Abstract:

Recently, climate change has become a topic of interest in the scientific community, governmental departments, and civil society. This paper begins with a description of the breakthrough technologies that have transformed nature followed by a systematic introduction of the increasing impact of human activities on nature. Since the Industrial Revolution, industrialization-driven urbanization has emerged as the dominant factor in climate change, considerably changing nature and human society. Due to the accelerating agglomeration effect of urbanization, the earth’s complex socio-ecological system is already in a crisis. We contend that climate change and urbanization, on the one hand, yield a series of negative impacts on the earth system, earth’s resources, ecology, environment, urban development, public health, and social resilience, and on the other hand, place new demands on earth science as a discipline as we enter the new geological era of the Anthropocene, which requires the development and redefinition of earth science. Consequently, earth science research will shift from being stratum based to being sphere based. Its objects and fields will expand from those of the pure earth system to those of the human-earth complex system. Correspondingly, the research focus will shift from the extraction of earth’s resources to the general habitability of the planet and the Anthropocene era, anthroposphere geography, cryosphere science, hydrosphere-anthroposphere interface, earth system dynamics, urbanization and urban geography, geoethics and semiotics, and EarthMAP (earth monitoring, analysis, and prediction) integration. Geography, as the “mother” of all natural and social sciences, will face new opportunities of development and prosperity, while human geography in particular will play a more important disciplinary role.

Key words: climate change, urbanization, accelerating change, Anthropocene, earth science, geography, human geography