Why 'Future Earth' needs lake sediment studies

Abstract

The new 'Future Earth' Framework and International Council of Science (ICSU) Grand Challenges highlight the need to combine environmental and complexity sciences. An improved understanding of trajectories, interactions, fast and slow processes, alternate steady states and thresholds in key natural and social phenomena are vital to the design of sustainable management strategies. Lake sediment records can provide highly resolved time-series of data that give essential long term perspectives for complex socio-ecological systems, especially at regional scales. This means that these records have important roles in addressing the 'Future Earth' agenda, especially for 'Forecasting', 'Observing' and 'Confining' environmental change within the proposed interdisciplinary themes of Dynamic Planet and Global Development.