Year: 2015
Type: article
Abstract: This Frontiers Special Issue – honoring the Ecological Society of America's (ESA's) centennial – is particularly timely, covering a set of issues critical to the long-term viability of our society and environment. It is being published the same month as the launch of the twenty-first session of the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Paris, France. The whole world is waiting to see whether this conference can deliver a global, legally binding agreement to slow the rate of climate change through dramatic and permanent reductions in anthropogenic greenhouse-gas emissions and other mitigation strategies. Several recent developments provide reasons for optimism – China's announcement in September that it will start the world's biggest carbon market in 2017, India's pledge in October to source 40% of its electricity from renewable and other low-carbon sources by 2030, and the joint announcement by the US and China on climate change and clean-energy cooperation in November 2014. However, experts – including Christiana Figueres, the Executive Secretary of the UNFCCC – have clearly indicated that these are just the first steps toward a sustainable Earth system. In testimony to the European Parliament this fall, Figueres indicated that the current commitments offered by the world's nation–states are insufficient to limit global temperature increases to two degrees Celsius relative to our pre-industrial climate, the highest temperature change that would avoid some of the more dire societal and environmental consequences of global warming. In his 2015 encyclical, Laudato Si', subtitled “On Care for our Common Home” (http://bit.ly/1Gi1BTu), Pope Francis also called for marked changes in our interactions with the natural world, and advocated for a new covenant between humanity and the environment. These calls to action resonate with all of us in the global community of climate-change scientists. Like many of my colleagues, I have spent much of my career working to further our understanding of the causes and effects of global environmental change through measurement and modeling. My peers have recorded data everywhere – from the ice floes in high latitudes to the vast jungles on the Equator. We have combined this information with unprecedented space-based measurements to build sophisticated models of the Earth system, capable of projecting the world's climate for centuries to millennia in the future. Many of the articles in this Special Issue are based in part on our grim projections of accelerating sea-level rise, greater storm activity, increasing stress on ecological habitability zones, and more frequent heat waves should we continue “business as usual”. We have evaluated these predictions and our understanding in massive and comprehensive Assessment Reports for the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. While these academic investigations continue to be vitally important, research without action is no longer enough. My colleagues and I teach students who have grown up in, and are now inheriting, the warmest climate the Earth has experienced in the past millennium. By the time their grandchildren matriculate, they will likely confront an even warmer environment, unprecedented in recorded human history. It is for these reasons that many of us have pivoted to engage with our colleagues, friends, students, and communities to address the challenges posed by climate change. Several examples close to home illustrate this increasing engagement. The University of California (UC) recently committed itself to becoming carbon neutral by 2025 through solutions scalable to the state, the nation, and the world. We hope our related report, Bending the Curve (http://bit.ly/1NGWXrz), will serve as a solid foundation to “build a better, safer, healthier, and more equitable world” through public, private, and international partnerships. Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, I have the privilege of directing the Climate Readiness Institute (CRI; http://climatereadinessinstitute.org) with colleagues from regional stakeholder organizations, UC Berkeley, UC Davis, Stanford University, and the Berkeley National Laboratory. CRI's goal is to tackle big, long-term problems in climate adaptation that would benefit from sustained teamwork among our stakeholders, faculty, and students. At the same time, CRI aims to develop new lines of relevant research and to train new generations of community and thought leaders to tackle climate change. Our proposed solutions address the interlocking challenges of generating new knowledge and innovative technologies while simultaneously confronting the thorny issues of governance and climate equity. These efforts and other initiatives worldwide come none too soon. The 21st century is set to pose some of the greatest upheavals humanity has ever faced. This Special Issue both celebrates ESA's progress over the past 100 years and squarely faces the challenges posed by global warming over the century to come.
Author: William Collins
Language: English
Subfield: Economics and Econometrics
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Climate action
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2281914616