Earth System Governance: Science and Implementation Plan of the Earth System Governance Project

This Science and Implementation Plan sets out the agenda for the next decade of earth system governance research. In this section, we present a new vision developed by the research community and describe the background and process of developing the plan. We explain the structure of the plan, and provide an overview of environmental, economic, social and political trends that define the context of the next generation of earth system governance research. To facilitate high-quality and novel earth system governance research, we need to regularly rethink the relevance and urgency of our research endeavour in light of a changing world and changing earth system. This plan builds on successful elements of the previous plan but adds new research lenses and approaches that have come to the fore and will be important to earth system governance in the coming decade. While the timeframe of this plan is the next ten years, we expect that there will be active engagement and discussion when taking it forward, to ensure high relevance to governance challenges and new scientific findings. The implementation of this plan will be aided by shorter-term action plans developed by the Scientific Steering Committee.