X affluence X technology) offered by Erhlich and Holdren by: expanding the notion of impacts to include development outcomes of human needs and hunger and poverty reduction; considering the role of institutions; and addressing placed-based interactions between impacts and driving forces at different spatial scales.