Presentations
Panel at the Open Meeting of the Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change Research Community. 7 October, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Abstract
As documented in a number of recent reports, the last two decades have witnessed the emergence of global environmental change as a widely accepted worldview, a maturing program of scientific research, and as an arena of increasing political attention and demand for action. The same reports stress, however, that as we enter the 21st century both the notable successes and the unfinished business of these first two decades of pioneering work are creating demands for further evolution of the global change agenda in directions that will let it better address a number of emergent challenges:
- bringing the scientifically defined agenda for studying global change into a closer relationship with the socially defined agenda for sustainable development;
- understanding how the multiple, cumulative stresses increasingly apparent in interactions between social and environmental systems induce responses including discontinuous or irreversible ones at multiple time and space scales;
- conducting integrated assessments of the implications of such complex interactions for particular, place-based configurations of social and ecological systems, and to do so in a manner that is responsive to the needs of a wide range of affected decision makers; and
- designing "socially robust" strategies for establishing program priorities in the above noted areas, and providing them with adequate financial and infrastructure support over time periods consistent with the phenomena being addressed.
This panel will report initial results of an international project in which a team of natural scientists, social scientists and government research managers are collaborating to address these challenges and promote the design of research and assessment systems to address them. The chair of the panel, Prof. Pamela Matson of Stanford, will introduce the session with an overview of the core research questions that are emerging at the intersection of scientific agenda for global environmental change and political agenda for sustainable development. Mr. Thomas Parris of ISCIENCES will then summarize results of the project''s effort to evaluate the key trends and transitions that will shape long term interactions between environment and development. Next, Dr. Roger Kasperson of the Stockholm Environment Institute will report results of the project''s efforts to develop and test new conceptualizations of vulnerability in coupled nature-society systems that integrate insights from the ecosystem science and the study of social response to natural hazards. Prof. William Clark of Harvard will present an evaluation of the adequacy of present research systems to define and support work on the core questions of "sustainability science," and outline the project''s findings on ways to improve the effectiveness of such systems. The Discussant, Dr. Gilberto Gallopin of the U.N. Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, will place the project''s findings in the context of other national, regional and international efforts to bring science and technology to bear on the agenda of the upcoming World Summit on Sustainable Development.
Characterizing a Sustainability Transition: The International Consensus
Thomas M. Parris and Robert W. Kates
Assessing Vulnerability in Human-Environment Interactions
Roger E. Kasperson, Jeanne X. Kasperson, Pamela Matson, B.L. Turner II, Wen-hua Hsieh, and Andrew Schiller
Research Systems for Sustainability Science
William C. Clark, Jill Jäger, David Cash, Nancy M. Dickson, and Frank Alcock