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. HOPE 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.
Developments in technologies are shaping information access globally. This presents opportunities and challenges for understanding the role of new technologies in sustainability research. This article focuses on a suite of technologies termed Environmental Virtual Observatories (EVOs) developed for communicating observations and simulation of environmental processes. A strength of EVOs is that they are open and decentralised, thus democratising flow and ownership of information between multiple actors. However, EVOs are discussed rarely beyond their technical aspects. By evaluating the evolution of EVOs, we illustrate why it is timely to engage with policy and societal aspects as well. While first generation EVOs are primed for scientists, second generation EVOs can have broader implications for knowledge co-creation and resilience through their participatory design.
Chinese investments in large hydropower dams have rapidly increased all over the world in the last 20 years. Some of these projects have been contested both from a technological and political point of view due to the ways in which decisions have been made, as well as in relation to the resulting social-ecological change and ecological distributional aspects. From an Environmental Justice perspective, this paper analyses the main drivers and contested aspects of Chinese hydropower investments in the global South. The paper builds on Chinese projects located in different regions of the world, by combining information from the literature and the Global Atlas of Environmental Justice - EJAtlas dataset. Based on the analysis of Chinese hydropower projects and environmental justice concerns, this paper sheds light on the current literature on drivers and multidimensional conflictive outcomes of these large hydropower dam investments.
In the last few decades, the literature on waste has soared and taken two main directions. Considering the assumption that waste is a natural category, which we need to ‘dispose of’, the scholarship on waste management and its sustainability offers mainly problem-solving propositions (e.g., the 3Rs proposal—re-cycling, re-using, and reducing—or ‘circular economy’). The social scientific waste studies literature takes a more critical stance from its outset and advances a relational account of waste. We aim to bring those two main research streams into dialogue through a presentation of two case studies among indigenous communities in the Russian North. Not only we disclose the hidden biases of the notion of circular economy and other ‘innovative’ problem-solving practices in the waste management literature, but we also propose to pay more attention to non-hegemonic waste practices amongst communities, which are often overlooked in both the waste management and the social studies of waste literature.