IGBP provides essential international scientific leadership and knowledge of the Earth system to help guide society onto a sustainable pathway during rapid global change.

By linking biology, ecology and social sciences, DIVERSITAS produces socially relevant new knowledge to support sustainable use of biodiversity.

IHDP provides international leadership in framing, developing and integrating social science research on global environmental change, and promote key findings of this research to help address these changes.

WCRP improves climate predictions and our understanding of human influence on climate through observations and modelling of the Earth system and the policy-relevant assessment of climate conditions.

ESSP is a partnership of the four international global-change programmes. It is an integrated study of the Earth System, the ways that it is changing, and the implications for global and regional sustainability.

If true character is revealed in the choices made under pressure, the early decades of the 21st century promise to be revelatory for our species. As the State of the Planet Declaration notes:

Research now demonstrates that the continued functioning of the Earth system as it has supported the well-being of human civilization in recent centuries is at risk. Without urgent action, we could face threats to water, food, biodiversity and other critical resources: these threats risk intensifying economic, ecological and social crises, creating the potential for a humanitarian emergency on a global scale. In one lifetime our increasingly interconnected and interdependent economic, social, cultural and political systems have come to place pressures on the environment that may cause fundamental changes in the Earth system and move us beyond safe natural boundaries.

Yet, in the jaded aftermath of the UN’s Rio+20 conference, it’s clear that scientific insight into the emerging systemic pressures isn’t a sufficient condition for action – and that our jumbled, planetary bundle of individual and institutional interests has a momentum that’s hard to deflect.

If the goal is to accelerate societal learning, the interplay between scientists, policymakers and the wider public will be critical. However, the existing patterns of interaction leave much to be desired. First, the science-policy relationship is often difficult and dysfunctional2. Second, the international governance infrastructure – the United Nations, World Bank, WTO and others – was designed to meet the needs of the post-WWII era and is ill-adapted to the interconnected and transdisciplinary challenges it now faces. And finally, our main public communication channels seem better attuned to the linear and polarised narrative of crisis than to the nuanced, detailed, anticipatory work of crisis avoidance or minimisation. Quite simply, among other changes, we need to find new ways to communicate the kinds of global challenges that elude compression into a simple linear narrative.

News cartography – the creation of dynamic, interactive, collaboratively editable and shareable maps of the stories – is a promising, early-stage response to this challenge. It gives people a way to pull apart an issue like food security or ocean acidification, sift fact from fiction and get to the essence of the debate. It enables everyone to explore a topic at their own speed and find out who is saying what. How much do we know with certainty? How reliable is the information? Who disagrees? What are the solutions?