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  • A personal note on IGBP and the social sciences


    Humans are an integral component of the Earth system as conceptualised by IGBP. João Morais recalls key milestones in IGBP’s engagement with the social sciences and offers some words of advice for Future Earth.

  • IGBP and Earth observation:
    a co-evolution


    The iconic images of Earth beamed back by the earliest spacecraft helped to galvanise interest in our planet’s environment. The subsequent evolution and development of satellites for Earth observation has been intricately linked with that of IGBP and other global-change research programmes, write Jack Kaye and Cat Downy .
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Photo: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

Earth system science

Global change is often seen as a series of separate problems – climate change, biodiversity loss, dwindling water resources – with separate priorities and solutions. But the Earth behaves as a system, where biological and physical processes interact to determine prevalent global environmental conditions. Now human activity is a major driver of change in the Earth system.

Data from Antarctic ice cores reveal the cyclical behaviour of the Earth System. Greenhouse gases and inferred temperature show regular synchronised variations over hundreds of thousands of years. Human civilization developed during the Holocene (i.e. last 10 000 years) - a short and comparatively stable period in geological time occasionally experiencing abrupt climatic changes, for example, average temperature oscillations of 10 degrees in a decade.

Humans have become such a dominant environmental force, notably after the industrial revolution, that a new geological era, the Anthropocene, has been proposed to describe the last few hundred years.

Increased population growth together with accelerated human activities and economic wealth over the past century have greatly increased resource use, as reflected in agriculture, fisheries, forestry, industry, transport, energy and urbanisation. This has resulted in multiple and interacting global environmental impacts as seen by the current values of greenhouse gases temperature.

The Earth System has clearly moved far outside the range experienced over the last 700,000 years and is hence is operating in a “no-analogue” state.

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IGBP closed at the end of 2015. This website is no longer updated.

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  • Global Change Magazine No. 84


    This final issue of the magazine takes stock of IGBP’s scientific and institutional accomplishments as well as its contributions to policy and capacity building. It features interviews of several past...

  • Global Change Magazine No. 83


    This issue features a special section on carbon. You can read about peak greenhouse-gas emissions in China, the mitigation of black carbon emissions and the effect of the 2010-2011 La Niña event on gl...
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