How Can Science and Education Help Shape Sustainable Development
1 How Can Science and Education Help Shape Sustainable Development? 1.1
The Anthropocene and the Great Acceleration
Since the Industrial Revolution, humans have become the main shapers of our earth’s ecosystem. The 1950s saw the start of a great acceleration in many socio-economic and earth system trends (Figure 1), prompting calls to coin the current geological era the “Anthropocene”. Human activity frequently results in complex changes that proceed rapidly (temporal aspect) and spread globally (spatial aspect). Changes may have negative and/or positive effects that vary over time and create both winners and losers. The globalized economy is a major driver of problematic or unsustainable development with detrimental effects, such as global warming, pollution, environmental pollution, biodiversity loss, food waste, armed conflicts, and flows of refugees.
Figure 1: Selected socio-economic and earth system trends since 1750 (Industrial Revolution), with a great acceleration since the 1950s (Source: Steffen et al. 2015)
The risks of globalization were impressively laid bare by the COVID-19 pandemic, which, within a very short time, significantly disrupted all aspects of life as we knew it.
In the Anthropocene, humans became the most significant impact factor on the earth’s ecosystem. Since the 1950s, the Anthropocene is characterized by a great acceleration of both global ecological and socio-economic trends. Our ability to do seems to have outstripped our ability to understand what we are doing!
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