[L-03] New perspectives of Human Geosciences

[L03-03] Environmental change and social-ecological system

★Invited Papers

*Hiroya Yamano^1,2 (1.The University of Tokyo, 2.National Institute for Environmental Studies)

Keywords:environmental change, climate change, biosphere, human sphere

The present era has been called the Sixth Age of Mass Extinctions. Over the past 600 million years, life on Earth has experienced five mass extinctions, but the mass extinctions believed to be occurring today are not caused by natural occurrences, but by us humans. As the human sphere has expanded from the Holocene to the present, humans have destroyed habitats, overhunted organisms, caused environmental pollution, introduced invasive alien species, and caused climate change, all of which cause biodiversity loss. And when we affect the biosphere, the effects come back to us in the form of degraded ecosystem services. In other words, the human sphere and the biosphere form a social-ecological system that interacts with each other. The foundation of this social-ecological system is the global environment, and as humans have come to influence the global environment, as represented by global warming, the social-ecological system is also undergoing change.

This talk will introduce the social-ecological system formed by the human sphere and the biosphere, and discuss about the relationship between environmental change and the social-ecological system, using the recent changes in the distribution of organisms due to climate change and society's response as an example. In order to consider regional and global sustainability in an era of environmental change, it is essential to understand the systems formed by the global environment, biosphere, and human sphere, and this is an important issue that the human geosciences should address in cooperation with other sections of JpGU.