Professor Dr Rik Leemans, Chair, Earth System SciencePartnership

in Climate Environment by alovering — August 27, 2011 at 11:38 am | 0 comments

The Earth System is a complex gestalt of processes and interactions. Indeed, it seems we are only just realising the scale of the challenge we face in understanding its intricacies. Chair of the ESSP Scientific Committee, Professor Dr Rik Leemans explains how the ESSP is helping find solutions to global challenges

To begin, could you explain the catalyst behind the Earth System Science Partnership (ESSP)?

The catalyst behind the ESSP was the recognition 10 years ago that human activities now match (and often exceed) the natural services of the Earth System. Human choices about how we use resources are at the heart of many of these changes. Over recent decades, we have gained a deeper understanding of the degree to which all of these separate issues are linked. The Earth System is a very complex coupled system with myriad feedbacks, and it has and it will inevitably continue to exhibit rapid, global-scale responses to changes in environmental conditions.

The types of questions being asked of the research community have changed over the last decades, reflecting the increasing appreciation of the interconnectedness of the Earth System. For example, establishing the cause-effect relationships of the Antarctic ozone hole required international collaboration amongst atmospheric chemists and meteorologists. Understanding the causes and consequences of acid rain required collaboration between atmospheric scientists and terrestrial ecologists. This innovative interdisciplinary research increased understanding and helped to develop adequate solutions to these problems.

Now, however, the kinds of questions being asked of the scientific community increasingly underline the need for a more holistic or integrated approach. These questions cannot be answered without a close coupling of approaches from both the natural sciences, and social sciences and humanities. Answering them will also require new observational and modelling tools that to a much larger extent have to integrate the many dimensions of the biosphere, the oceans, the atmosphere and the anthroposphere. In addition, the GEC research community faces an increasing challenge to present research results in more accessible and informative ways to stakeholders.

The ESSP was established in response to all of the challenges in which the four international global change research programmes (ie. DIVERSITAS, IGBP, IHDP and WCRP) collaborate as they attempt to address such highly integrative and interdisciplinary questions, and communicate the answers to society in a timely manner. ESSP thus aims to address complex Earth System questions that are important to society and that require problem-solving skills from a range of natural and social sciences.

Can you highlight some of the disciplines represented in ESSP and explain why utilisation of these is critical to achieving the project’s objectives?

The disciplines involved in the GEC programmes and ESSP are manifold. They come from natural science (eg. meteorology, physics, oceanography, ecology, physical geography, physiology, chemistry) and the social sciences (eg. political sciences, economics, social geography and anthropology). A single discipline or even collaboration between a few key disciplines can only understand part of the systems. Integration of many disciplines should be able to advance our understanding but there are many difficulties to overcome in accomplishing this. Each discipline, for example, has its own approaches and jargon.

Every successful integrative programme that involves many disciplines should start to develop a common conceptual framework to which every discipline involved can relate. Such framework should not be cast in stone but revisited regularly so that emerging insights can be accommodated. Integration is thus not something that you do towards the end of a project or programme because this will lead to gaps and inconsistencies. Modelling can be a common tool because concepts and relationships have to be defined and formalised in a model. The development of plausible future scenarios can help because scenario analysis can combine both qualitative and quantitative approaches. Successful integration thus involves an open dialogue between all disciplines and the development of innovative overarching approaches.

How would you rate the current level of knowledge transfer and collaboration within the field of environmental change?

The results of the scientific research of the GEC programmes and ESSP are primarily published in the peer-reviewed scientific journals, as well as presented to funding agencies and research councils (through IGFA). Each journal has its own scope and focuses on, for example, individual disciplines, interdisciplinary studies, specific regions, the whole globe, or specific issues. The papers published in these scientific journals are extremely difficult to understand for non-experts, decision makers and for laypeople. The GEC programmes and ESSP have strongly contributed to the international science-policy assessments that assess and synthesise scientific understanding towards broader audiences. The Summaries for Policy Makers in these assessments synthesise the knowledge (and its uncertainties) and ‘translate’ it to support policy development. Additionally, we have published several synthesis books, flyers and policy briefs to further inform the public.

The collaboration in the GEC programmes and ESSP to transfer knowledge is highly successful. This can be illustrated by the annual release of the global carbon budget trends and analysis by the ESSP global carbon project. These emissions have increased over recent decades (except for the last two years following the financial crisis) and several papers in high-impact scientific journals have published these figures and their interpretation. Additional supporting information to these publications was prepared to be used in policy and education. Many news agencies and newspapers summarised the findings in articles. In this way the outreach to the public was enhanced. (This information can be found on the GCP website: www.globalcarbonproject.org.)

What is the objective of your Integrated Regional Studies (IRS)?

The objective of the regional studies is to take the integrative topics (carbon, water, food and health) and tailor them for specific regional conditions. These conditions are related to the different socioeconomic and environmental characteristics, different historical pathways and contemporary trends in development. Within ESSP, there are currently projects and initiatives focusing on mega-cities, coastal zones and deltas, mountains and on the Asian-monsoon region. All these regions are characterised by explicit features that lead to specific problems and opportunities to solve them. To accomplish this, these problems should be studied in an integrative way. The regional projects gain strongly from the more globally orientated research projects by being able to tap into their expertise, data and models, but they also contribute to them by providing specific case studies.

ESSP is dedicated to hosting Open Science Conferences. What do you believe can be gained from such major international science meetings?

The Open Science Conferences are extremely important events. They assemble the GEC research community and other stakeholders and this helps to exchange ideas and findings as well as advancing the understanding of all these changes. Although the plenary sessions are dedicated to integration and solving global problems, there are ample opportunities during these meetings in parallel sessions and site events to present and discuss topical and regional aspects. An additional aim of the Open Science Conferences is to reach out to individuals and institutions that are not yet involved in the programmes. Moreover, the user communities of the scientific results from all the research programmes and projects participate. Such a user dialogue is extremely important to enhance the applicability of our research to major societal problems because we aim not only to do fundamental research that is recognised by all peers as excellent, but also to ensure that is inspired by societal regional and global opportunities and challenges.

Further to this, what did you learn from your first Open Science Conference in Beijing in 2006? Are you planning any future conferences?

This was a major event in bringing together researchers from all over the world, allowing participants an opportunity to become familiar with all aspects of integrative global change research. In the days preceding this major conference, we also organised a gathering (led by START) especially for young scientists from all over the world. It is important to stimulate and educate next-generation scientists. Their participation in the Beijing Open Science meetings stimulated much discussion on our future research. It taught us that the next generation of scientists is very much interested in pursuing an interdisciplinary career. This is necessary to advance the required integrated research as it evolves in the ESSP.

The next Open Science Conference ‘Planet under Pressure’ will be organised in March 2012 in London (www.planetunderpressure2012. net). Based on the latest scientific evidence, the conference will provide a comprehensive update of our knowledge of the Earth System and the pressure our planet is now under. The conference will discuss solutions, at all scales, to move societies on to a sustainable pathway. It will also provide scientific leadership towards the 2012 UN Rio +20 conference.

Guiding the direction for the conference is the International Council for Science’s five grand challenges for global sustainability research (www.icsu-visioning.org/other/grand-challenges). Its programme will be designed to attract senior policy makers, industry leaders, NGOs, young scientists, the media, health specialists, and academics from many disciplines.

The conference will thus act as a platform to strengthen and enlarge the global-change research community and mark a move to a new vision for global-change research and sustainability.

Are there any other aspects of ESSP’s work that you would like to highlight?

ESSP also develops an interactive science-policy stakeholder dialogue with policy makers and other users. For example, over the last four years, we have provided an annual update after the most recent IPCC report (the latest report was published in 2007) for all negotiators in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. The discussion that followed helped negotiators to understand the latest scientific insights and uncertainties, and allowed the scientists to learn about urgent policy questions that require additional scientific research.

Furthermore, we are very active also in capacity building and developing global-change activities in developing countries through the ESSP partners START, IAI and APN. START (www.start.org) builds capacity among people and institutions through grants, fellowships and training programmes, informs policy by assessing impacts and identifying options for adapting to global environmental change risks, and inspires action through projects and programmes that bring scientists, communities and policy makers together to address critical global environmental change issues. The IAI (www.iai.int) and APN (www.apn-grc.org) respectively are supported by 19 countries in the Americas and 22 countries in the Asia-Pacific region. Both strive to enable the developing countries of their region to participate in, and benefit fully from, cooperative research. This gives assurance that the research results contribute to developing the scientific capacity to address local and regional environmental change issues, sound science-based adaptation strategies and other policy processes for sustainability.

www.essp.org 

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