The world is facing overwhelming challenges with implications on the socio-economic performance and the quality of life around the planet. New solutions are needed to prevent, overcome or mitigate the turmoil processes caused by global change, resources exhaustion, and the procession of induced socio-economic impacts.
Future challenges for global sustainability address the impact of human
actions on environmental changes and ask how these changes affect human
well-being. The problem is closely connected to a transition of the
socio-ecological system. In this session we ask for contributions that
describe, characterize, or model transitions of the complex system
consisting of social, economic, or ecologic components. Special attention
can be devoted to the interactions of the socio-economic system and the
variables that help to understand the relevant transition processes. Of
particular interest are the contributions of geosciences to understand
these complex transitions. What transitions occur in view of climate change
/ global change and how can they be modeled? How do energy, land use and
water supply interact during transitions? Further questions address the
relevant variables and indicators to understand transition processes, the
limits of a save transition, as well as the connection to phenomena such as
changing consumption patterns and the results for out ecosystems.

Jan Rotmans will give a keynote. He
is the scientific director of DRIFT and is one of the founding fathers of
Integrated Assessment and an expert in the field of integrated modelling,
scenario-analysis, indicator-development and uncertainty-analysis and –
management. He created the IMAGE and TARGETS Integrated Assessment Models.