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BES ANNUAL MEETING
3 - 7 SEPTEMBER 2008
IMPERIAL COLLEGE LONDON, UK

BES LECTURE

Wednesday 3 September

The BES is honoured that Thomas Rosswall has agreed to present the BES Lecture this year. 

Thomas Rosswall is the Executive Director of the International Council for Science.  He has been instrumental in the development of microbial ecology, both nationally and internationally.  His leadership in three major ecosystem projects has been important not only for ecosystem sciences in Sweden, but also for the development of international networks, which have fostered intensive collaboration between scientists in many countries. His work on carbon and nitrogen cycling has ranged from microcosm studies to the globe and has linked deep process understanding to modelling efforts of entire systems at all scales.

Formerly he has been Director of the International Foundation for Science (IFS), Rector (President) of the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Director of the International START Secretariat, Executive Director of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP) and Professor of Water in Nature and Society at the Universities of Stockholm and Linköping, Sweden.  He has also served on numerous international and national committees and boards.  He is an elected member of six learned societies including the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Academia Europaea and the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World.

Title: Science and Society – the Role of Ecology

Ecosystem ecology has developed dramatically since the International Biological Programme (IBP, 1964-1974).  Societal demands on science have also changed over the past decades.  The Nobel Prize to IPCC gave the necessary visibility to the importance of science for political decision making.
IBP provided the basis for ecosystem science through, for ecologists, unprecedented international collaboration.  Some ten years later, the global change research programmes moved the scientific frontiers by investigating the role of ecosystems in regulating Planet Earth.  This necessitated new levels of multidisciplinarity, bringing together the physical, chemical, biological and geological sciences to decrease the scientific uncertainties in relation to global change phenomena as a basis for political action.
In the 21st Century we are entering the Athropocene.  We know that humans are significantly altering the global system.  Thus, human dimensions research is essential.  Efforts to understand Planet Earth now fully includes relevant social sciences. 
But we need to link the global to the local.  The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment focus on ecosystem services for human well-being provides a new challenge for ecology.  A new international programme should provide the necessary ecological understanding for governments to implement the UN Millennium Development Goals and address the future of societies based on best available ecological scientific understanding.

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