Interconnected risks and solutions for a planet under pressure - overview and introduction

摘要

The year 2012 should be a seminal moment in history. Twenty years have passed since the 1992 Rio Summit on Sustainable Development and eleven years since the 2001 Amsterdam Global Change Conference that consolidated the concept of Earth system science.Since 1992, science has made giant strides in expanding knowledge on how our Earth system functions. But there is a growing gloom that global decision-making is failing to keep up with the pace of change. We are failing in our new role as planetary stewards, a role that is now crucial to sustaining human development and, even, the survival of civilization as we have come to know it in the benign environmental conditions of the past few millennia.