The Anthropocene Review

Human activities over the past 200 years have fundamentally transformed the shape of Australia’s southern Murray–Darling Basin. The arrival of British colonists in the 19th century disrupted millennia of human management of the region and brought widespread changes to biota and soils. The subsequent development of mining, transport and irrigation infrastructure re-engineered the region’s landscapes to meet human objectives and ambitions. This article offers an integrated regional history of anthropogenic change across the southern Murray–Darling Basin, identifying historical processes driving complex ongoing interactions between human activities and the natural environment. We examine three broad domains of engineering and geo-disturbance in the region, including the development of transport corridors, micro- and macro-scale water management and landforms remade by erosion and sedimentation. We use the archaeology of the recent past to integrate insights drawn from physical geography, fluvial geomorphology and related research into the enduring landscape changes of modern Australia’s food bowl.

In a 2014 issue of Nature, members of our research group called for abandoning the gross domestic product as the key indicator in economic policymaking. In this new article, we argue that a new post–gross domestic product economy focusing on wellbeing rather than material output is already emerging in the Anthropocene, thanks to the convergence of policy reforms and economic shifts. At the policy level, the Sustainable Development Goals require policymakers to protect ecosystems, promote greater equality, and focus on long-term equitable development. At the economy level, the provision of services has outpaced industrial production as the key driver of prosperity, with innovative business models optimizing the match between supply and demand and giving rise to a burgeoning “sharing economy”, which produces value to people while reducing output and costs. The economic transformation already underway is, however, delayed by an obsolete system of measurement of economic performance still dominated by the gross domestic product–based national accounts, which rewards the incumbent and disincentives the new. We show that a different approach to measuring wellbeing and prosperity is the “missing link” we need to connect recent evolutions in policy and the economy with a view to activating a sustainable development paradigm for a good Anthropocene.

Evidence that human societies built on agricultural subsistence have been inherently ecologically unsustainable highlights the value in exploring whether any pre-agricultural subsistence approaches were ecologically sustainable or nearly so. The land management practices of some hunter-gatherer societies have been portrayed as sustainable, even beneficial. Research suggests such practices may fruitfully inform contemporary land management. As a human subsistence foundation, however, they may not have been ecologically sustainable. Figuring centrally in the late Pleistocene shift from immediate-return to delayed-return hunting and gathering, they enabled population growth, helped make possible the development of agriculture, and appear to have caused early environmental degradation. Consistent with this argument is research locating the origins of the Anthropocene near the Pleistocene–Holocene boundary, as societies were taking greater control of food production. It appears then that immediate-return hunting and gathering, which involved little or no land management, was the human lifeway most closely approaching ecological sustainability. Wider recognition of this idea would assist in understanding and addressing today’s ecological challenges.

In recent years, research in climate science has increasingly emphasized the need to reduce fossil fuel supply in order to avoid an overshoot of the global carbon budget and to meet the Paris Agreement target to keep global warming ‘well below 2°C’. This article aims to outline a balanced appreciation of the particular responsibility held by transnational oil and gas companies in the global challenge to organize an equitably managed decline in fossil fuel extraction. It does so by focusing on a case study. The latter consists of the stylized reconstruction of the internal social dynamics that shape the power structure of the French firm Total and of questioning its ability to make investment decisions aligned with the imperative to preserve the stability of the climate system, as its public position makes clear. The persistence of short-termed compensation schemes in the higher corporate hierarchy impedes the elaboration and implementation of deep decarbonization strategies at the firm level. These would imply a significant upscaling of investments in renewable energy and/or carbon-capture storage technologies, in order to avoid the foreseeable destruction of corporate jobs linked to oil and gas extraction in an increasingly carbon-constrained world.

This article reviews how corporate social responsibility, in particular its environmental practices, is being mobilised in practice by companies. We discuss that the current engagement with the Anthropocene is more a marketing argument supporting a capitalist discourse, rather than an ethical approach towards business. Thus, we call for a more sustainable approach in corporate social responsibility, not as a communication tool, but as a genuine response to Anthropocene conditions and shared stewardship, rather than a marketisation of corporate social responsibility. We suggest the establishment of an international corporate social responsibility certification entity that would advise companies in corporate social responsibility practices in the Anthropocene Earth.

Inadequacies of the current agriculture and food systems are recognised globally in the form of damages to environment and human health. In addition, the prevailing economic and policy systems do not reflect these damages in its accounting systems and standards. These shortcomings lead to perverse and pervasive outcomes for society at large. Our proposal is to consider all social and environmental externalities – both negative and positive, in global agriculture and food systems and reflect them in an economic system by evaluating comprehensive costs and benefits. This can be done by adopting an innovative, universal, and inclusive framework (the ‘TEEBAgriFood’ framework) in order to stimulate appropriate policy responses.

Many of our cities are going digital. From self-driving cars to smart grids to intelligent traffic signals, these smart cities put data and digital technology to work to drive efficiency and improve the quality of life for citizens. Yet, the natural capital upon which cities rely risks being left behind by the digital revolution. Bringing nature online is the next frontier in ecosystem management and will change our relationship with the natural world in the urban age. In this article, we introduce the ‘Internet of Nature’ to bridge the gap between greener and smarter cities and to explore the future of urban ecosystem management in an age of rapid urbanisation and digitisation. The creation of an Internet of Nature, along with the ecosystem intelligence it provides, is an opportunity to elicit and understand urban ecosystem dynamics, promote self-sufficiency and resilience in ecosystem management and enhance connections between urban social and ecological systems.