IGBP's vision is to provide essential scientific leadership and knowledge of the Earth system to help guide society onto a sustainable pathway during rapid global change.
The vision has three key elements:

• the planet
• the planet under pressure
• transformation in an era of rapid global change.

In Brazil, the IGBP Regional Office is located at the National Institute for Space Research (INPE) in its Earth System Science Center (CCST) and under the scientific coordination of the researcher Dr. Patrícia Pinho who works together with the Program Secretariat in Stockholm and with the IGBP Scientific Committee President, Dr. Carlos Nobre, a member of the Brazilian Science Academy, for topics related to the natural and social sciences on the global environmental changes and the earth system sustainability.

The Regional office helps IGBP to accomplish its Science Plan and Implementation Strategies, mainly with the role of widening the capillarity and synergy from IGBP and other global programs in South America and in other countries of the developing world.

Thus, the IGBP Regional Office, created in 2006 has as its main role the diffusion of the IGBP scientific agenda together with the scientific project of the Earth System Science Center, at INPE. Focused on the global environmental changes and the earth system sustainability it aims to consolidate the scientific ties with the community associated to the earth system studies in Latin America through the propagation of coordination activities and the dissemination of the scientific agenda.

Once tuned with its mission, the Regional Office articulates a net of information within regional and global assets counting on the participation and organization of scientific meetings, discussion forums, workshops and the publication of material for scientific disclosure.

From 2012 on, the regional office will develop a synthesis project about the “Adaptation to the global environmental changes and the Earth System sustainability: a coordination strategy and net focused on an understanding of the socio-environmental dynamics to achieve the sustainability in Latin America.”