4.8 KiB
| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Earth System Governance Project | 3/3 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_System_Governance_Project | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T10:22:16.868105+00:00 | kb-cron |
== Impacts == The ESG Project does not take policy positions as a network. However, its lead scientists have initiated many activities to support political decision-making and inform policy makers. For example, in 2011, the lead faculty of the ESG Project launched a global assessment on international environmental governance. This publication drew on ongoing research on the institutional framework for sustainable development in the period leading up to the 2012 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio de Janeiro. The outcome was an article in Science in 2012, written by 33 leading scholars from the ESG Project as a blueprint for reform of strengthening earth system governance. In 2011, more than twenty Nobel Prize laureates, several leading policy-makers and renowned thinkers on global sustainability met for the Third Nobel Laureate Symposium on Global Sustainability at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm. The Nobel Laureate Symposium concluded with the Stockholm Memorandum. This document mentioned earth system governance prominently and called for "strengthening of earth system governance as a priority for coherent global action". It was submitted to the High-level Panel on Global Sustainability appointed by the UN Secretary General and fed into the preparations for the 2012 UN Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20). In 2014, the then project's chair Frank Biermann was invited to speak in the United Nations General Assembly during an Interactive Dialogue on Harmony with Nature. This fed into the Harmony with Nature report of the Secretary-General of the UN. In 2022, members of the ESG Project, along with many natural scientists, took the initiative to call for an "International Non-Use Agreement on Solar Geoengineering". The authors demand that "Governments and the United Nations need to take effective political control and restrict the development of solar geoengineering technologies before it is too late." In general, there is widespread support for the ESG Project in the scientific community, which is reflected in the size of the research network and in various publications by experts.
== Challenges == The ongoing funding of the secretariat (International Project Office) is a challenge from time to time, just like it is for many other knowledge networks or alliances.
== History == In 2001, four global change research programs (DIVERSITAS, International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP), World Climate Research Programme, and International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change (IHDP) agreed to intensify co-operation through setting up an overarching Earth System Science Partnership. The research communities represented in this partnership said in the 2001 Amsterdam Declaration on Global Change that the earth system now operates "well outside the normal state exhibited over the past 500,000 years" and that "human activity is generating change that extends well beyond natural variability—in some cases, alarmingly so—and at rates that continue to accelerate." To cope with this challenge, the four global change research programs have called "urgently" for strategies for Earth System management. In March 2007, the Scientific Committee of the IHDP mandated the drafting of the Science Plan of the ESG Project. The IHDP was the overarching social science program in the field at that time. For this drafting work a Scientific Planning Committee was appointed and chaired by Professor Frank Biermann, who was affiliated with VU University Amsterdam. This committee drafted in 2006-2008 the ESG Project's first Science and Implementation Plan. Biermann also became in 2009 the chair of the Scientific Steering Committee, until he stepped down in 2018. Since then, the Project is led by a Scientific Steering Committee that operates with rotating co-chairs. The ESG Project builds on the results of an earlier long-term research program, the IHDP core project "Institutional Dimensions of Global Environmental Change" (IDGEC). In 2009, the ESG Project began. Since the termination of the IHDP in 2014, the ESG Project operates independently as an international, self-funded research alliance. In 2015 the ESG Project became affiliated with of the overarching international research platform Future Earth. However, links between Future Earth and the ESG Project have remained weak.
== See also == Earth System Science Partnership Environmental governance Global Carbon Project Global governance Global Land Project World Climate Research Programme Urbanization and Global Environmental Change Project
== References ==
== External links == ESG Project