Today, awareness of our perilous position has grown immensely, even if our ability to do something about it has not. Analyses suggest that human activities have already pushed planetary processes past stable boundaries through destruction of biodiversity, ocean acidification, and land-use change associated with agriculture, among other effects (see Steffen, W. et al., Science 347, 1259855; 2015). Over the past few decades, estimates find that human resource extraction has reduced the total outstanding capital of the world’s base of natural resources by some 40%. What is apparently our most pressing challenge — planetary warming — is just one of many challenges linked to our inability to limit the scale of our human activities and impacts.
These problems are obviously beyond the capacity of any small group of people — or even of nations — to address. And yet inaction is not an option. In July, I attended an unusual meeting at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste, which brought together physicists, ecologists, economists, demographers and biologists with the aim of finding — not solutions, of course — but perhaps some pathways to the right questions, which could spur some tangible progress. The nominal theme was Quantitative Human Ecology. Amidst general recognition that the scale of our problems is staggering, much of the focus was on how new technologies could help us monitor the changing state of our planet and bring awareness of the urgency of the issues to a majority of people.
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