Project Prof. Dr. Urlich Platt
“Global Change and Globalisation. Inter-Dependencies, Adaptation, Risik, Avoiding Dangers“
Global change and globalisiation are the central challenges of our age. Both processes are closely interconnected. On the one hand economic and social globalisation provides the potential of economic growth potential unprecedented in history., in particular by integration of the populous Asiatic countries in the global goods- and financial markets. the realisation of these potentials for growth and the associated spatial redistribution of production and consummation opens new chances. On the other hand the expansion of global production initiated by globalisation and its spatial distribution are central causes for novel burdens on the global environment. Processes of global change, e.g climate change, loss of biodiversity and consumption of resources are and will increasingly be influenced by human activities. Global deterioration of the quality of the environment feed back to societal and economic processes, as becomes evident from geopolitical conflicts over increasingly scarce resources. At the same time globalisation processes provide new opportunities for global coordination of political decisions in individual countries and thus the prerequisites to counter global change in an effective way. Thus the interdependences of processes of global change and globalisation are multi-layered and complex.
Both, purely natural science and purely social science approaches to analyse this actual and ongoing developments quickly reach their limitations. Modern global- change research and studies on globalisation therefore require close collaboration and integration. Central questions of an integrated approach are the inter-dependencies between anthropogeneous decisions/interactions with global consequences and natural systems, study of adaptation- and mitigation strategies of societal and natural systems, their resilience and reactions in conjunction with the identification and avoidance of risk and dangers for humans and society within the “System Earth“.
As an example for the central topics of an integrated globalisation- and global change-research within the framework of my project we concentrate on the actual and imminent climatic change. Climate change has direct consequences for many aspects of the topic, like water ressources or biodiversity. However, global change also takes place independent of climatic change, as a direct consequence of the global growth in population and economy influencing e.g. the availability of ressources (water, arable land, fossil fuel, etc.) or the decline of biodiversity.
