Introduction

Welcome to my blog exploring the management of global environmental change :)

In this blog, I would like to investigate how global environmental change is affecting the lives on Earth and how it is being managed or planned to be managed - through looking at variety of aspects including geoengineering. 

Global environmental Change and Anthropocene

The trend in Earth's system is that there is an overall degradation (or decline) in the environment, ranging from the decline in the biodiversity of species to the disappearance of water sources such as the Aral sea. Recently, the scientific community begun to recognise that such trends are heavily influenced by the human activities happened since the birth of agrarian societies (although continuing debates exist about the beginning of such human-induced changes on earth), and a new notion of anthropocene has been introduced. 

Anthropocene

Anthropocene is a recent notion referring to the new geological epoch of the Earth after Holocene, when us, the humans, were starting to profoundly influence the Earth system. Unlike before, humans and their activities are beginning to be recognised as the major force affecting the 'trajectory of the Earth system instead of all the usual non-human forces of nature' (Maslin & Lewis 2015). There are ongoing debates on the definition and start of Anthropocene among scientists, but they all agree that this new epoch has already occurred on the planet. 

Here is a video explaining about the Anthropocene in a simple way:

Source: https://youtu.be/fvgG-pxlobk

Current global environmental change includes changes in climate itself, such as increase in the frequency of extreme climate events, warmer surface temperature and global sea level rise. Although there are controversies over whether such climate change are induced by natural forces like sun's forces and related orbital forces exist, it is widely accepted that the human activity are one of the major drivers of such global change. 

Following video clip introduces about the recent climate change induced by humans:

Source: https://youtu.be/EtW2rrLHs08

Managing global environmental change

As illustrated, the global shifts in Earth's environment - mostly devastating effects - are getting acknowledged by wider community and more efforts to manage such changes are implemented around the world. 

Global cooperation on emission and temperature limit

One of recent major global cooperation efforts on managing global climate change can be the Paris agreement happened last year. COP21 aimed for the first time for achieving a legally binding and universal agreement on global cooperation on climate change mitigation and adaptation, and the final draft of the Paris deal includes global limit on temperature of 'well below 2°C' with 'efforts' to limit it to 1.5°C. Additionally, long-term emissions goal is also included in the agreement that are more specific and tightly defined for global community compared to the previous drafts of climate conference. 

COP21 Paris agreement - Source: COP PARIS/Fliker https://www.flickr.com/photos/cop21/23595388112/in/album-72157661744003510/ 

Geoengineering 

Geoengineering that aims to manipulate the Earth's environment in a large-scale, has been suggested as a potential tool to mitigate global warming from (mainly anthropogenic) greenhouse gas emissions (Zhang et al., 2015). There are various aspects in geoengineering schemes including land-based, ocean-based, atmosphere-based and space-based approaches. One of most renowned schemes of geoengineering is the Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) that target to remove carbon directly. It has already been developed and started to be applied in some parts of the world, including agriculture and forestry (Chaudry et al., 2013). 

Carbon Capture & sequestration 

Source: Mann & Kump, 2015. Dire Predictions: Understanding Climate Change, 2^nd Edition. Pearson Education. 

Despite its potential impacts on mitigating global environmental change, there are still ongoing debates continuing on geoengineering, and this would be examined further in next posts. 

Others?

After all, degradation in environments needs to be managed through various conservation works even though it seems late - but still, "better late than never". 
Many civil societies and NGOs are campaigning and working in the field for conservation works, especially for biodiversity loss. For instance, first global conservation priorities have been set at the The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) World Conservation Congress. The targets include promoting nature-based solutions to climate change and accounting for biodiversity conservation in renewable energy development (https://www.iucn.org/news/first-global-conservation-priorities-set-–-iucn-world-conservation-congress). 

More management schemes planned or implemented globally to be discussed in following posts. 

References:

Chaudhry, R., Fischlein, M., Larson, J., Hall, D.M., Peterson, T.R., Wilson, E.J., Stephens, 
J.C., 2013. Policy stakeholders' perceptions of carbon capture and storage: a comparison 
of four U.S. States. Journal of Cleaner Produdction. 52: 21 - 32.

Climate Change 101 with Bill Nye | National Geographic (Youtube). 2015. Available at: 

https://youtu.be/EtW2rrLHs08 [Accessed 23 Oct. 2016].

Cop21paris.org. COP 21 Paris France Sustainable Innovation Forum 2015 working with 

UNEP. [online] Available at: http://cop21paris.org [Accessed 23 Oct. 2016].

E-education.psu.edu.  Lesson 11 - Geoengineering. [online] Available at: https://www.e-

education.psu.edu/meteo469/?q=book/export/html/178 [Accessed 23 Oct. 2016].

Gadian, A. (2011). Geoengineering. Atmospheric Science Letters. 12(2): 161.

Maslin, M. and Lewis, S. 2015. Anthropocene: Earth System, geological, philosophical and 
political paradigm shifts. The Anthropocene Review. 2(2): 108 - 116. 

Rhodes, C. 2016. The 2015 Paris Climate Change Conference: COP21. sci prog, 99(1): 97-

104.

Welcome to the Anthropocene (Youtube). 2012. Available at: https://youtu.be/fvgG-pxlobk  

[Accessed 23 Oct. 2016]. 

Zhang, Z., Moore, J., Huisingh, D. and Zhao, Y. 2015. Review of geoengineering approaches 

to mitigating climate change. Journal of Cleaner Production. 103: 898-907.