Interconnected risks and solutions for a planet under pressure - overview and introduction

Since 1992, science has made giant strides in expanding knowledge on how our Earth system functions. But there is a growing gloom that global decision making is failing to keep up with the pace of change. We are failing in our new role as planetary stewards, a role that is now crucial to sustaining human development and, even, the survival of civilisation as we have come to know it in the benign environmental conditions of the past few millennia.

In 2012, we must make a new and innovative commitment to protecting our planet and managing global-scale risks to human development. One place to do this is at the Rio+20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development in June, an event which should be informed by the latest science on both risks and solutions.

In this spirit, the Global Environmental Change Programmes of the International Council for Science convened the Planet Under Pressure: New Knowledge Towards Solutions conference in March 2012, and commissioned a series of policy briefs (http://www.icsu.org/rio20/policy-briefs) to contribute the best and most recent science to Rio+20. This volume brings together a suite of papers, commissioned in parallel to support the policy briefs, and to articulate the research agenda for the next decade. It thus responds to a clear sense of threats, of solutions, of barriers to action, and of a potential way ahead: this is also the framing of the conference, which has the twin goals of contributing to Rio+20, and, beyond that, of charting the next decade of global environmental change research.