Future Earth
Future Earth is an international research program which aims to build knowledge about the environmental and human aspects of Global change, and to find solutions for sustainable development. It aims to increase the impact of scientific research ...
(originally the
International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme
The International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP) was a research programme that ran from 1987 to 2015 dedicated to studying the phenomenon of global change. Its primary focus was coordinating "international research on global-scale and regio ...
land systems Land systems constitute the terrestrial component of the Earth system and encompass all processes and activities related to the human use of land, including socioeconomic, technological and organizational investments and arrangements, as well as the ...
given the prospects of rapid and massive global environmental change. The goal of GLP is "to measure, model and understand the coupled human-environment system".
The Global Land Project Science Plan describes the scientific questions that the land systems research community considers to be crucial for the next decade. GLP has three objectives that determine the research framework:
* To identify the agents, structures and nature of change in coupled human-environment systems on land, and to quantify their effects on the coupled system;
* To assess how the provision of
ecosystem services
Ecosystem services are the many and varied benefits to humans provided by the natural environment and healthy ecosystems. Such ecosystems include, for example, agroecosystems, forest ecosystem, grassland ecosystems, and aquatic ecosystems ...
is affected by the changes in (i) above; and
* To identify the character and dynamics of vulnerable and sustainable coupled human-environment systems to interacting perturbations, including
climate change
In common usage, climate change describes global warming—the ongoing increase in global average temperature—and its effects on Earth's climate system. Climate change in a broader sense also includes previous long-term changes to ...