Environment:

Looming Global-Scale Failures and Missing Institutions

Energy, food, and water crises; climate disruption; declining fisheries; increasing ocean acidification; emerging diseases; and increasing antibiotic resistance are examples of serious, intertwined global-scale challenges spawned by the accelerating scale of human activity. They are outpacing the development of institutions to deal with them and their many interactive effects. The core of the problem is inducing cooperation in situations where individuals and nations will collectively gain if all cooperate, but each faces the temptation to take a free ride on the cooperation of others. The nation-state achieves cooperation by the exercise of sovereign power within its boundaries. The difficulty to date is that transnational institutions provide, at best, only partial solutions, and implementation of even these solutions can be undermined by internation competition and recalcitrance.

¹ The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) Sustainable Ecosystems, Canberra, ACT 2601, Australia.
² Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, SE-106 91 Stockholm, Sweden.
³ Earth Institute and School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027, USA.
⁴ Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics, Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, SE-104 05 Stockholm, Sweden.
⁵ Department of Applied Economics, University of Minnesota, St. Paul, MN 55108, USA.
⁶ Department of Economics, Lund University, SE-221 80 Lund, Sweden.
⁷ Stockholm Environment Institute, SE-106 91 Stockholm, Sweden.
⁸ Tufts University, Medford, MA 02155, USA.
⁹ Economics Department, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA.
¹⁰ Center for Limnology, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI 53706, USA.
¹¹ Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi 110007, India.
¹² Department of Biology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA.
¹³ Australian Research Council (ARC) Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, James Cook University, Townsville, QLD 4811, Australia.
¹⁴ Department of Systems Ecology, Stockholm University, SE-106 91 Stockholm, Sweden.
¹⁵ Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA.
¹⁶ Department of Economics and Finance, University of Wyoming, Laramie, WY 82071, USA.
¹⁷ Nicholas School of the Environment, Duke University, Durham, NC 27708, USA.
¹⁸ Department of International and European Economic Studies, Athens University of Economics and Business, GR10434 Athens, Greece.
¹⁹ Center, Tilburg University, 5000 LE Tilburg, Netherlands.

^* Author for correspondence. E-mail: brian.walker{at}csiro.au