Earth System Analysis: Integrating Science for Sustainability

Since this new science is of an unprecedented interdisciplinary nature, the book does not merely take stock of its numerous ingredients, but also delivers their multifaceted integration.
The resulting master paradigm - the co-evolution of nature and anthroposphere within a geo-cybernetic continuum of processes - is based on a structured manifold of partial paradigms with their specific ranges. Most importantly, this serves the scientific foundation of a meaningful, safe and efficient environment and development management for solving the most burning questions concerning humankind and its natural environment.
The more concrete elucidation of the natural and human dimensions, as well as various attempts and instruments of integration are represented in the different parts of the book, while the didactic quality is heightened by many allegoric illustrations.

As humanity approaches the 3rd millennium, the sustainability of our present way of life becomes more and more questionable. New paradigms for the long-term coevolution of nature and civilization are urgently needed in order to avoid intolerable and irreversible modifications of our planetary environment. Earth System Analysis is a new scientific enterprise that tries to perceive the earth as a whole, a unique system which is to be analyzed with methods ranging from nonlinear dynamics to macroeconomic modelling. This book, resulting from an international symposium organized by the Potsdam Institute, has 2 aims: first, to integrate contributions from leading researchers and scholars from around the world to provide a multifaceted perspective of what Earth System Analysis is all about, and second, to outline the scope of the scientific challenge and elaborate the general formalism for a well-defined transdisciplinary discourse on this most fascinating issue.