Realigning human culture with Earth

Humans have for the past 80 years lived through the first time in our evolution where cooperation has existed at the global scale. While many thought this trend was going to continue toward increased unity, we now see signs of returning to geopolitical fragmentation. This fragmentation arguably comes at the worst possible time when global cooperation is most needed to steer us through global environmental challenges, such as accelerating climate change, biodiversity loss, chemical pollution and future pandemics. How do we navigate towards global sustainability amidst this new turbulence, that some call a global polycrisis? In this talk I will give an overview of ongoing and planned research uncovering the dynamics of the global polycrisis, the ongoing attempts of reorienting human culture to be aligned with Earth system sustainability, and what the former implies for the prospects of success of the latter. A central theme will be understanding the liminal dynamics of human culture at the global scale. The talk also serves as an opportunity to introduce the research agenda of the SES-ES group.

Peter is the incoming PI of the Socio-Economic Systems and Earth Systems (SES-ES) group at BIOPOLIS. He is associate professor in Sustainability Science at Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University and a co-directs the Anthropocene Laboratory at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

[Host: Paulo Azevedo, SocioEconomic Systems and Earth Systems - SES&ES]