20. IHOPE – Can we foresee the future of humanity? A conversation on the uses and abuses of deep and recent pasts Chair: Sverker Sörlin, Royal Institute of Technology, and Stockholm Resilience Centre, Sweden. Robert Costanza, Gund Institute for Ecological Economics, University of Vermont, USA Panel members: Carole Crumley, Anthropology, University of North Carolina, USA Will Steffen, Fenner School of Environment and Society, Australian National University, Australia Sander van der Leeuw, Human Evolution & Social Change, Arizona State University, USA Verena Winiwarter, Social Ecology, Klagenfurt University, Vienna, Austria Commentator: Paul Warde, University of East Anglia, UK Description: Human history and earth system history have traditionally been developed independently, with little interaction among the academic communities. Therefore, separate methods of describing these histories have been developed, and there have been few attempts to integrate these histories and information across these fields of study. Recent recognition that current earth system changes are strongly associated with the changes in the coupled human-environment system make the integration of human history and earth system history an important step in understanding the factors leading to global change and in developing coping and adaptation strategies for the future. The capability to integrate human history with the natural history of the earth now exists. The goal of the Integrated History and future Of People on Earth (IHOPE) project is to understand the interactions of the environmental and human process across temporal scales to determine how human and biophysical changes have contributed to Earth system dynamics and what this implies for the future of humanity. Some of this work is guided by modeling that has been developed by the earth system sciences. Human history typically operates on much shorter time scales and must be explained using intentionalities and contingencies that challenge the logic of models and make predictions and scenarios difficult, in particular over longer time scales. In this panel we will probe earnestly the potentials and pitfalls of the attempts to combine formal and modeling based approaches with methodologies and empirical approaches from archaeology, anthropology and history, including its many sub specialties such as environmental history, economic history and the history of science. Is it a viable ambition to “produce an integrated history of the climate, atmospheric chemistry and composition, material and water cycles, ecosystem distribution, species extinctions, land use systems, human settlement patterns, technological changes, patterns of disease, patterns of language and institutions, wars and alliances, and other variables on earth from many new and existing data sources in a spatially and temporally consistent framework” (from the IHOPE research plan 2007) and how should such an enterprise be organized?