The Earth League

The Earth League, a voluntary alliance between leading scientists and institutions working on planetary processes and sustainability issues, was established to address the current challenges and opportunities related to the future of our planet. The name “The Earth League” highlights the two core ideas of the alliance:

  • Emphasizes that we consider the Earth itself as a research topic
  • Stresses the importance of uniting world-class scientists and academic institutions
Split image showing a farmer using a smartphone in a green field beside a burned, deforested landscape with fallen trees.
Composite image showing a young woman using a tablet while examining crops in a green field beside a cleared forest area with tree stumps.

The need for The Earth League

The world urgently needs interdisciplinary, transnational scientific and evidence-based voices. However, those capacities and voices do not exist at the scale required to address our biggest challenges.

The Earth League was established to fill the critical gap left behind by the existing institutional landscape. It aims to bring together leading global thinkers to tackle problems of fundamental and immediate concern, and to respond at time scales aligned with the urgency of both existing and emerging challenges.

The role of science

Science must play a central role in addressing today’s global challenges.

Modern civilization is built on scientific thinking. The best possible science should be employed to identify pathways and means for improving human conditions. Truly transformational strategies are necessary to overcome the climate crisis and global demographic change.

Science is one of the few global languages we share. Knowledge generation is rooted in community-wide best practices, which reflect the universalities of reality as epitomized by the laws of physics or genomics. Thus, scientists, wherever they work, have “the truth” as a common reference point.

This unique calibration can transcend national interests, which continue to dominate multilateralism in a world composed of some 200 sovereign states. The knowledge enterprise has both the capacity and responsibility to find and propose global solutions for global problems; yet, this will require new forms of self-organization and novel concepts for the dialogue between science and society.