An alliance of international partners from global science, research funding and UN bodies, announced a new 10-year initiative on global environmental change for sustainability at the Planet under Pressure conference on Tuesday. Future Earth – research for global sustainability, operational in 2013, will provide a cutting-edge platform to coordinate scientific research that can respond to the most critical social and environmental challenges of the 21st century at global and regional levels.

The International Council for Science (ICSU), the International Social Science Council (ISSC), the Belmont Forum, a high level group of major funders of global environmental change research, together with UNEP, the United Nations University (UNU) and UNESCO, and with the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) as observer, are jointly establishing this new 10-year initiative.
“Future Earth platform will link global environmental change and fundamental human development questions”, said Prof. Diana Liverman, co-Director of the Institute of the Environment at the University of Arizona and co- Chair of the team that is designing Future Earth. “Global environmental change affects our ability to access food, water, energy, increases our vulnerability to hazardous events, and erodes our ability to eradicate poverty. Only by actively engaging natural sciences, social sciences and humanities and working with the full range of users and producers of knowledge, can we provide a full understanding of global change and its impact on societies and ecosystems.”
Future Earth will embody an interdisciplinary approach to provide early warning signals of environmental risk and change, and stimulate new research to support the transition of society towards sustainability. Its official launch will be in June 2012, at the United Nations “Rio+20” conference.
“We are very proud of the enormous scientific achievements of the ICSU-sponsored Global Environmental Change Programmes over the last decades”, said Prof. Yuan T Lee, winner of the 1986 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and ICSU President. Lee stressed that “unifying the different efforts through this new broad partnership will provide the step-change needed in international research coordination to face the challenges posed by global environmental change”.

Source: Eurekaalert!
For more information on Future Earth, see the official International Council for Science (ICSU) website