The Integrated History and future of People on Earth (IHOPE) initiative is a global research network, demonstrating that earth system changes in the past have been strongly associated with changes in the coupled human-environment system. The IPO of IHOPE therefore argues that society and science can learn from the past when modelling unpleasant thresholds and possible sustainable futures. IHOPE supports sharing knowledge and resources from the biophysical and the social sciences and the humanities to address analytical and interpretive issues associated with coupled human-earth system dynamics. IHOPE will create frameworks that can be used to integrate perspectives, theories, tools and knowledge from a variety of disciplines spanning the full spectrum of social and natural sciences and the humanities. The overarching goal is to produce a rich understanding of the relationships between environmental and human processes over the past millennia. IHOPE recognizes that one major challenge is consensus building around a "workable" terminology that can be accepted by scholars of all disciplines. The initiative’s objective is to identify slow and rapidly moving features of complex social-ecological systems, on local to continental spatial scales, which induce resilience, stress or collapse.

Image: Creative Commons Flickr/Arian Zwegers