Earth System Analysis: Integrating Science for Sustainability

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.

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.