Rendering global change problematic: the constitutive effects of Earth System research in the IGBP and the IHDP

Abstract

Efforts to predict the future habitability of Earth are examined in three interrelated IGBP and IHDP projects: Global Change and Terrestrial Ecosystems (GCTE), Land Use and Land Cover Change (LUCC), and the Global Land Project (GLP). Drawing upon project documentation and research plans from 1986 to 2012, and 10 interviews with researchers involved in project design and implementation, we trace how these projects have represented the problem of global change in the modelling of ecosystem and land-use dynamics. The imagining of global change was recalibrated as project participants brought more aspects of natural and human life into their computations. A top-down gaze informed by atmospheric physics and predictable cause–effect relationships gave way to a more complex Anthropocene imaginary dominated by non-linearity and less predictable thresholds and pathways. Given intrinsic links between ways of representing and knowing a phenomenon and ways of acting upon it so as to transform it, qualitative change in how the Earth System is ‘rendered problematic’ may imply changes for the practices of environmental science and governance.