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2.The Challengeof an Unstable Earthl l l12 Research over the last two decades has documentedthat the Earth is undergoing major environmentaland socio-economic changes (see, for example,Steffen et al., 2004; Rockström et al., 2009; Reidet al., 2010). Climate change, land degradation,deforestation, biodiversity loss and changes of waterquality and quantity are prominent examples ofglobal environmental changes. The intensity andrate of change for many of these examples havenever been recorded in the most recent geologicalera, the Holocene, or even in the Quaternary (IPCC,2007). Globalisation, demographic changes, thescarcity of food, energy and raw materials and thewidening gap between rich and poor are examples ofsocio-economic trends that are closely linked withthe environmental changes. Furthermore, processessuch as climate change or biodiversity loss couldlead to a number of irreversible tipping points*,including the dieback of the Amazon rainforestand decay of the Greenland ice sheet (Lenton etal., 2008). Despite agreements reached almost 20years ago at the UN Conference on Environmentand Development in Rio de Janeiro, little has beenachieved in putting the planet onto a sustainabletrack. The ‘Rio+20’ United Nations Conferenceon Sustainable Development (UNCSD)9 should bea key step forward for the transitions toward sustainability.This RESCUE foresight initiative aimsto contribute to such transitions.In addition to the many ‘really global’ issues,however, it is also important to focus on local problems.For instance, the triple shock that hit Japanin 2011 (earthquake, tsunami, nuclear meltdown) isResponses to Environmental and Societal Challenges for our Unstable Earth (RESCUE)9. www.uncsd2012.org, and for instance, ec.europa.eu/environment/consultations/pdf/report_un_2012.pdf,www.earthsummit2012.org, and EEAC (2011)Figure 3.Two examples of global change issues:(above) land degradation and desertification; (below) water pollution.a marked example of the importance of the interactionswithin the physical environment and thefragility of our technologies and infrastructure. Howcould one anticipate and mitigate the risks associatedwith such cascading effects of a natural disasteror extreme event on a society which relies heavily ontechnology, without the proper involvement of manyresearch disciplines? The newly formed Integrated© iStockphoto© iStockphoto
Research on Disaster Risk (IRDR)10 project could bea new test-bed for evaluating the human and societalcapacity to respond to multiple stressors and forimproving it in the short term, through an open,reflexive, adaptive mechanism.Global change challenges have been describedin the literature as ’wicked problems’, a term thatrefers to problems that are difficult or impossibleto solve because of incomplete, contradictory andchanging requirements that are often difficult torecognise (Rittel and Webber, 1973; Frame, 2008;Brown et al., 2010). Moreover, because of complexinterdependencies, the effort to solve one aspect ofa wicked problem may reveal or create other problems.Long-term environmental challenges, whichare commonly also global, have been defined as“public policy issues that last at least one humangeneration, exhibit deep uncertainty exacerbatedby the depth of time, and engender public goodsaspects both at the stage of problem generation aswell as at the response stage” (Sprinz, 2009, p. 2;CCSP, 2009). This points to the long time-scales andstructural uncertainty inherent in global environmentalchallenges and to the difficulties that canarise when complex problems are formulated andhamper success at the response stage (e.g., van derSluijs et al., 2005). The uncertainities related to thecomplexity of the global environmental change andthe human actions have been extensively examined(e.g., Funtowicz and Ravetz, 1990; Funtowicz andStrand, 2011), especially as they play an importantrole at the science-policy and science-society interfaces(e.g., van der Sluijs, 2006; Pregernig, 2006;van der Sluijs, 2010; Koetz et al., 2011).Since the environment is increasingly refashionedby human activities11, there is a need toradically reframe global environmental problemsas fundamentally social – moving beyond the traditional,narrow confinement in both academicand public discussions of the ‘environment’ to the‘natural’ domain. While such a reframing presentsmassive challenges for scholarship, public understandingand engagement, governance* and policymaking, it is the only meaningful way to go. It isthe precondition not only for the mitigation of environmentalproblems and for societal adaptation tothe unavoidable ones but also for the broader taskof reconceptualising the human condition in theAnthropocene epoch. The term ‘Anthropocene’has been proposed in reference to an emergingfundamentally new epoch in planetary history, a10. www.irdrinternational.org11. See, for instance, Landscape in a Changing World – BridgingDivides, Integrating Disciplines, Serving Society. ESF-COST<strong>Science</strong> Policy Briefing #41, 2010. 16p.successor to the current Holocene epoch. Given thatthe impact of human activity is now of the samemagnitude as biogeophysical forces, this creates acompletely novel situation posing fundamentallynew questions, including issues related to ethics,culture, religion and human rights, and requiringnew approaches and ways of thinking, understandingand acting. The challenges are societal, not justscientific.Overall, the work of the RESCUE working groupsand task force has pointed to a number of deficitsin the science/research/education system, whichmakes it difficult or even impossible to meet thechallenges of an unstable Earth. These are discussedin this section.Interdisciplinarity in global changeresearchDisciplinary specialisation has been the basis ofscientific progress certainly since the 19th century;Karl Pearson described the need for discipline-basedresearch per se in his book, The Grammar of <strong>Science</strong>,first published by Walter Scott in 1892. Disciplinaryspecialisation will remain one of the productivedivisions of knowledge labour in the future (asdescribed, for example, in the medical field by TobyGelfand [1976] and discussed in many other studies).It has been noted, however, that disciplinaritysometimes has a restrictive inertia of its own, notleast through the tendency of academic elites to seekto ‘protect their turf’, which needs to be overcome© Thinkstock13Responses to Environmental and Societal Challenges for our Unstable Earth (RESCUE)
Page 5 and 6: Forewordl l lThe world is currently
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Page 11 and 12: 1.Introductionl l lHumankind is cur
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