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Day 2: Key Event

Searching the Past for Clues to the Future (IHOPE)

Sander van der Leeuw, Arizona State University, USA; Carole Crumley, Stockholm University, Sweden

Session content:
The Integrated History and future of People of Earth (IHOPE) initiative is a global network of researchers and research projects. 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 therefore argues that society and science can use lessons from the past when conceptualizing and modeling possible sustainable futures and sometimes unpleasant thresholds. IHOPE supports sharing 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, particularly across the biophysical, social and humanities communities.

IHOPE is developing frameworks that can be used to integrate perspectives, theories, tools and knowledge from a variety of disciplines spanning the full spectrum of social and natural sciences and the humanities. The overarching goal is to produce a rich understanding of the relationships between environmental and human processes over the past millennia. The specific objective for IHOPE is to identify slow and rapidly moving features of complex social-ecological systems, on local to continental spatial scales, which induce resilience, stress, or collapse. For more information, see IHOPE’s webpage. We welcome colleagues who wish to investigate dynamic human-environment interactions from times of early human settlement to the present, and to construct and test models of successful strategies for future applications.