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Associated Emerging Topics:
3.1Decarbonisation
Greenhouse gas emissions in 2022 were the largest in history: humanity released 36.1 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide (GtCO2), 1.5 per cent more than in 2021.1
3.2Earth Systems Modelling
The concept of the Earth system can be traced to James Lovelock’s much-discussed Gaia hypothesis, which posited that all of Earth is a self-regulating whole. While aspects of Lovelock’s proposal remain controversial, the core notion of significant interactions between elements of the Earth system — oceans, atmosphere, land, Arctic and Antarctic ice (the cryosphere) and biosphere — has proved correct.
3.3Future Food Systems
Food is fundamental to our existence, and the challenge before us is to build a resilient, sustainable system able to produce and distribute sufficient nutrition for a growing global population. By 2050 our planet will be home to around 10 billion people whose environment is increasingly affected by the vicissitudes of climate change. This task is complex and multifaceted at every level, and differs according to geography, socioeconomics, politics, and access to technology. It will take a multitude of approaches and technologies to meet this challenge.
3.4Space Resources
Humans already depend on and utilise off-world resources. Almost all of our energy ultimately comes from the Sun, and we are protected from dangerous radiation by the magnetosphere that encircles our planet. The region just beyond our atmosphere has become a resource for communication, observation and exploration. But our ambition, as well as our requirement for resources, is greater still.
3.5Ocean Stewardship
The ocean is central to the existence of life on Earth. However, human activity is putting increasing strain on the ocean, directly through activities such as overfishing and pollution, and indirectly through the emission of greenhouse gases and associated anthropogenic climate change.
3.6Solar Radiation Modification
Solar radiation modification (SRM) is a set of approaches that could fully or partially offset the temperature rise caused by greenhouse gas emissions, thus reducing some of the harmful impacts of anthropogenic climate change.
3.7Infectious Diseases
The past century has seen enormous progress against some diseases, with the mortality associated with a few diseases — malaria, for instance — falling dramatically.1 However, infectious diseases remain a major threat to human health and wellbeing.
Related Content:
Opportunity
The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is at its highest level in four million years. If we want to meet our goal of capping global warming at 2°C, urgent action is required to both slash emissions and remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Opportunity
The ocean supports all life on Earth, but we have explored only 80 per cent of it and an estimated 91 per cent of ocean species have yet to be classified. What's more, the ocean is changing at unprecedented rates in the face of climate change, pollution and over-exploitation. Understanding these changes demands a rapid scale-up in ocean monitoring and the collection of valuable data before it disappears.
Opportunity
Solar Radiation Modification (SRM) has been scientifically, politically and societally divisive. Some experts don’t even want to discuss proposals to go on with fundamental research in the field. There is fear that future societies could succumb to “techno fix” attitudes, potentially damaging current climate change mitigation policies. Other experts believe that interventions such as cloud brightening, aerosol injection, and creating more reflective surfaces must be part of a possible intervention portfolio, especially if other measures fail. Regardless of position, both sides agree that the planet’s future is in peril and people and governments must act.
Opportunity
Humanity created, captured, copied, and consumed more than 64 trillion gigabytes of data last year. This deluge of information is being used to try to model the world around us in unprecedented detail. That includes complex systems like cities, ecosystems, and the climate.
Opportunity
After COP26, there is global agreement for governments, businesses, and citizens to embark in a decarbonisation global effort at every level. Global decarbonisation efforts are being stalled by objective gaps in science, technology, processes, and diplomacy. The nature of the gaps is often complex and systemic, and therefore impossible to solve with linear or single party solutions. Solutions currently in the pipeline need to be accelerated to reach the right stage of maturity for their implementation. The global ambition is to achieve net-zero CO2 for 2050, which requires accelerating the energy transition to switch to renewable energy and deploying technologies that directly remove CO2 from the atmosphere.
Opportunity
As humans move into previously undisturbed ecosystems, and as climate change broadens areas where vector-transmitted diseases such as dengue fever, Zika, and Chikungunya are present, the need to monitor, detect, contain and, above all, prevent new outbreaks is paramount. Genetic modification of mosquitoes is already being tested to stop disease transmission, but are poorly accepted publicly. The opportunity to constrain disease transmitters with a new biological (non-genetic, hence possibly better accepted) method is within our grasp. This effective method is being evaluated for endorsement by the World Health Organization, while next generation advances in synthetic biology and genetic engineering are looking at even more innovative ways to constrain disease, such as modifying the human microbiome to resist such viruses.
Debate
Our monitoring tool — which provides live data on the actions of selected civil society actors (citizens, small groups and NGOs) — detected close to 200,000 “actions” in the areas covered by Eco-regeneration & Geoengineering, making this by far the most active domain for this section of the Science Breakthrough Radar. This is due to the nature and breadth of the topics covered – decarbonisation for example – but also the importance of climate-related issues for the civil society actors surveyed.
Debate
Analysis of mainstream media articles, blog posts and scientific articles over a period of 12 months reveals that the overall sentiment towards Eco-regeneration and Geoengineering is mixed, with nearly as much associated negative press as there is postitive.
Invited Contribution
It may not attract much attention in everyday life, but the fungal kingdom has a remarkable breadth and depth of impact on human and environmental wellbeing.
Fungi are integral to health, agriculture, biodiversity, ecology, manufacturing and biomedicine. They are the earth’s pre-eminent degraders of organic matter, are among the best-characterised model systems for biomedical research and produce enzymes crucial for fermentation, food production, bioremediation and biofuel production. Fungi have also made invaluable contributions to medicine: they produce a phenomenal diversity of chemicals that we have found uses for as antibiotics, immunosuppressants that make organ transplants possible and drugs that reduce the risk of heart disease.
Opportunity
The minerals locked up in the most valuable asteroid in our solar system are worth $15 quintillion, according to estimates from startup Planetary Resources. The number should be taken with a grain of salt, but even if it is off by several orders of magnitude, the sum would still be colossal.
Opportunity
The poles are the most challenging and expensive frontiers on Earth for scientific research and resource acquisition. The current geopolitical situation has put deployed efforts to pursue research in those regions at risk. It is, in fact, accelerating the race to exploit essential resources such as oil, gas, and rare earth minerals. In addition, concerns citing environmental preservation, ecosystem balance, and lack of clear authority or ownership loom over existing approach to the Earth’s poles. Alternatively, the poles and their resources are an important contributor to meeting the demand of a more manageable energy transition.
Invited Contribution
With the rapid pace of science and technology breakthroughs driving significant changes to our world and how we live in it, having agency over our future has never been more important. One of the tools we have for this is anticipation, through which we can use our assessment of what might happen in the future to direct action in the present. GESDA aims to enable this process of anticipation by laying out in its Science Breakthrough Radar the possibilities scientists envisage for the future. In this way, GESDA aims to act as an honest broker between the scientific community and society to encourage open debates about how we wish to shape the future and what opportunities for action can be taken today.