Lecture 1

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Oct 30, 2023

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What is Sustainability?  Enduring into long-term future systems operate on their own Sustainable development  Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs o Ecological sustainability o Economic sustainability o Social inclusion Triple Bottom Line  Three pillars of sustainability are connected o Economic o Environmental o Social Systems Thinking  Interconnected parts  Whole is greater than sum of its parts  Properties are emergent properties (if we add something or take away something then properties will change)  Systems are nested within other systems (Russian doll kind of thing) o One change can lead to multiple changes Carrying Capacity  Maximum number of individuals a given environment can support indefinitely Ecological Footprint  Demand placed on nature for resources consumed and wastes absorbed, expressed as land area Natural Capital  Plants, animals, soil, water air  Ecosystem services  Planetary “saving account”

Resilience  Capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and retain its basic function and structure What makes a system resilient?  Diversity  Redundancy  Modularity (somethings exist within systems but are not interconnected to everything else)  Connectivity Complex Adaptive Systems  Emergent properties – outcomes cannot be predicted  Can have more than one stable state  Tipping points o Critical thresholds: small changes cause state changes o Systems crossing a critical threshold into a new regime  LAKE EXAMPLE Living in the Anthropocene Earth has entered Anthropocene epoch  International commission on stratigraphy o Official body for establishing geological time scale  Anthropocence working group

o Has determined a new epoch should be officially designated o Now studying: what physical evidence should be used as its marker? Planetary Boundaries  9 boundaries identified to maintain stable, Holocene-like state SEVERN CULLIS – SUZUKI AT RIO SUMMIT 1992  Organization called ECCO  Talking about her future and for all generations to come  World hunger, animals dying  Holes in ozones, chemical in air  Telling the adults to get their chit together; talking about wealth differences between countries  Make their actions reflect their words Watch this video and then watch the next one with Greta Thunberg. Are the messages different? Has anything changed in the 27 years between meetings?  They are both children trying to get the adults to take action  Severn’s focus was more on taking action whereas Gretta’s was also on educated the public and presenting the entirety of the problem to them  Based on the speeches nothing has really changes, the leaders and scientists have sidelined the crisis and it has only gotten worse GRETA THUNBERG'S SPEECH AT THE R20 AUSTRIAN WORLD SUMMIT, VIENNA, MAY 2019  Climate activist from Sweden  Talking about changing the way they deal with and speak of the climate crisis; it is an emergency  People in general aren’t well educated on the topic, they know about greenhouses gases but don’t know the effects  Talks about Paris agreement, runaway greenhouse effect

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 Biggest crisis humanity has faced  Focus on informing the public THE SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOALS REPORT 2021 ANTHROPOCENE NOW: INFLUENTIAL PANEL VOTES TO RECOGNIZE EARTH’S NEW EPOCH A panel of scientists voted this week to designate a new geologic epoch — the Anthropocene — to mark the profound ways in which humans have altered the planet. That decision, by the 34- member Anthropocene Working Group (AWG), marks an important step towards formally defining a new slice of the geologic record — an idea that has generated intense debate within the scientific community over the past few years. The panel plans to submit a formal proposal for the new epoch by 2021 to the International Commission on Stratigraphy, which oversees the official geologic time chart. Twenty-nine members of the AWG supported the Anthropocene designation and voted in favour of starting the new epoch in the mid-twentieth century, when a rapidly rising human population accelerated the pace of industrial production, the use of agricultural chemicals and other human activities. At the same time, the first atomic-bomb blasts littered the globe with radioactive debris that became embedded in sediments and glacial ice, becoming part of the geologic record. “The Anthropocene works as a geological unit of time, process and strata,” says Jan Zalasiewicz, chair of the AWG and a geologist at the University of Leicester, UK, who wasn’t confident of that conclusion when the AWG began its work a decade ago. But the vote demonstrates that the group has mostly coalesced around the geological unit. “It is distinguishable. It is distinctive,” he says. The results of the vote are not surprising, given that they solidified an informal vote taken at the 2016 International Geological Congress in Cape Town, but the decision invigorates the race to find a geologic marker signalling the end of the Holocene epoch and the start of one shaped by human activity. The AWG was established by the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy, which in turn is part of the International Commission on Stratigraphy. Having decided to go ahead with the new epoch, the group will now focus on identifying a definitive geologic marker or ‘golden spike’, which is technically called a Global boundary Stratotype Section and Point (GSSP). The group is considering ten candidate sites from around the globe, including a cave in northern Italy, corals in the Great Barrier Reef and a lake in China. Next week, many of the scientists involved will gather in Berlin to coordinate the next two years of research. They hope to identify a single site to include in their formal proposal. They must also define the type of physical evidence in the sedimentary record that represents the start of the epoch. The group is considering whether to choose the radionuclides that came from atomic-bomb detonations from 1945 until the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963, says Zalasiewicz.

Once the AWG makes its formal proposal, it will be considered by several more groups of the International Commission on Stratigraphy. If it makes it past that group, final ratification would come from the executive committee of the International Union of Geological Sciences. Four members of the AWG voted against the idea of designating the Anthropocene as a new epoch. They objected to the group’s efforts to find a single clear signal that can be found globally in the geological record, as opposed to acknowledging the progressive impacts of humans on the world, starting with prehistoric agriculture. “The stratigraphic evidence overwhelmingly indicates a time-transgressive Anthropocene with multiple beginnings rather than a single moment of origin,” says Matt Edgeworth, an archaeologist at the University of Leicester, UK, and a member of the AWG. Naming a new epoch on the basis of the radionuclide signal alone, he says, “impedes rather than facilitates scientific understanding of human involvement in Earth system change”.