Séminaire de John Finnigan - ISPA

Understanding the Anthropocene as a Dynamical System
John Finnigan, CSIRO, Canberra, Australia
 
Planet earth has entered a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene where human actions are as important as natural forces in shaping the biogeochemical flows of the planet.  The need to find a sustainable trajectory for humanity through the conjunction of population growth, economic growth and global change that will mark this century has led to the concepts of ‘planetary boundaries’ and ‘a safe operating space for humanity’ and to the realization that we need to manage the trajectory of human society to stay within these limits.
 
Such concepts assume that we can describe the human-earth system in the Anthropocene as a dynamical system with a trajectory in a state space whose axes define the state of the system and where interacting physical and social processes determine the trajectory.  Here we will attempt such a description in a state space with four axes: population, aspiration, connectivity and biogeochemical change.   Each of these quantities has undergone transformative change as we have entered the Anthropocene. 
 
We will see that many of the key interactions that determine our future trajectory and whether we can define and stay within a safe operating space depend on social and economic processes that natural scientists have been slow to include in their world view.  In trying to define the interactions and feedbacks that will determine our future trajectory we will start to see some of the limitations of our current knowledge, some of the challenges we need to overcome to understand our future and some of the forces that can drive us out of a safe operating space.