IHDP’s experts work on any of IHDP’s three distinct elements: (1) core projects – including several projects sponsored jointly with IGBP - organized around substantive themes such as human security or urbanization, (2) collaborative projects initiated as part of the Earth System Science Partnership (ESSP) and, (3) crosscutting themes dealing with issues that are relevant to a number of projects and are of particular interest to members of the IHDP Scientific Committee.

These programmatic activities have evolved, for the most part, independently. The core projects have developed along lines similar to IGBP and World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) projects. In its early years, IHDP invested the bulk of its resources in efforts to get cutting-edge core projects up and running.

By 2000, four projects were in operation (LUCC, IDGEC, IT, and GECHS). Since then, the Programme has initiated one new core project of its own, Urbanization and Global Environmental Change (UGEC), and two new projects sponsored jointly with IGBP, the Global Land Project (GLP) and the new Land/Ocean Interactions in the Coastal Zone Project (LOICZ).

Equally important is the fact that several of IHDP’s original core projects have completed their lifecycles and gone through successful synthesis processes. LUCC has formally completed its research program and has produced a synthesis volume. Th LUCC legacy continues, however, and a number of the LUCC research themes are being carried forward under the auspices of the GLP. IDGEC has held a major synthesis conference, which will lead to the publication of a synthesis volume in the near future. The central concerns of IDGEC are topics of continuing interest within the human dimensions community and will be continued in the form of crosscutting concerns.

The ESSP projects (the Global Carbon Project (GCP), the Global Environmental Change and Food Systems Project (GECAFS), the Global Water System Project (GWSP), and the Global Environmental Change and Human Health Project (GECHH)) emerged from a conviction articulated clearly in the 2001 Amsterdam Declaration and reaffirmed in Beijing in 2006 that coming to terms with the challenges of life in the Anthropocene will require a major increase in the time and energy devoted to the analysis of complex and dynamic socio-ecological systems. There is no doubt that this conviction is well-founded, and efforts to drive these projects forward under the auspices of ESSP have begun to bear fruit.