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We are facing an existential crisis. The anticipated global population of more than 9.7 billion by 2050 poses daunting challenges from providing sufficient energy, food, and water, as well as health care more accurately and at lower cost, to trespassing biogeophysical boundaries. These challenges are enormous in scale and complexity, and we will need to take equally enormous leaps in our imagination to meet them successfully. In the first convergence revolution the atomic parts list discovered by physicists sparked a first bringing us radar, television, computers, and the internet, just to start. Radically changing our conception of what is possible…

Science and technology allow us to understand our environment as well as manipulate it and create new environments and new systems. This led humans to emerge out of nature, and recently to create new complex worlds that highly resemble natural systems. Human-made systems often follow the same design principles governing natural systems. The most important of these design principles is evolution by natural selection. However, human-made systems are not exactly the same as those created by nature. We are gaining an increasing ability to create new complex environments and new technologies that perform as well as, or even better than,…

The loss of Earth’s biodiversity is accelerating at an unprecedented rate and proceeding at all levels: ecosystems, species and genes. No corner of the Earth, no matter how remote, is today free from human influence, whether in the form of the altered atmosphere, expanding cities, ubiquitous pollution and invasive species, conversion of wildlands and loss of once fertile farmland, or expanding exploitation and trade of wild species. The loss of biodiversity continues despite the growing sophistication of conservation activity and conservation science; and the understanding among governments at all levels as well as civil society that human wellbeing depends on…

JUST CLIMATE CHANGE? The Anthropocene is a widely proposed name for the geological epoch that covers human impact on our planet. But it is not synonymous with climate change, nor can it covered by environmental problems. The Anthropocene encapsulates the evidence of human hyper-dominance that have shifted all existing life forms on Earth in an unforeseen and alternate evolutionary paths caused by indirect or direct anthropogenic pressures. Largely driven by chance, and by constant human-induced modifications. But humans are also one of the main species affected by Anthropocene changes, transforming and simultaneously being transformed. The Earth System refers to the…

NATURAL INTELLIGENT We live in a world where we can either choose to live by technology to escape nature or escape technology to live by nature. ‘Modernization’ is leading to dramatic changes in how we regarded the natural world and the perception of our role in it. Our time enables us to have domination over nature and this behavior undermines the relationship of unity we should have with our surroundings, and with other living forms. The interconnectedness between human beings and nature illustrates a theory that human evolution has been dependent on the natural environment for a sense of overall…

CHANGING THE GAME It becomes clear that human activity shapes the earth’s systems. On the one hand this leaves us with a very dark viewpoint on humanity as we seem to blindly move down a path of destruction. This raises the question ‘responsibility’ and is accompanied by a sense of taking action. On the other hand the Anthropocene signals a sense of recognition and moral ownership of our transformative power. The Anthropocene not only reflects our influence on the ecological systems of the earth but more so serves as a metaphor for the way we see our human-nature relationship. The…

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…