MAHB Global

Millenium Alliance for Humanity and the Biosphere (MAHB) has been developing since 2004 (see the story in the documentation), launched by a group of natural scientists, social scientists, and scholars from the humanities. MAHB (pronounced “mob”) involves a global network of researchers committed to addressing the sustainability challenge by mobilizing and engaging scholars in the social and natural sciences and the humanities as well as policymakers and a broad spectrum of stakeholders. This is being done through running or participating in conferences, workshops, discussion groups, and research projects as well as a number of outreach initiatives, using a toolkit of advanced ICT options. MAHB’s point of departure is that human behaviour -- toward one another and toward the planet that sustains all of us -- requires persistent and rapid modification.

The choice and emphasis of the word "alliance" in MAHB is to underscore the very apparent truth that the cause of, and the only hope for a solution to, the global environmental predicament is through collective initiatives: research, policy analyses and proposals, and actions. MAHB stresses that the major need for knowledge is better understanding of human behaviour and how this can be altered to direct humanity onto a course toward a sustainable society -- before it is all-too-late. Human behaviour refers not just to the values, attitudes, and activities of individual human beings, but to the structures of institutional arrangements, cultural formations, and collective actions and their long-term consequences.

The idea is that the global MAHB can become a basic mechanism to expose society to the full range of population-environment-resource-ethics-power issues, and sponsor broad global analyses and discussions involving the greatest possible diversity of people across the globe. But to be effective discussions, research, planning and action will need to take place at every level of human action: among individuals, organizations, institutions, and international networks and entities.  This means encouraging and nudging citizens in pro-environmental behaviour, directing organizations to adopt full-cost accounting measures, designing or reforming institutions that locate concerns for sustainability at the forefront of their responsibilities, and enhancing or creating bodies globally with authority or powers to establish environmental goals and to apply pressures to adhere to  environmental regulations and restrictions.