[7] The secretariat, called International Project Office (IPO) is hosted at the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development at the Faculty of Geosciences, Utrecht University, The Netherlands.

This committee wrote the first Science and Implementation Plan drawing on input for various drafts discussed at global events and conferences.

[1][10] In this plan, the conceptual problems, cross-cutting themes, flagship projects, and its policy relevance were outlined in detail.

[11]: 8 The National Science Foundation of the United States provided about US$15,000 each year since 2015 via Future Earth, an international research platform.

This foundation is a "non-profit charitable organization under Dutch law, created to help channel support from a variety of sources to the earth system governance research community".

For example, in 2011, the lead faculty of the ESG Project launched a global assessment on international environmental governance.

[54] The outcome was an article in Science in 2012, written by 33 leading scholars from the ESG Project as a blueprint for reform of strengthening earth system governance.

In 2014, the then project's chair Frank Biermann was invited to speak in the United Nations General Assembly during an Interactive Dialogue on Harmony with Nature.

[60] In 2022, members of the ESG Project, along with many natural scientists, took the initiative to call for an "International Non-Use Agreement on Solar Geoengineering".

[61] The authors demand that "Governments and the United Nations need to take effective political control and restrict the development of solar geoengineering technologies before it is too late.

"[61] In general, there is widespread support for the ESG Project in the scientific community, which is reflected in the size of the research network and in various publications by experts.

The 2022 Annual Report of the network stated: "We are also exploring possibilities for the next institutional home of the IPO as our funding partnership comes to a close with Utrecht University in 2023".

The research communities represented in this partnership said in the 2001 Amsterdam Declaration on Global Change that the earth system now operates "well outside the normal state exhibited over the past 500,000 years" and that "human activity is generating change that extends well beyond natural variability—in some cases, alarmingly so—and at rates that continue to accelerate.

"[64] To cope with this challenge, the four global change research programs have called "urgently" for strategies for Earth System management.

For this drafting work a Scientific Planning Committee was appointed and chaired by Professor Frank Biermann, who was affiliated with VU University Amsterdam.