TY - JOUR
T1 - Developing an Integrated History and future of People on Earth (IHOPE)
AU - Costanza, Robert
AU - Van Der Leeuw, Sander
AU - Hibbard, Kathy
AU - Aulenbach, Steve
AU - Brewer, Simon
AU - Burek, Michael
AU - Cornell, Sarah
AU - Crumley, Carole
AU - Dearing, John
AU - Folke, Carl
AU - Graumlich, Lisa
AU - Hegmon, Michelle
AU - Heckbert, Scott
AU - Jackson, Stephen T.
AU - Kubiszewski, Ida
AU - Scarborough, Vernon
AU - Sinclair, Paul
AU - Sörlin, Sverker
AU - Steffen, Will
N1 - Funding Information:
This project studies urban resilience across the world and over the long term, from the development of urbanism 10 000 years ago until modern times ( http://www.arkeologi.uu.se/Forskning/Projekt/Urban_Mind/Introduction/ ). It involves researchers in the humanities and the social and biophysical sciences from various institutes in Sweden, the United Kingdom, Germany, Turkey, Zimbabwe, and South Africa. The development of urbanism is a global phenomenon that takes radically different forms in different times and places, with widely varying consequences. Ongoing studies address cognitive aspects of urbanism and climate change in Africa, Eurasia, and the Americas. This project has been funded in a targeted grant from MISTRA.
Funding Information:
Over the past 3000 years, the region has seen a succession of very different adaptations to extreme climatic circumstances. This group has been working together for decades to study different cultural responses to environmental change, based on a comparative study of six subregions in the area, which underwent very similar changes in climate, but had different social and environmental resources to cope with these. The project benefits from long tree-ring sequences that allow detailed reconstructions of fluctuations in annual average precipitation and temperature and the assignment of precise dates to the archeological evidence. In addition, the project has developed dynamic (multi-agent) models of social–environmental interaction over thousands of years and a sophisticated historical GIS database. By comparing how the region's extreme environmental circumstances have been managed by different societies over the last 10 000 years, the group can focus on distinguishing cultural and economic factors from environmental conditions. Funding for this Core Project has come from the US National Science Foundation and Arizona State University.
Funding Information:
This is a thematic project that cuts across disciplines in examining the history of the idea of environmental prediction and the reception of both optimistic and pessimistic predictions by societies. The period studied begins in the sixteenth century; predictions range from personal observation to interpretation of longitudinal data trends (prices, demographic data, meteorological records) as statistical modeling becomes increasingly important. This cross-cutting comparative methodology can be applied to all case studies; it provides a way to examine IHOPE itself and its role in today's politics of science. This project has funding from the Leverhulme Trust, the Center for History and Economics, Harvard University, the Australian Museum of Natural History, and the SRC.
Funding Information:
The IHOPE initiative has received support from several sources, including: the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS), the Stockholm Resilience Center, the QUEST project at the University of Bristol, the University of Uppsala, Arizona State University, the Institute for Sustainable Solutions at Portland State University, the Australian National University, the Dahlem Foundation, the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNRL). We also thank two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier drafts.
PY - 2012/2
Y1 - 2012/2
N2 - The Integrated History and future of People on Earth (IHOPE) initiative is a global network of researchers and research projects with its International Program Office (IPO) now based at the Stockholm Resilience Center (SRC), Uppsala University, Arizona State University, Portland State University, and the Australian National University. Research linked to IHOPE demonstrates that Earth system changes in the past have been strongly associated with changes in the coupled human-environment system. IHOPE supports integrating knowledge and resources from the biophysical and the social sciences and the humanities to address analytical and interpretive issues associated with coupled human-earth system dynamics. This integration of human history and Earth system history is a timely and important task. Until recently, however, there have been few attempts at such integration. IHOPE will create frameworks that can be used to help achieve this integration. The overarching goal is to produce a rich understanding of the relationships between environmental and human processes over the past millennia. IHOPE recognizes that one major challenge for reaching this goal is developing 'workable' terminology that can be accepted by scholars of all disciplines. The specific objectives for IHOPE are to identify slow and rapidly moving features of complex social-ecological systems, on local to continental spatial scales, which induce resilience, stress, or collapse in linked systems of humans in nature. These objectives will be reached by exploring innovative ways of conducting interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary science, including theory, case studies, and integrated modeling. Examples of projects underway to implement this initiative are briefly discussed.
AB - The Integrated History and future of People on Earth (IHOPE) initiative is a global network of researchers and research projects with its International Program Office (IPO) now based at the Stockholm Resilience Center (SRC), Uppsala University, Arizona State University, Portland State University, and the Australian National University. Research linked to IHOPE demonstrates that Earth system changes in the past have been strongly associated with changes in the coupled human-environment system. IHOPE supports integrating knowledge and resources from the biophysical and the social sciences and the humanities to address analytical and interpretive issues associated with coupled human-earth system dynamics. This integration of human history and Earth system history is a timely and important task. Until recently, however, there have been few attempts at such integration. IHOPE will create frameworks that can be used to help achieve this integration. The overarching goal is to produce a rich understanding of the relationships between environmental and human processes over the past millennia. IHOPE recognizes that one major challenge for reaching this goal is developing 'workable' terminology that can be accepted by scholars of all disciplines. The specific objectives for IHOPE are to identify slow and rapidly moving features of complex social-ecological systems, on local to continental spatial scales, which induce resilience, stress, or collapse in linked systems of humans in nature. These objectives will be reached by exploring innovative ways of conducting interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary science, including theory, case studies, and integrated modeling. Examples of projects underway to implement this initiative are briefly discussed.
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U2 - 10.1016/j.cosust.2012.01.010
DO - 10.1016/j.cosust.2012.01.010
M3 - Review article
AN - SCOPUS:84857913159
SN - 1877-3435
VL - 4
SP - 106
EP - 114
JO - Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability
JF - Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability
IS - 1
ER -