IESD research combines elements from many traditional disciplines to build a better unified understanding of the Human-Earth system.

Earth System Economics.

Natural and social sciences are typically pursued independently of each other, using different tools.  “Earth System Economics” aims to seamlessly integrate the global human system with the other components of the Earth System to provide a holistic understanding.

The Human Chronome Project.

All humans spend 24 hours per day engaged in activities. Those activities determine how we alter the biophysical reality, and play into our subjective experiences. The Human Chronome Project aims to build a comprehensive global dataset of human activities in order to better understand this critical aspect of the global human system.

Predictability of Subjective Wellbeing.

One way to find out how someone’s life is going is simply to ask them – the answer provides a metric that is known as ‘subjective well-being’. Many people would agree that sustainability solutions should also ensure high subjective well-being. By using co-ordinated global survey data we seek to provide fundamental insight on what matters most to humans, across the planet.

Surface Earth System Analysis and Modeling Environment (SESAME).

Data on human and non-human systems are typically archived in very different ways, in different places. The SESAME project aims to bring key human-Earth datasets into the same, spatially-gridded format to accelerate discovery and aid modeling efforts.

Life Across Scales.

Sustainability requires achieving balance between the biosphere and the human system. But the diversity of life on Earth can be overwhelming, and makes predictive modeling difficult. Using large datasets, we are studying general processes of growth, energetics, and abundance within living systems to better grasp underlying functions and link them to human disturbances.