Earth Sciences and Society (ESS)

Human-surface environment interaction refers to how humans interact with the environment to fulfill their requirements and how the environment responds to these interactions. Tectonic and climatic forces, when combined with the action of wind, water, glacier, and ocean currents on the Earth’s surface, landforms evolve. Understanding the surface processes and their rate of changes is extremely important to infer natural system behavior, variability, and resiliency, for predicting future changes, risk assessment, and mitigation of natural hazards. Humans also affect the Earth’s surface processes and climate through emissions and modification of the land surface through agriculture and urbanization. The interplay between the Earth’s surface processes and human interactions is therefore at the core of many global economic, environmental, and security issues. Notwithstanding this, our understanding of the Earth’s surface environment and human interactions is inadequate. There are inherent problems in Earth Science communication. We conclude that active collaboration between Earth and Social scientists is an essential prerequisite for preventing the loss of major geoscientific concerns among wider social, economic, and political concerns.