Starting Monday, around 3,000 scientists, politicians, businesspeople and NGO representatives from 95 countries will converge on London for a four-day conference entitled Planet Under Pressure. Their aim: to find solutions to the problems posed by a growing global population and rising consumption of the Earth's limited natural resources.

2012 is the year of Rio+20, the anniversary of the landmark UN sustainability conference that led to the Agenda 21 development guidelines and paved the way for the United Nations Climate Convention and the Convention on Biodiversity. In June, the world's attention will again be focused on the UN conference in Rio, which many hope could be a turning point in the struggle to reach a sustainable and equitable balance in supporting the world's growing population.

Just another conference?

In the months leading up to the Rio conference, there has been no shortage of conferences and events around the world devoted to the topics of sustainability, climate change, energy, water, or food security. So is there a danger of overkill or conference fatigue, which could be counterproductive?

Planet Under Pressure co-chair Mark Stafford Smith, of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), the Australian national science agency, doesn't think so.

In a DW interview, the climate expert said even if the Rio+20 conference doesn't get as far as many would like, "it remains the ideal forum for sustainability issues to be really tackled in a policy sense." For that reason, he sees the months leading up to Rio as an ideal time for a large-scale conference to come up with solutions.

Search for answers

"Knowledge towards Solutions" is the theme of the London conference, which is being hosted by the Royal Society and organized jointly by Diversitas, the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme, the World Climate Research Programme, the UN International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change (IHDP) and the Earth System Science Partnership.

The conference has the ambitious goal of tackling not one particular aspect, but the whole global change agenda. The aim is to "review the science advances of the last 10 years and set the agenda for the next 10 years on global change" said Stafford Smith, science director of CSIRO's Climate Adaptation Flagship.

Climate change is just one of the major challenges facing the world's population, which topped 7 billion last year. Overexploitation of natural resources, pollution and the acidification of the ocean are some of the other issues on next week's agenda.

Human impact

"Human beings are now a force on this planet of the same magnitude as geological forces in the past," said Stafford Smith. The conference, he says, will focus on the scientific understanding of how different parts of the Earth system, the atmosphere, land and ocean systems work together and affect each other, and how human management can take all of these into account.

"Looking after people's economic well-being has to be traded off against the potential impact on resource use and the environment," he added.

There is a growing recognition of the need for networked thinking, a holistic approach to the challenge of providing a sustainable future for the Earth's growing population. Water, food, energy, and climate are all interconnected and cannot be viewed in isolation.

Connecting the dots

"If you try and resolve one of these problems thinking only about that problem, then you tend to create problems in other areas, which is something we've done a lot of over the last couple of decades,” said Stafford Smith. He gives the example of growing crops for bio-fuels to reduce CO2 emissions, which then means that land is no longer available for food crops.

Encouraging people to "join the dots" between the different aspects of sustainability is one of the key ideas behind the London conference.

"The thing I hope will set our conference aside is trying to think about these issues of integration and inter-connectedness at the global scale and how those might affect the sort of decisions that are taken at Rio," said Stafford Smith. Global sustainability goals or a new UN global sustainability are amongst the ideas up for discussion.

Author: Irene Quaile
Editor: Martin Kuebler