Creating State of the Art Research Coordination and Communication in the Future Earth Secretariat

Future Earth is a global network of scientists and researchers aimed at making our world a more sustainable one. We leverage the expertise of our 20 global research projects and thousands of scientists to help make research relevant for the most pressing issues of our time. For example, we inform the UN of the latest science on climate change to help them make informed decisions about reducing carbon emissions. We judge ourselves by not just the quality of our science, but its impact and its ability to help generate solutions - whether cleaning the oceans, protecting the rainforests or reducing pollution in cities. We also draw together scientists, businesses, technology experts and police makers to brainstorm ideas and solutions together. Through this 'co-design', science helps generate practical solutions to make this planet more sustainable. This science is then communicated to the outside world through social media campaigns, high quality journalism and cutting-edge communications, like virtual reality visuals.

Future Earth has leveraged its 20 global research projects to have a global impact, most importantly on high level policy fora. E.g., our 10 Science Must-Knows synthesised the latest science on climate change for the 2017 UNFCCC conference. In the crucial Paris climate talks of 2015, Future Earths major press conference to critique the draft text helped lead to a more ambitious target for the Paris agreement. We produced scientific input to help frame new UN urban agenda at the 2016 UN Habitat conference and worked with city leaders and partners to co-convene the IPCC cities conference in 2018. In the business world, we held workshops with major financial institutions aimed at making them aware of tipping points in the Earth system. We published an exponential roadmap on decarbonisation driven by the tech sector, launched at the UN Climate Action Summit of 2018. Media outreach has been crucial. Our 2017 work on the annual CO2 emissions saw 3,700 media hits, including NYT and BBC.

The transition to sustainable development has begun around the world and must accelerate. This emerging and dynamic shift places global environmental change (GEC) research at the top of agendas and dramatically augments demands on the growing community of GEC researchers and sustainable development practitioners that Future Earth, and especially the new Future Earth Secretariat, plan to meet. The research community needs support to respond to a global society in transition eager to understand environmental change and its consequences. Knowledge from many disciplines must be synthesized and communicated while researchers continue to explore areas that remain less understood and which are not yet receiving attention from policy makers and decision makers in business and civil society. The newly established permanent secretariat of Future Earth is rapidly establishing itself as a leader in global environmental change (GEC) science coordination, communication, and engagement. While working actively to bring in the core projects of the prior GEC Programmes, Future Earth is developing Knowledge-Action Networks that will define a new approach to collaboration and engagement in society for global sustainability researchers. At the same time, the secretariat is developing an ambitious an exciting new approach to communication that takes advantage of advances in the digitalization and visualization of data, new media techniques and cutting edge dialogue and communication to create a new model of interaction with stakeholders, policy makers, and the general public. These activities are described further in the following sections.