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List of editors, scientific editorial team and contributing authors Foreword Sir John Lawton Preface Acknowledgements List of notation 1. Earth system science and society: a focus on the Anthroposphere Sarah E. Cornell, Catherine J. Downy, Evan Fraser and Emily Boyd 2. Fundamentals of climate change science I. Colin Prentice, Peter G. Baines, Marko Scholze and Martin J. Wooster 3. How has climate responded to natural perturbations? Eric W. Wolff, Sandy P. Harrison, Reto Knutti, Maria Fernanda Sanchez-Goni, Oliver Wild, Anne-Laure Daniau, Valerie Masson-Delmotte, I. Colin Prentice and Renato Spahni 4. The Earth system feedbacks that matter for contemporary climate Pierre Friedlingstein, Angela V. Gallego-Sala, Eleanor M. Blyth, Fiona E. Hewer, Sonia Seneviratne, Allan Spessa, Parvadha Suntharalingam and Marko Scholze 5. Earth system models: a tool to understand changes in the Earth system Marko Scholze, Icarus Allen, Bill Collins, Sarah E. Cornell, Chris Huntingford, Manoj Joshi, Jason Lowe, Robin Smith and Oliver Wild 6. Climate change impacts and adaptation: an Earth system view Richard A. Betts, Nigel W. Arnell, Penelope Boorman, Sarah E. Cornell, Joanna I. House, Neil Kaye, Doug McNeall, Michael Sanderson and Andrew Wiltshire 7. Mitigating climate risks by managing the biosphere Joanna I. House, Jessica Bellarby, Hannes Boettcher, Matthew Brander, Nicole Kalas, Peter Smith, Richard Tipper and Jeremy Woods 8. How our Earth system science understanding shapes society's options - key findings, implications and a forward look Sarah E. Cornell and I. Colin Prentice List of acronyms Glossary Index.

Many contemporary societal challenges manifest themselves in the domain of humanenvironment interactions. There is a growing recognition that responses to these challenges formulated within current disciplinary boundaries, in isolation from their wider contexts, cannot adequately address them. Here, we outline the need for an integrated, trans-disciplinary synthesis that allows for a holistic approach, and, above all, a much longer time perspective. We outline both the need for, and the fundamental characteristics of, what we call “integrated history.” This approach promises to yield new understandings of the relationship between the past, present and possible futures of our integrated human-environment system. We recommend a unique new focus of our historical efforts on the future, rather than the past, concentrated on learning about future possibilities from history. A growing worldwide community of trans-disciplinary scholars is forming around building this Integrated History and future of People on Earth (IHOPE). Building integrated models of past human societies and their interactions with their environments yields new insights into those interactions and can help to create a more sustainable and desirable future. The activity has become a major focus within the global change community.

More than 200 people avoided the persistent ash cloud from Eyjafjallajokull volcano and met in the United Kingdom for Earth System Science 2010 (see http://earthsystemscience2010.org for more on the proceedings). This was the first Open Science Conference of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme's Analysis, Integration and Modeling of the Earth System (AIMES) project. It was convened by Quantifying and Understanding the Earth System (QUEST), a U.K. Natural Environment Research Council—funded research program with close strategic links with the international activities of AIMES. This connection meant that QUEST's established Anglophone and European research community was greatly expanded, with conference contributors from Brazil, Japan, India, and China.