The Anthropocene is a new era where humans shape every aspect of the biosphere – the thin layer of life around our planet. The research theme Anthropocene Dynamics and Capacities explores how humans now rival natural forces in modifying the functioning of the Earth’s climate and all ecosystems.
The implications of living in the Anthropocene also means new evolutionary dynamics, new aspects of human pressures, new levels of connectivities, and new types of risks.
This will have broad implications for how we understand and manage global resilience and sustainability.
Trade, increased influence of financial markets, human migration, urbanization, technological development and communication are increasingly connecting people and nature’s life-supporting ecosystems in ever more distant geographic locations.
The speed, magnitude and extent at which these connections play out is unprecedented and profoundly complex, posing major challenges for systems research, policy, and society at large.
The implications of this human-driven transformation of Earth’s biosphere have bearings on global biodiversity, species distribution, ecosystem functioning, water cycles, and climate. This raises the risk of crossing safe planetary boundaries, triggering abrupt global tipping points, and disrupting processes that support life on Earth.
This theme explores how global biophysical and socioeconomic changes emerge, interact, and shape the relationships between humans and nature, as well as their social and environmental consequences.
To maintain the planet’s resilience, it will be crucial to understand how to leverage the adaptive and transformative capacities of both humans and nature in intertwined and increasingly global social-ecological systems.
To advance this young research field, we need to apply both existing methods and theories, as well as developing new ones.
This theme will be an incubator for novel research ideas and a meeting place for different disciplines and perspectives. The goal is to understand and support the human capacity to navigate life in the Anthropocene.
Theme contacts
Magnus Nyström
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Peter Søgaard Jørgensen
Lan Wang Erlandsson
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David Collste
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