Search

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Paris Agreement on climate are the key international agreements to deliver a sustainable future. They are a compromise between the scientifically necessary and politically possible to achieve global sustainability. Agreed in 2015, they constitute a radical departure for international policy with no precedents and are beginning to shape national policy, civil society and business decisions. We argue that these new frameworks represent the most important institutional innovation to emerge in recent years. They mark a shift away from international rule-making towards a system based on goal setting. This reflects a theory of societal steering or what we commonly think of as governance that differs sharply from mainstream regulatory systems by Pauwelyn et al. (Eur J Int Law 24:733–763, 2014). Given that achieving the Paris Agreement and the SDGs will require transformation of societies at all levels, it remains unclear how existing instruments, policies, and even institutions will adapt to this new global governance strategy. The key to success, we argue, will be “action coherence”, whereby actions initiated to fulfill individual SDGs are coherent across efforts to achieve the full set of SDGs over the long run.

Keeping the Earth system in a stable and resilient state, to safeguard Earth's life support systems while ensuring that Earth's benefits, risks, and related responsibilities are equitably shared, constitutes the grand challenge for human development in the Anthropocene. Here, we describe a framework that the recently formed Earth Commission will use to define and quantify target ranges for a “safe and just corridor” that meets these goals. Although “safe” and “just” Earth system targets are interrelated, we see safe as primarily referring to a stable Earth system and just targets as being associated with meeting human needs and reducing exposure to risks. To align safe and just dimensions, we propose to address the equity dimensions of each safe target for Earth system regulating systems and processes. The more stringent of the safe or just target ranges then defines the corridor. Identifying levers of social transformation aimed at meeting the safe and just targets and challenges associated with translating the corridor to actors at multiple scales present scope for future work.

Fil: Díaz, Sandra. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas, Físicas y Naturales. Departamento de Diversidad Biológica y Ecología. Instituto Multidisciplinario de Biología Vegetal; Argentina. Fil: Díaz, Sandra. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnica. Instituto Multidisciplinario de Biología Vegetal; Argentina. Fil: Zafra Calvo, Noelia. Future Earth; España. Fil: Purvis, Andy. Natural History Museum; Reino Unido. Fil: Verburg, Peter H. VU University Amsterdam. Institute for Environmental Studies: Países Bajos. Fil: Obura, David. Coastal Oceans Research and Development Indian Ocean; Kenia. Fil: Leadley, Paul. Université Paris-Sud. Ecologie Systématique Evolution; Francia. Fil: Chaplin Kramer, Rebecca. Stanford University. Natural Capital Project; Estados Unidos. Fil: De Meester, Luc. Leibniz Institut für Gewässerökologie und Binnenfischerei; Alemania. Fil: Dulloo, Ehsan. Bioversity International; Mauricio. Fil: Martín- López, Berta. Leuphana University of Lüneburg. Faculty of Sustainability; Alemania. Fil: Shaw, Rebecca. The World Wide Fund for Nature; Estados Unidos. Fil: Visconti, Piero. International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis. Ecosystem Services and Management Program; Austria. Fil: Broadgate, Wendy. Future Earth; Suecia. Fil: Bruford, Michael W. Cardiff University. School of Biosciences and Sustainable Places Institute; Reino Unido. Fil: Burgess, Neil D. UN Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre; Reino Unido. Fil: Cavender Bares, Jeannine. University of Minnesota. Department of Ecology, Evolution and Behavior; Estados Unidos. Fil: DeClerck, Fabrice. EAT Foundation; Noruega. Fil: Fernández Palacios, José María. Universidad de La Laguna. Instituto Universitario de Enfermedades Tropicales y Salud Pública de Canarias; España. Fil: Garibaldi, Lucas A. Universidad Nacional de Río Negro. Instituto de Investigaciones en Recursos Naturales, Agroecología y Desarrollo Rural. Río Negro, Argentina. Fil: Garibaldi, Lucas A. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Instituto de Investigaciones en Recursos Naturales, Agroecología y Desarrollo Rural. Río Negro, Argentina. Fil: Hill, Samantha L. L. UN Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre; Reino Unido. Fil: Isbell, Forest. University of Minnesota. Department of Ecology, Evolution and Behavior; Estados Unidos. Fil: Khoury, Colin K. International Center for Tropical Agriculture; Colombia. Fil: Krug, Cornelia B. University of Zurich. Department of Geography; Suiza. Fil: Liu, Jianguo. Michigan State University; Estados Unidos. Fil: Maron, Martine. The University of Queensland; Australia. Fil: McGowan, Philip J. K. Newcastle University. School of Natural and Environmental Sciences; Reino Unido. Fil: Pereira, Henrique M. German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research; Alemania. Fil: Reyes García, Victoria. Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies; España. Fil: Rocha, Juan. Future Earth; Suecia. Fil: Rondinini, Carlo. Sapienza University of Rome. Department of Biology and Biotechnologies. Global Mammal Assessment Program; Italia. Fil: Shannon, Lynne. University of Cape Town. Department of Biological Sciences; Sudáfrica. Fil: Shin, Yunne-Jai. University of Cape Town. Department of Biological Sciences; Sudáfrica. Fil: Snelgrove, Paul V. R. Memorial University of Newfoundland. Departments of Ocean Sciences and Biology; Canada. Fil: Spehn, Eva M. Swiss Academy of Sciences. Swiss Biodiversity Forum; Suiza. Fil: Strassburg, Bernardo. Pontifical Catholic University. Department of Geography and the Environment. Rio Conservation and Sustainability Science Centre; Brasil. Fil: Subramanian, Suneetha M. United Nations University. Institute for the Advanced Study of Sustainability; Japón. Fil: Tewksbury, Joshua J. University of Colorado; Estados Unidos. Fil: Watson, James E. M. Wildlife Conservation Society; Estados Unidos. Fil: Zanne, Amy E. George Washington University. Department of Biological Sciences; Estados Unidos. Global biodiversity policy is at a crossroads. Recent global assessments of living nature (1, 2) and climate (3) show worsening trends and a rapidly narrowing window for action. The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) has recently announced that none of the 20 Aichi targets for biodiversity it set in 2010 has been reached and only six have been partially achieved (4). Against this backdrop, nations are now negotiating the next generation of the CBD's global goals [see supplementary materials (SM)], due for adoption in 2021, which will frame actions of governments and other actors for decades to come. In response to the goals proposed in the draft post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) made public by the CBD (5), we urge negotiators to consider three points that are critical if the agreed goals are to stabilize or reverse nature's decline. First, multiple goals are required because of nature's complexity, with different facets—genes, populations, species, deep evolutionary history, ecosystems, and their contributions to people—having markedly different geographic distributions and responses to human drivers. Second, interlinkages among these facets mean that goals must be defined and developed holistically rather than in isolation, with potential to advance multiple goals simultaneously and minimize trade-offs between them. Third, only the highest level of ambition in setting each goal, and implementing all goals in an integrated manner, will give a realistic chance of stopping—and beginning to reverse—biodiversity loss by 2050.

The maturing of Earth system science as a discipline has underpinned the development of concepts such as the Anthropocene and planetary boundaries. The International Geosphere–Biosphere Programme’s (IGBP) scientific and institutional history is deeply intertwined with the development of the concept of the Earth as a system as well as the discipline of Earth system science. Here we frame the broader programme of IGBP through its core projects and programme-level activities and illustrate this co-evolution. We identify and discuss three phases in the programme’s history. In its first phase beginning in 1986, IGBP focused on building international networks and global databases that were key to understanding Earth system component processes. In the early 2000s IGBP’s first major synthesis and associated activities promoted a more integrated view of the Earth system informed by greater emphasis on interdisciplinarity. Human actions were seen as an integral part of the Earth system and the concept of the Anthropocene came to the fore. In recent years IGBP has increased focus on sustainability and multifaceted engagement with policy processes. IGBP closed at the end of 2015 after three decades of coordinating international research on global change. The programme’s longevity points to its capacity to adapt its scientific and institutional structures to changing scientific and societal realities. Its history may offer lessons for the emerging Future Earth initiative as it seeks to rally international collaborative research around sustainability and solutions., SCOPUS: ar.j, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

The first symposium on ``The Ocean in a High-CO2 World'' in 2004 proved to be a landmark event in our understanding of the seriousness of ocean acidification, as reported in Oceanography (Cicerone et al., 2004). The scientific community reunited in 2008 for a second symposium on ``The Ocean in a High-CO2 World.'' During the four years between the two symposia, more scientific papers were published on the topic of ocean acidification than during the preceding 55 years. Ocean acidification is now widely cited in the press and is familiar to many nonscientists. Participants at the 2008 symposium identified new research priorities and stressed the importance of improving international coordination to facilitate agreements on protocols, methods, and data reporting in order to optimize limited resources by greater sharing of materials, facilities, expertise, and data. Despite major uncertainties, the research community must find ways to scale up understanding of individual organisms' responses to provide meaningful predictions of ocean acidification's effects on food webs, fisheries, marine ecosystems, coastal erosion, and tourism. Easy-to-understand information, such as simple indicators of change and of thresholds beyond which marine ecosystems will not recover, is also needed for management and policymaking.