In this chapter, we explore the challenges that Earth system researchers face in addressing human-induced global environmental changes and the societal consequences of global change within their research toolkit. We focus on areas of research that have particular resonance with today’s social and political demands.

The Earth system and the ‘problematic human’

The state of play and our position

The great scientific challenge faced by today’s global change scientists is to understand the Earth system. Part of this is knowing that we ourselves, as human beings, are an influential component of that system and that the understanding we develop shapes our responses to the environmental changes we see around us. In scientific terms, most of the fundamental workings of our planet, including the processes that change climate and landscapes on short and long timescales, were already well understood by the end of the twentieth century. Earth system science is the field of study that has brought these areas of knowledge together. It has not just provided insight into the phenomena of global environmental change, but also explained the ‘hows’ and ‘whys’ behind them, bringing insights into the future prospects for our planet. The enormity of the challenge lies in the realization that we are seeking to understand and predict the properties of a complex adaptive system of which we are a part, recognizing that our choices and our agency as human beings are important controls on its workings. More than that, our ability to deploy our knowledge and make choices about our actions is an important facet, perhaps even a characterizing trait, of our existence.

Why have we written this book?

In 2001, the former chief executive of the UK Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), Sir John Lawton (Lawton, 2001), wrote:

In the year that followed, the research council consulted widely among its scientists, policy stakeholders and the international research community about how to address that challenge. By the autumn of 2002, a plan of action was in place. The research council had earmarked a very substantial research budget for ‘Quantifying and Understanding the Earth System’, matched by an ambitious vision for the science that this research programme – QUEST – would address:

We, the authors of this book, have worked together over several years under the auspices of QUEST (Box 1). QUEST ran from 2003 to 2011, as one of several initiatives worldwide aligned with the internationally developed Earth system science agenda for collaborative research. The research programme sought to do more than ‘just’ provide a more robust understanding of the global carbon cycle, although interactions between biogeochemical cycles and climate have been at the heart of the programme.