The Program on Ecosystem Change and Society

PECS is a Future Earth core-project, one of 21 such global change research projects (initially sponsored by ICSU and UNESCO).

PECS aims to integrate research on the stewardship of social–ecological systems, the services they generate, and the relationships among natural capital, human wellbeing, livelihoods, inequality and poverty.

PECS research is explicitly transdisciplinary and intersectoral, and aims to break down barriers that have impeded understanding of social-ecological transformations. PECS aims to understand interactions across scales, such as fast and slow drivers of social and ecological change, thresholds, traps and time lags, in order to identify appropriate operational scales. A comparative, place-based approach, international in scope, is at the core of PECS research.