Addressing the major challenges of this century—including feeding a growing population, dealing with climate change and its wide-ranging effects, sustaining ecosystems, managing a major energy transition, predicting and mitigating natural disasters, and much more—are all deeply connected to the Earth and space sciences and require connecting or converging this science with the other sciences and engineering and engaging the public, the private sector, governments, and society. This Centennial Plenary will feature a series of 4-minute talks exploring some of these “grand challenges” that are largely selected from a larger group of solicited papers being published in AGU’s journals. The session will also highlight emerging opportunities for addressing these challenges: in sum how the American Geophysical Union community can foster and promote Earth and space science for the benefit of humanity.