Understanding global environmental and health risks in the 21st century

Our inability to deal with global environmental change comes in part from the habit of thinking in small specialised boxes. This article calls therefore for more problem- (not discipline-) driven thinking, institutionalised in problem-driven structures, and for describing phenomena at different scales, highlighting their interconnections. Knowledge integration and appropriate levels of description are key conditions for us not to be mere spectators of a environmental “risk” we can indeed address.