The Earth Humanity Coalition

The role of the Decade itself is to create the conditions required for the mentioned transformative change of research, innovation, and development to happen. We identify the following goals for the Decade to be able to fulfil this role:

1. CO-CREATE the Web of Earth-Humanity Sciences, a worldwide network of thousands of transdisciplinary hubs active at the local, national, and global levels to address the existential challenges facing humanity in the 21st century. The web will build on and extend from existing initiatives to promote context-grounded spaces for transformative exchange, integration, resonance, and fruitful collaboration across geographies, cultures, and disciplines, among scientists, and together with all other societal actors. We aspire to recreate, expand, and multiply the spirit of collaboration inherent in Big Science, which has shown its capacity to build very much needed intercultural bridges and scientific infrastructures and thus contribute to mutual understanding and peace in numerous conflicts and challenges worldwide.

2. SUPPORT the emergence of a new culture of wellbeing, grounded on leading edge science and traditional and local wisdom in which relationships, collective responsibility, equity and creativity are central to a healthy humanity and hospitable biosphere. The fundamental unity and interdependence of humanity and life at large imply an emerging redefinition of what human development means. This in turn is made possible by showing that all sciences and arts, as twin expressions of human creativity, show the path to enjoyable lives for all within the boundaries of the planet. This definition is consistent with the vision of the Earth as a living whole that is always emerging out of the manifold of biophysical, human and multispecies relations that make it up.

3. FORMULATE in novel ways the questions critical for the overall goal of equitable wellbeing and habitability on a healthy planet. The originality in the formulation will come from the use of a multiplicity of lenses across all sources of knowledge as well as by prioritizing challenges that massively affect habitability. Three good examples of such questions are “water as a critical common good”, “the design of the spaces we inhabit to make them better attuned to their natural contexts” and “designing societal governance to be just and as a partnership with Earthly processes”.

4. PROMOTE the reframing of the agendas and funding instruments used by public and private actors in the domain of research, innovation, human development and peace, in order for them to reflect and facilitate the novel and integrative role of sciences called by the Decade.

5. CONCEIVE AND PRODUCE a set of credible and practical instruments of orientation to navigate the processes of transformation to sustainable development. This should be done in active collaboration with policymakers, and public and private actors as well as with citizens at large, in order to enable the new role of sciences in and for society.

6. CO-DESIGN AND CO-CONSTRUCT the processes and organizational structures required not only to execute successfully the Decade itself but also to serve as the platform for the fulfilment of the ambition described above. Ultimately, this would create the Web of Earth-Humanity Sciences to attune and care for the Web of Life.