Summer School on Global Sustainability-Working Group Wiki Page

Please refer to the Complex Systems Summer School groups page to get an idea of self organization and working groups.

Cluster Research Ideas

Ecosystem Services, Biodiversity, Food and Ag

• How can the global food and land-use systems adapt to climate change while mitigating its effects and decrease its negative environmental impact?

• Expanding and standardizing our measurement, monitoring, and verification of global ecosystem services.

• How can we sustainably use our ocean and freshwater systems (drinking water, fishing, aquaculture, recreation, and biodiversity)?

Developing World

• How to foster innovation/knowledge sharing within the developing world in regards to improving livelihoods & ensuring sustainability? (e.g. Indeigenous Knowledge, solutions appropriate for agricultural lifestyles)?

• How would technological transfer from developed to developing nations (or vice versa) for climate change adaptation and mitigation actually occur? (e.g. acocuntability, $$, open source software, govt to govt, private to private, incentives for innovation)

• How do we get to an equitable distribution of responsibility for climate change mitigation & adaptation around the globe? (e.g. emission reduction burdens, adaptation funds, ranking vulnerability)

Policy/Regulatory Environment

• How to support streamlining development and complex science adoption of technolgies and practices?

• How to effetivel translate research into policy, practice and intervention? (with diversit collaborators, partnerships, initiatives, etc)

• How do we transform policies affecting global sustainability (path dependence, complex adaptive policy, integration, scalability, ect)

• What types of policies and how to meaningfully enforce them? (individual initatives, systems approaches, international agreements)

Decision Sciences

• How do we understand/how do we change/what are

the rules of the game, especially as applied to: economic growth theory agricultural/eco systems social systems?

• What drives societal transformation (in terms of values, norms, practices, and livelihoods strategies) & how can complex system science help to productively shed light on those processes?

Climate Change

• How can we better quantify uncertainty when we are in uncharted territory of the climate system (where change is happening faster and involving feedbacks we don't yet understand?

• How do we develop useful integrated models? Are there feedback mechanisms that we don't understand?

• How does climate change affect uncertainties and challenges in modeling de-carbonization & the energy system?

Human Well-Being, Sociology, Advocacy

• how can we best change consumption and political behaviors?

• How can population growth be part of the dialogue?

• What techniques & strategies from past social movements can be used to initiate and sustain new social movements?

• How do cultural conceptions of nature influence sustainability? What kind of educational strategies are needed to foster values that facilitate sustainability?

• How can we anticipate & mitigate resource-based human conflicts?

Mitigation and Adaptation

• What technologies are still needed to evaluate environmental impacts?

• What is our vision for a sustainable future?

• Which low-carbon or carbon neutral technologies or practices are needed, or need to be developed for a sustainable future?