La Administración De Los Recursos Naturales
Enviado por rocastellanos • 30 de Noviembre de 2012 • 11.931 Palabras (48 Páginas) • 252 Visitas
INVITED PAPER
The Anthropocene: From Global Change to Planetary
Stewardship
Will Steffen, A ° sa Persson, Lisa Deutsch, Jan Zalasiewicz, Mark Williams, Katherine Richardson,
Carole Crumley, Paul Crutzen, Carl Folke, Line Gordon, Mario Molina, Veerabhadran Ramanathan,
Johan Rockstro¨m, Marten Scheffer, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, Uno Svedin
Received: 29 June 2011 / Accepted: 29 June 2011
Abstract Over the past century, the total material wealth
of humanity has been enhanced. However, in the twentyfirst
century, we face scarcity in critical resources, the
degradation of ecosystem services, and the erosion of the
planet’s capability to absorb our wastes. Equity issues
remain stubbornly difficult to solve. This situation is novel
in its speed, its global scale and its threat to the resilience
of the Earth System. The advent of the Anthropence, the
time interval in which human activities now rival global
geophysical processes, suggests that we need to fundamentally
alter our relationship with the planet we inhabit.
Many approaches could be adopted, ranging from geoengineering
solutions that purposefully manipulate parts of
the Earth System to becoming active stewards of our own
life support system. The Anthropocene is a reminder that
the Holocene, during which complex human societies have
developed, has been a stable, accommodating environment
and is the only state of the Earth System that we know for
sure can support contemporary society. The need to
achieve effective planetary stewardship is urgent. As we go
further into the Anthropocene, we risk driving the Earth
System onto a trajectory toward more hostile states from
which we cannot easily return.
Keywords Earth System Anthropocence
Planetary stewardship Ecosystem services Resilience
PEOPLE AND THE PLANET: HUMANITY
AT A CROSSROADS IN THE TWENTY-FIRST
CENTURY
The twin challenges of ‘‘peak oil’’—decreasing petroleum
resources and increasing demand—and climate change are
redefining the pathways of human development in the
twenty-first century (Sorrell et al. 2009; ASPO 2010;
Richardson et al. 2011). Less well known is the potential
shortage of the mineral phosphorus and the increasing
competition for land—sometimes referred to as the ‘‘land
grab’’ in relation to Africa—as the new economic giants of
Asia move to secure food resources in non-Asian territories.
The pathways of development followed by today’s
wealthy countries after the Second World War—built on
plentiful, cheap fossil fuel energy resources, an abundance
of other material resources, and large expanses of productive
land to be developed—cannot be followed by the
75–80% of the human population who are now at various
stages of their trajectories out of poverty, and are beginning
to compete with today’s wealthy countries for increasingly
scarce resources.
A large fraction of our population of nearly 7000 million
people needs more access to food, water and energy to
improve their material standard of living, and the prospect
of an additional 2000 million by 2050 intensifies the need
for basic resources. These challenges come at a time when
the global environment shows clear signs of deterioration
and, as a consequence, questions the continuing ability of
the planet to provide the same accommodating environment
that has facilitated human development over the past
10 000 years.
Climate change is a prominent sign of human-driven
changes to the global environment. The evidence that the
Earth is warming is unequivocal, and human emissions of
greenhouse gases, most importantly carbon dioxide (CO2),
have been responsible for most of the warming since the
middle of the twentieth century (IPCC 2007). The manmade
greenhouse gases have already trapped enough
infrared energy to warm the planet by more than 2C
(Ramanathan and Feng 2008). Although many uncertainties
still surround the risks associated with climate change,
Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences 2011
www.kva.se/en 123
AMBIO
DOI 10.1007/s13280-011-0185-x
impacts are already observable at today’s mean global
surface
...