The hope is that the biodiversity targets translate directly into what individual countries, cities, companies and even families can adopt as tangible actions.
Though its use has grown in the last decade, the Anthropocene concept has been around since the 19th century.
John Cobb/Shutterstock
The term Anthropocene - previously known only to geologists and academics - has hit the mainstream. Now it’s being tweeted as shorthand for the negative effects humans have had on the planet.
Oil tankers load up in a port at twilight.
Avigator Fortuner/Shutterstock
The Great Acceleration inaugurated the Anthropocene in the 1950s. Now, a similar race for resources and space is happening in the ocean.
NASA ‘could not imagine the radical effect of seeing the Earth’ from the moon. In the face of a climate catastrophe, we all need to step back and see the Earth again.
Bill Anders/NASA/Handout
Historical perspective can offer much in this time of ecological crisis,. Many historians are reinventing their traditional scales of space and time to tell different kinds of stories that recognise the unruly power of nature.
Pictured is a slag pile at Broken Hill in New South Wales. Slag is a man-made waste product created during smelting.
Anita Parbhakar-Fox
Manufacturing minerals is an expanding field of study. Making more of them could help alleviate various pressures faced by our growing population. But how are they made, and where can they be used?
If sci-fi films mirror the world’s contemporary dystopian anxieties, then over the years Star Wars has gone from nuclear war to environmental collapse.
A black marlin in the sea. These apex predators can grow to 800 kilograms.
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A giant ocean fish swims into the heart of industrial Port Kembla looking for food. What if we take its presence, a few km from an ancient, living midden, as a symbol of both new and old ways to learn in the age of the Anthropocene?
People have been modifying Earth – as in these rice terraces near Pokhara, Nepal – for millennia.
Erle C. Ellis
Ben Marwick, University of Washington; Erle C. Ellis, University of Maryland, Baltimore County; Lucas Stephens, Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology e Nicole Boivin, Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology
Hundreds of archaeologists provided on-the-ground data from across the globe, providing a new view of the long and varied history of people transforming Earth’s environment.
Plant extinctions have skyrocketed, driven in large part by land clearing and climate change.
Graphic Node/Unsplash
Geology will be key to any green transition, but its academic reputation needs an urgent makeover.
Whooping cranes, a critically endangered species, breed in one location, a wetland in Wood Buffalo National Park. Yet a federal-provincial review panel has approved an oilsands mine that could kill some of the birds.
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Researchers examined how youth on three continents think about digital technology today and conducted an experiment to learn what youth said after living without their phones for a week.
The complexity of student experiences can be lost in larger groups.
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Grade 4 student Charlene seemed chronically off-task – until an educator noticed she was, in fact, the sole student pursuing the question, ‘Was the oil boom bad for our wildlife?’
An alleged Banksy artwork at the Extinction Rebellion camp site, London.
Andy Rain/EPA-EFE
New research suggests that even ecologically flexible baboons could be at significant risk of habitat loss and endangerment from anthropogenic climate change.
Human self awareness is an evolutionary outcome, but where has it brought us?
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Understanding the evolutionary roots of what draws us to delusions of legacy and distractions of leisure will help us address the environmental challenges of the 21st century.
Allan and Helaine Shiff Curator of Climate Change, Royal Ontario Museum and Assistant Professor, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Toronto