Some would claim that all geomorphology is about global environmental change; others are suspicious of the territorial ambitions of Earth systems scientists, who have been largely responsible for the increased awareness of the practical importance of global environmental change over the past couple of decades. regard much geomorphological work as having its primary significance for local scale problems (and no less important for this) and view the emphasis of the Earth systems scientists as an entirely positive reminder to us geomorphologists of the value of examining global scale phenomena.

There are at least two components of global environmental change: systemic and cumulative (Turner et al., 1990). Systemic change refers to global scale changes such as climate change, whereas cumulative change refers to the net world-wide change resulting from many local or intermediate scale changes.

Climate and people drive global environmental change and they are in turn impacted by global environmental change. Climate produces a series of cascading system responses via river hydrology, snow and ice, glaciers, permafrost, flora and fauna, sediment systems, oceans and people. People drive global environmental change by intentional land use and land cover change, damming and diverting of rivers, managing of snowpacks, transferring soil and rock materials of all kinds and building of cities. In this sense, geomorphology is just one of many responses to climatic and anthropogenic processes. Nevertheless, changes in landforms are pervasive over space and through time and many of these changes are global in scale.

The interpretation of global paleoenvironments is undoubtedly the central contribution of geomorphologists to global environmental change in the historical geomorphology tradition. Within the global research agenda, the PAGES project represents the core of this tradition. There are two parts of PAGES, namely PAGES Stream, covering the last 200,000 years and PAGES Stream, covering the last 2,000 years. Functional geomorphologists contribute in two ways:

1. understanding of energy and mass fluxes;
2. interpretation of landform response to climate, hydrology, tectonics and land use.

Applied geomorphologists contribute in three ways:

1. minimising and adjusting to the effects of global environmental change;
2. mitigating natural hazards;
3. the sustainability question.