The International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change – Taking Stock and Moving Forward

Abstract

AbstractHuman actions dominate the Earth’s great biophysical and geochemical cycles and consequently lie at the very heart of every effort to come to terms with the phenomenology of global environmental change. Research on the so-called human dimensions of global change concerns human activities that alter the Earth’s natural environment, the sources or causes of those activities, the consequences of global environmental change (GEC) for societies and economies, and the responses of humans to the experience or expectation of global change. Human interferences with the Earth’s system are so significant that the recent era has been suitably named the ‘Anthropocene’. Human activity continues to intensify sharply and increases pressures on the Earth’s resources and, for instance, on the planet’s capability to assimilate/absorb wastes (e.g. Crutzen 2002). Thus, climate change is the most prominent, but only one of the various changes that humanity presently faces and which threaten social welfare. Global environmental change also encompasses changes in terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, and its full extent and complexity is only now being realized. Global environmental change research in recent years has increasingly recognized the importance of humans as the central elements of the Earth System and its cycles. This has given rise to the concept of socio-ecological systems, a frame of reference that serves as a model for all human dimensions research.KeywordsEcosystem ServiceRegime ShiftGlobal Environmental ChangeHuman DimensionCore ProjectThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.