Since 2001, the international „Global Change Research Community“ has propagated sustainability science as an interand transdisciplinary approach to the assignment of tasks related to sustainable development (Kates et al., 2001). It has afforded a new perspective on man-environment research and demands the inclusion of various branches of psychology, including environmental, health, community an...

The current threat of global warming and the public demand for confident projections of climate change pose the ultimate challenge to science: predicting the future behaviour of a system of such overwhelming complexity as the Earth's climate. This Theme Issue addresses two practical problems that make even prediction of the statistical properties of the climate, when treated as the attractor of...

The world economy is entering an era of multiple crises, involving finance, food security and global environmental change. This article assesses the implications for global public health, describes the contours of post-2007 crises in food security and finance, and then briefly indicates the probable health impacts. There follows a discussion of the crisis of climate change, one that will unfold...

Over the last 20 years, different greenhouse gases have been compared, in the context of climate change, primarily through the concept of global warming potentials (GWPs). This considers the climate forcing caused by pulse emissions and integrated over a fixed time horizon. Recent studies have shown that uncertainties in GWP values are significantly larger than previously thought and, while pas...

Options is a magazine featuring the activities of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), located in Laxenburg, Austria. IIASA is an interdisciplinary, nongovernmental research institution sponsored by a consortium of National Member Organizations in Asia, Europe, and North America. The Institute’s research focuses on sustainability and the human dimensions of global c...

There is considerable research interest on the meaning and measurement of resilience from a variety of research perspectives including those from the hazards/disasters and global change communities. The identification of standards and metrics for measuring disaster resilience is one of the challenges faced by local, state, and federal agencies, especially in the United States. This paper provid...

Global surface temperature has increased approximately 0.2 degrees C per decade in the past 30 years, similar to the warming rate predicted in the 1980s in initial global climate model simulations with transient greenhouse gas changes. Warming is larger in the Western Equatorial Pacific than in the Eastern Equatorial Pacific over the past century, and we suggest that the increased West-East tem...

L. K. Xue, T. Wang, J. Gao, A. J. Ding, X. H. Zhou, D. R. Blake, X. F. Wang, S. M. Saunders, S. J. Fan, H. C. Zuo, Q. Z. Zhang, and W. X. Wang Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, China Environment Research Institute, Shandong University, Ji’nan, Shandong, China Chinese Research Academy of Environmental Sciences, Beijing, China Institut...

Climate change is expected to drive species extinct by reducing their survival, reproduction and habitat. Less well appreciated is the possibility that climate change could cause extinction by changing the ecological interactions between species. If ecologists, land managers and policy makers are to manage farmland biodiversity sustainably under global climate change, they need to understand th...

With respect to the climate change, and more generally to the energy problem, in the laboratories working on the subject, scientists contribute to clarify the situation and to help decision makers by yielding and updating factual physical informations, and also by modelling. This conceptual work is mainly done in the language of economics. This discipline, which appears therefore in the core of...