Bert de Vries (Planbureau voor de Leefomgeving and Professor of Global Change and Energy at the Copernicus Institute for Sustainable Development and Innovation of Utrecht University)

Humanity is facing a transition to a more sustainable state. To avoid major catastrophic overhoots, resource systems will have to be managed more sustainably than in the past. This will demand technological innovations but also changes in values, mental maps and institutions, in particular with respect to managing resources with a public good character (such as the earth’s climate). This is the more urgent with the large and still growing interconnectedness in the world.

Science should offer novel, integrated ways to deal with the sustainable management in social-ecological systems (SES) (or human-environment systems). Institutions and knowledge are still organized in relative isolation; this has to change. In my presentation I will offer a few schemes which can be helpful in such a conceptualization. 

A subquestion is how existing and novel IC-technologies can contribute to improve the communication between scientists and stakeholders. There is a rapid increase in simulation and visualization tools which permit linkages of field surveys, simulation-gaming experiments and scientific hypotheses. I will give some reflections of how such tools can assist in improving the interface between scientific insights and uncertainties on the one hand and the policy makers and public on the other, using the energy-climate issue.