The ongoing anthropogenic global change raises societal issues that require transversal studies involving natural-science and social-science disciplines. Anthropogenic change of the Earth system has local, regional and global consequences, for example, for soils, ground-water or coastal seas. Sub-systems to regulate climate, nutrient-loads or water cycle are impacted too. Phenomena like hypoxic areas in seas and lakes, over-exploitation of georesources or pollution of air, water and land pose challenges, such as how to shape production processes. Technological remedies to mitigate anthropogenic global change pose additional challenges such as the provision of resources, side-effects and governance. Subsequently, contemporary sound geoscience-practice takes societal issues into context.
Causes, effects and remedies to local and global change have an impact on any human community. They pose, on one side, scientific and technological challenges. However, above all, they are economic, societal and cultural challenges about the design of the human niche. Hence, they need to be questioned given the individual perceptions, societal concerns, economic choices, environmental carrying capacity and philosophical conceptions of the world and human histories. That is, even before being a scientific theme of geosciences and Earth System Sciences, anthropogenic global change is a cultural theme to reflect on the choices, individual and collective, for our present, to shape our future.
The requirement to act responsibly urges geoscientists to question the ethical, cultural and societal significance of geoscience research and practice - for individuals, people or humanity. It is urgent giving satisfactory, rational and convincing answers to the concerns of individuals and society, also on delicate topics such as climate changes, deep-sea mining, big data or geoengineering. Geoethics proposes a world view centred on the human agent, guided by a series of values rooted in the knowledge of geosciences, contextualised in space and time, which is derived from the principle of responsibility.
The session invites the authors to submit abstracts that highlight, from a geoscientific perspective, ideas, reflections, suggestions, provocations on the ethical, cultural and societal aspects, also through case studies, related to topics like those sketched above.
This session is co-sponsored by IAPG - International Association for Promoting Geoethics.