“Welcome to the Anthropocene” film released

“The Anthropocene changes our relationship with the planet. We have a new responsibility and we need to determine how to meet that responsibility.” Conference Chief Scientific Advisor, Nobel Laureate Professor Elinor Ostrom, Indiana University.

Welcome to the Anthropocene, commissioned by the London Planet Under Pressure conference*, provides a data visualization of the state of the planet. It opens at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. As the camera swoops over Earth, viewers watch the planetary impact of humanity: cities, roads, railways, pipelines, cables and shipping lanes until finally the world’s planes spin a fine web around the planet. The film is produced as part of the world’s first educational portal on the Anthropocene.

Conference Chief Scientific Advisor, Nobel Laureate Professor Elinor Ostrom from Indiana University said: “The Anthropocene changes our relationship with the planet. We have a new responsibility for the planet and we need to determine how to meet that responsibility. At their core Planet Under Pressure and Rio+20 are a recognition of this.”

The film was co-directed** by Canadian data visualization expert and anthropologist Felix Pharand-Deschenes from the education organization GLOBAIA.

Pharand-Deschenes said: “Data visualization is a powerful tool to help us view the world and our place in it and to help foster the global awareness needed to support global sustainability and governance. Science can make use of these tools to help bring research to more people.”

Dr Stafford Smith said: “The film picks up the main theme of the Planet Under Pressure conference: the risks we face are global, urgent and interconnected. Our search for solutions must take this into account.”

The conference, which opens on Monday 26 March in London, will present new scientific findings on urbanization, food, energy water, climate, biodiversity, poverty alleviation providing the equality in opportunities for improving well-being, ice sheet stability and ocean acidification.

Also on the eve of the conference (Sunday 25), UK chief scientific advisor to Defra (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) and Blue Planet Laureate, Professor Sir Bob Watson will speak to arriving delegates. His talk will be based on the recent report from Blue Planet Laureates. He is expected to highlight the urgent need for action. The laureates report notes: “We must act now to limit climate change and loss of biodiversity, and adapt to the inevitable changes that are already pre-ordained. To transition to a more sustainable future will require simultaneously redesigning the economic system, a technological revolution, and, above all, behavioural change.”

“Delay is dangerous and would be a profound mistake. The ratchet effect and technological lock-in increase the risks of dangerous climate change: delay could make stabilization of CO2 concentrations at acceptable levels very difficult,” the report says.

The Planet Under Pressure conference has developed a major outreach campaign with 150 science and technology centres worldwide through the Association of Sci-ence and Technology Centers (ASTC). This will allow scientists to engage with the pub-lic on global challenges humanity is facing.

The new website, Anthropocene.info, will be launched to coincide with the conference and support outreach activities to science and technology centres.

Produced by an international consortium of research centres and programmes**, the Anthropocene website uses data visualizations, Google Earth, and dramatic imagery to take viewers on a journey through the Anthropocene, the proposed geological ep-och in recognition that human impact is visible in the planet’s geology.

The Anthropocene as a new geological epoch was first proposed in 2000 by Dutch Nobel Laureate Professor Paul Crutzen and US academic Professor Eugene Stoermer (1934-2012).

** Co-director Owen Gaffney, director of communications at the International Geo-sphere-Biosphere Programme
***International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme, CSIRO, Stockholm Resilience Cen-tre, Stockholm Environment Institute, International Human Dimensions Programme and GLOBAIA.