Earth System Science—Past Experiences and Future Trends - Towards an Interdisciplinary Approach in Earth System Science - page 4

2 Review

The last 15 years have seen a signi cant increase in awareness of global climate

change and sustainability issues. Slowly but steadily scientists, engineers, econo-
mists, politicians are all beginning to accept that there is a problem which tran-
scends political boundaries. The 2001 Amsterdam Global Change Conference
(Canadell and Noble 2001 ) highlighted this acceptance and put forward a plea to
governments, public-private institutions and people of the world to agree on ethical
framework for global stewardship and strategies for Earth system management, and
importantly for the development of a new international system for global envi-
ronmental science that draws from existing expertise, integrates natural and social
sciences, and creates bridges between environmental and developmental issues.
These sentiments have been reiterated over the years by the IGBP program
(William et al. 2010 ), various IPCC reports 3

and countless global forums and

scienti c conferences such as the ESS 2010 (Downy and Cornell 2011 ) or Bonn

Climate Change Conference 2014. 4
What has changed signi cantly in the last decade (Ignaciuk et al. 2012 ) is the

advancement in terms of sensors and observational systems, especially satellite
remote sensing-based. Enhanced tools to store and digest this data coupled by
signi

cant advances in computation have led to the development of more sophis-
ticated models which can describe biophysical processes in greater details. This in
turn provides a better handle on model uncertainties and predictions for future Earth
scenarios. In addition, the plea to setup educational programs that focus more on the
integrative aspects has not fallen on deaf ears. Earth and Environmental Sciences or
Earth System Sciences are currently the most important keywords used in most bio-
geoscience undergraduate and graduate programs. 5 Neither is ESS a concept of the
western world (Walker 1999 ), it has established itself as an important educational
concept which is accepted globally (Dong et al. 2009 ).
The ESSReS PhD program (Grosfeld et al. 2013 ; Meggers et al. 2014 ) was
designed to address this aspect of collaborative science across the bio, geo-physics to
computing sciences. In its second term, ESSReS brought together 23 outstanding
PhD students from 12 countries to conduct their research in various disciplines,
ranging from climate sciences, bio-geosciences, geo-information sciences to com-
puter modelling and remote sensing of the atmosphere (Meggers et al. this volume).
From these numbers it is clear that the program has been successful in its primary
aim of educating the next batch of academics. The ESSReS program also highlighted
aspects that could be improved. For example, it is not suf

cient to broaden the
horizon for the students. Faculty, and especially supervising faculty need to

3

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. http://www.ipcc.ch/ .
4 Bonn climate change conference

IPCC —

— June (2014). http://unfccc.int/meetings/bonn_jun_2014/

meeting/8031.php .
5 Earth System Science Courses. http://serc.carleton.edu/introgeo/earthsystem/nutshell/courses.
html .