The 2018 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has made clear that, to achieve the international goal of holding the average surface temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius, global emissions of greenhouse gases must be halved by 2030, and reach net zero by around the middle of the century. That is a transformative task of unprecedented proportions. It is made even greater by the need to tackle simultaneously a series of other worsening – and inter-related – global environmental problems, including biodiversity loss, soil degradation, and air and marine pollution, as documented in the 2019 reports of the…
The Anthropocene is a proposed new geological epoch based on the observation that human impacts on essential planetary processes have become so profound that they have driven the Earth out of the Holocene epoch in which agriculture, sedentary communities, and eventually, socially and technologically complex human societies developed. Regardless the formalization of the Anthropocene it is becoming apparent that Anthropocene conditions transgress Holocene conditions in several respects The knowledge that human activity now rivals geological forces in influencing the trajectory of the Earth System has important implications for both Earth System science and societal decision making. While recognizing that different…
CONSIDERING GLOBAL AND REGIONAL IMPACTS OF RAPID CLIMATE CHANGE in conservation planning is a major societal challenge. Climate change is rapidly increasing in rate and magnitude and can alter the survival, fitness, phenologies and interactions of individuals, affecting population viability and food web dynamics, which in turn alter the structure and functioning of ecosystems. Climate change profoundly impacts ecosystems and their biota, resulting in range shifts, novel interactions, food web alterations, changed intensities of host–parasite interactions, and extinctions. An increasing number of studies have documented evolutionary changes in traits such as phenology and thermal tolerance. While evolutionary responses have the…
Society 5.0 will feature enhanced forms of robotics, AI, nanotechnology, and biotechnology, an enhanced Internet of Things, and further exploitation of Big Data. Both Industry 4.0 and Society 5.0 are premised on the creation of increasingly sophisticated cyber–physical systems, which are characterized by their reliance on embedded, decentralized, real-time computation occurring within a network of heterogeneous physical objects. When human beings (or social robots or AIs) are functionally integrated into a cyber-physical system (CPS) at the social, cognitive, and physical levels, it becomes a cyber-physical-social system (CPSS) whose members may engage in cyber-physical-social behaviors within cyber-physical spaces. Through their interactions…
