Reid et al. (2012) identified five challenges to meet in order to: (a) simultaneously respond to ongoing global environmental change and meet socioeconomic development goals and (b) deepen our knowledge of the Earth as a system. These five challenges are deeply interconnected.
- Monitoring global and regional environmental change. Here, the emphasis is to coordinate and report social-environmental data in such manner that response, mitigation, and adaptation to biophysical changes occurs rapidly and effectively in all communities, including those that are most vulnerable. Global environmental data collection, curation, and analysis has a large price tag. The interesting part about this type of work is that although we, as a society, know that it is important, paying for it is another issue! The standard gripe that you will hear from many researchers is that we spend more time trying to procure funding than doing the work. The problem of funding has become very acute in the last decade, in particular after the beginning of the recession. Funding that can be used across geopolitical boundaries is very scarce and insufficient to meet the current needs for integrated observation systems.
- Creating more useful, accurate, and long-term forecasts of changes in environmental conditions and associated socioeconomic changes. Good forecasts rely on our understanding of physical and biological phenomena, which in turn has its foundation of data collection and analysis. The impact of these forecasts remains limited if the effects of climate, biodiversity, geochemical, and hydrological change is not placed in the context of social change. This is one of the critical bottom lines of this course, to understand the relationships between environmental systems and the stability of our current social institutions. As Reid et al. (2012) argues, there are not enough professionals trained to understand this critical nexus. As academics, we are still trying to understand what the education of such professionals would look like. In other words, you are our guinea pigs right at this moment! This is the first time a course like this is being taught. Period. This is not calculus or German literature. There is no beaten path!
- Anticipating and managing disruptive environmental change. The issue of scales of analyses matching the scale of decision-making is discussed both by Reid et al. (2012) and by DeFries et al. (2012).
- Creating effective institutions, economic, and behavioral changes that overcome the current spatial and temporal limitations of global environmental governance. As part of Modules 10 and 11, we discussed the difficulties in solving global problems using nation-state governance. In the following section, we will discuss the conditions needed to create this effective global policies.
- Encouraging innovation. So, the best solution might not be obvious yet!
How do we address these challenges?
Reid et al. (2012) and DeFries et al. (2012) suggest that we must undertake solution-oriented and integrated research, in which the boundaries between particular disciplines (e.g., ecology, glaciology, economics, etc.) are abandoned in favor of addressing individual problems. We need finer-scale research capable of identifying how global environmental change will affect specific communities and of producing solutions tailored to their specific biophysical, socioeconomic, and political needs.
Basically, we need a lot of brain power and resources.