A more dynamic understanding of human behaviour for the Anthropocene

Schill, Caroline; Anderies, John M.; Lindahl, Therese; Folke, Carl; Polasky, Stephen; Cárdenas, Juan Camilo; Crépin, Anne‐Sophie; Janssen, Marco A.; Norberg, Jon; Schlüter, Maja

doi:10.1038/s41893-019-0419-7

Cited by 156 publications

(143 citation statements)

References 58 publications

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“…In this study, we documented another one: The public health risks of an increasing number of disease outbreaks and their increasingly global spread. Even without the devastating current impacts of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, the additional disease outbreak burden associated with our highly mobile and migratory human societies is a definite cost which must be considered in its moral and ethical implications as we consider the future trajectory of the Anthropocene (Ehrlich and Ehrlich, 2013;Steffen et al, 2018;Schill et al, 2019).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The accelerated infectious disease risk in the Anthropocene: more outbreaks and wider global spread

Morand

Walther

2020

Preprint

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The greatly accelerated economic growth during the Anthropocene has resulted in astonishing improvements in many aspects of human well-being, but has also caused the acceleration of risks, such as the interlinked biodiversity and climate crisis. Here, we report on another risk: the accelerated infectious disease risk associated with the number and geographic spread of human infectious disease outbreaks. Using the most complete, reliable, and up-to-date database on human infectious disease outbreaks (GIDEON), we show that the number of disease outbreaks, the number of diseases involved in these outbreaks, and the number of countries affected have increased during the entire Anthropocene. Furthermore, the spatial distribution of these outbreaks is becoming more globalized in the sense that the overall modularity of the disease networks across the globe has decreased, meaning disease outbreaks have become increasingly pandemic in their nature. This decrease in modularity is correlated with the increase in air traffic. We finally show that those countries and regions which are most central within these disease networks tend to be countries with higher GDPs. Therefore, one cost of increased global mobility and greater economic growth is the increased risk of disease outbreaks and their faster and wider spread. We briefly discuss three different scenarios which decision-makers might follow in light of our results.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The accelerated infectious disease risk in the Anthropocene: more outbreaks and wider global spread

Morand

Walther

2020

Preprint

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“…And the fact that most societal challenges are of the "wicked" kind [16], as well as the need to decide among many societal tradeoffs and many future pathways that may or may not lead to positive results [17], require that we seriously engage in using "Complex Systems" approaches. Whilst there are efforts in this direction, many of those are still only partial [18][19][20][21]. It is up to our scientific community to identify these pathways, and we need to move very quickly!…”

Section: Reconsidering Sustainability As a Societal Challengementioning

confidence: 99%

Beyond the Indicators: Improving Science, Scholarship, Policy and Practice to Meet the Complex Challenges of Sustainability

et al. 2020

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Many teams have developed a wide range of numerical or categorical indicators of progress in the implementation of the SDG targets. But these indicators cannot identify why target goals have not been accomplished, whether or how they do or do not do justice to the social and cultural context in which they are applied, and how newly emerging social dynamics affect indicators. Nor do they provide means for resolving conflicting values and making balanced trade-offs. Our starting point in examining why we have not been successful in progressing towards sustainability is that the sustainability conundrum is primarily a societal, rather than an environmental problem. Our present emphasis is to maintain our way of life while minimizing its impact, hoping that such a minimization strategy would make the world more sustainable. Reducing for example the extent of pollution but keeping the same industries alive would not be sufficient for a transformation towards sustainability. Instead we should ask “How did we come to this point and what practices, in our societies and in our science, need to change to make progress towards sustainability?” To answer these questions, one needs to go much further back than usual in the history of western societies to identify the societal, scientific, technological and environmental co-evolutionary dynamics that have brought us to the current conundrum. And the fact that most societal challenges are of the “wicked” kind, as well as the need to decide among many societal options and many future pathways that may lead to positive results require that we seriously engage in using “Complex Systems” approaches. It is up to our scientific community to identify these pathways, and we need to move fast!

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“…In that sense, the above definition of geoethics might also be read as "wherever the Earth System and human practices interact". This statement expresses the critical property of the Earth system in times of anthropogenic global change, the robust feedback between nature and social components [30]. They form a loop of causeeffect in which who was the cause and what was the effect does make little sense to be determined.…”

Section: Geoethics Situated In Pandemicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Geoethics for Nudging Human Practices in Times of Pandemics

Marone¹,

Böhle²

2020

Preprint

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Geoscientists developed geoethics, an intra-disciplinary field of applied philosophical studies, during the last decade. Reaching beyond the sphere of professional geosciences, it led to professional, cultural, and philosophical approaches to handle the social-ecological structures of our planet ‘wherever human activities interact with the Earth system’. Against the backdrop of the COVID-19 and considering geoscientists’ experiences dealing with disasters (related to hazards like tsunamis, floods, climate changes.), this essay (1) explores the geoethical approach, (2) re-casts geoethics within western philosophical systems, such as the Kantian imperatives, Kohlberg scale of moral adequacy, Jonas’ imperative of responsibility, and (3) advances a ‘geoethical thesis’. The latter takes the form of a hypothesis of a much broader scope of geoethics than initially envisioned. That hypothesis appears by suspecting a relationship between the relative successes in the COVID-19 battle with the positioning of agents (individual, collective, institutional) into ethical frameworks. The turmoil caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, calls for the transfer of experiences between different disciplinary domains to further sustainable governance, hence generalising the geoethical approach. It is emphasized that only when behaving as responsible and knowledgeable citizens, then people of any trade (including [geo-]scientists) can transgress the boundaries of ordinary governance practices with legitimacy.

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A more dynamic understanding of human behaviour for the Anthropocene

Cited by 156 publications

References 58 publications

The accelerated infectious disease risk in the Anthropocene: more outbreaks and wider global spread

The accelerated infectious disease risk in the Anthropocene: more outbreaks and wider global spread

Beyond the Indicators: Improving Science, Scholarship, Policy and Practice to Meet the Complex Challenges of Sustainability

Geoethics for Nudging Human Practices in Times of Pandemics

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