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What we presented, based on the latest science, was evidence that the world needs a new paradigm for development, one that pursues alleviation of poverty and economic growth while staying within the safe planetary boundaries that define a stable and resilient planet.
Despite all the promising talk, world leaders failed miserably in Copenhagen to agree on targets to stay within a safe global budget for carbon in the atmosphere, one of the nine planetary boundaries, by reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
it was becoming painfully clear to me how naïve it was to assume that, just because the facts were on the table, people would make the right decisions. That wasn’t the way the world worked.
The dominant narrative until now has been about infinite material growth on a finite planet, assuming that Earth and nature have an endless capacity to take abuse without punching back. That narrative held up as long as we inhabited a relatively small world on a relatively big planet—one in which Earth kept forgiving all the insults we threw at her. But that is no longer the case. We left that era 25 years ago.
Two thirds of the cities needed by 2030 have not yet been built.
In a critical cold period about 75,000 years ago, as DNA analyses have revealed, the entire human population may have dwindled to as few as 15,000 fertile adults, confined to the high plateau in northern Ethiopia.
in both the Northern and Southern hemispheres, we quickly grew accustomed to an incredibly narrow range of climatic variation, with temperatures wobbling only about 1°C (1.8°F) up or down. The impact was immediate. Almost as soon as we entered the Holocene, groups of hunters and gatherers in at least four different parts of the world independently invented agriculture more or less simultaneously.
The onset of the Holocene, in short, was the planetary equivalent of establishing the ultimate shopping mall for humanity.
That’s why what we’re doing right now ranks as the most disturbing event in the history of humankind: We’re pushing our planet out of the Holocene into new and uncharted territory.
But soon, by almost every measure, our growing populations and unsustainable habits piled on more and more environmental pressures. No matter which parameter you chose to look at—whether CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere from fossil fuels; nitrogen concentrations in the soil from agriculture and industry; methane concentrations in the air from livestock; ozone depletion over Antarctica; rising surface temperatures; floods and other extreme weather disasters; disappearing fish stocks; coastal disruption from fish farms; nitrogen pollution of coastal waters; loss of tropical rainforests; wild
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ppm (parts per million) is the measure of concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. CO2 eq (Carbon dioxide equivalent) is a standard unit for measuring carbon footprints. The idea is to express the impact of each different greenhouse gas in terms of the amount of CO2 that would create the same amount of warming. Apart from CO2 they include methane (CH4), Nitrous oxide (N2O), Ozone (O3), and chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs).
This alarming recognition—which will be further explored below—that nature often behaves in unpredictable ways, with the risk of major and often irreversible shifts from one state to another, fundamentally changes our relationship to the planet. To preserve the stability of biophysical systems, and thus Earth’s ability to support human development, we must invest in building ecological resilience—nature’s capacity to avoid undesired surprises.
The rising curves of negative environmental change have a sister curve in rising human wealth.
The Great Enrichment
The world as we know it has become an increasingly complex, turbulent, and globalized place, not only socially and economically but also ecologically.
The Human Web, Big History
The notion that everyone lives in everyone else’s backyard is the new reality.
Again, surprise is the common denominator.
IF YOU WERE TO FIND yourself driving down a winding road along a steep cliff on a dark night, you’d want clearly marked guardrails to prevent you from getting too close to the edge. That’s the basic idea behind planetary boundaries.
The starting point for this quest—to define a safe operating space for humanity on a stable planet—is to identify which of Earth’s processes are most important to maintaining the stability of the planet as we know it.
This quantification had never been done before. Only during the past 10–15 years have scientists been able to explain the complex dynamics governing the way Earth operates. The first comprehensive overview of observations showing the exponential rise of human pressures on the planet during the past 50 years was published only eight years ago.
Whether we call them tipping elements, tipping points, regime-shifts, or thresholds is less important than the mountain of evidence showing that Earth’s resilience is what matters.
The biophysical components of the Earth system—what we call nature for short—are full of surprises, we’ve discovered, and if we push systems too far, they can break and get stuck in an undesired state for humanity. If such tipping points occur in too many systems in too many places—such as the irreversible melting of ice sheets or the release of methane in steppe regions from thawing permafrost—then the combined effect could lead to the crossing of a planetary tipping point that takes us away from the Holocene.
We’re still struggling with the chemical pollution boundary, which we’ve renamed “novel entities” to indicate that these are truly novel compounds in the Earth system, created entirely by us humans.
We called these “The Big Three.” They are climate change, stratospheric ozone depletion, and ocean acidification.
The second group includes boundaries based on slow planetary variables that contribute to the underlying resilience of the Earth system. We called them the four “slow boundaries.” They are land-use change, freshwater use, biodiversity loss, and interference with the global nitrogen and phosphorus cycles.
The third group of boundaries consists of two human-created threats: air pollution from soot (black carbon), nitrates, sulfates and other particles; and pollution of the biosphere by chemicals such as heavy metals and persistent organic pollutants.
The final state of our climate system and biodiversity is determined by the aggregate effects of how water flows, land use, and nutrient flows operate. In simple terms, if we get it right on climate and biodiversity, then we’re very likely to safeguard a desired state of the planet. We therefore call these two “core boundaries.”
the world continues to rush toward the 450 ppm CO2 boundary ceiling, beyond which catastrophic tipping points are, from a scientific perspective, very likely.
But the most dramatic transgression is what’s happening with the biodiversity boundary. The pace of species loss today is so great we’re literally in the midst of the planet’s sixth mass extinction, which is certain to cause massive and permanent changes in the functioning of Earth’s ecosystems. Especially troubling are the losses of top predators, species at the top of the food webs, which are rapidly changing the entire structure of natural life-support systems, including triggering major tipping points. These losses are tragic, because, unlike other planetary boundaries, they’re
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It’s becoming increasingly clear, in the end, that the “final battleground” over climate change is moving away from a focus on reducing emissions to a focus on managing the biosphere.
If the planet goes from friend to foe, then our mitigation policies for emission reductions will make little difference. Because as impressive as they might be, human impacts on the climate system pale by comparison to the warming feedbacks the Earth system itself can trigger. If the carbon contained in just the top 50 cm (19.6 inches) of soil in the Arctic were to be released, for example, it would exceed all the carbon humans have emitted since the industrial revolution began 250 years ago.
The fact that ice and snow, because of their white surfaces, reflect incoming heat from the sun back into space, is one of the most important and well-known of Earth’s negative feedbacks.
Even if we take actions immediately to slow the pace of melting in Antarctica, however, we may already be committed to an additional 1 m (3.3 ft) of global sea level rise during this century. This is in addition to the 1 meter already estimated by the IPCC for this same period. The fact is, we don’t know how to adapt to such a pace. As glaciologist Richard Alley of Pennsylvania State University pointed out when these studies were released, crossing this tipping point in Antarctica means that we are now committed to a global sea level rise equivalent to a permanent Hurricane Sandy-size storm
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we’re approaching a point where the pressure we put on the planet may push the wrong “on” buttons, triggering Earth to kick in with self-reinforcing “positive” feedbacks—like the rapid warming of Greenland from loss of reflective snow and ice. These are the “big whammies” we need to avoid above all else.
Humanity has already transgressed three of the nine planetary boundaries our team of scientists identified in 2009 to keep the world in a safe operating space: climate change, rate of biodiversity loss, and the global nitrogen cycle. Other thresholds are also in danger of being crossed,
Is what we have to look forward to: A gradually less beautiful world? A gradually weaker planet? A more expensive place to live, where resources such as oil and metals are harder to find, and ecosystem services such as food and drinking water are more scarce? A place where healthy conditions like air quality are more difficult to deliver? Is this the price we have to pay for using up the safe operating space on Earth?
If you want to know what’s happening in the oceans, pay close attention to the world’s major coral reefs. Often described as the “rainforests of the sea,” coral reefs host a wealth of biologically rich and productive ecosystems. They could also be called the “canaries in the coal mine” of climate change, because they’re so sensitive to shifting conditions. Whenever there’s a change in the ocean, it often shows up first in coral reefs.
warming seas have triggered coral bleaching, which occurs when corals lose the micro-algae that live within their tissues and provide their lively colors.
When the EU, for example, revised fishing policies not long ago to drive high-tech fishing fleets from their “home waters,” few political leaders could have anticipated that they were launching a string of events that potentially is associated with the world’s worst outbreak of the ebola virus.
A similarly unexpected train of events preceded the Arab Spring in 2010–2011.
What had begun as a heat wave in Russia became a perfect storm of social–ecological disruption in Africa.
THE GLOBAL CRUNCH on raw materials is getting worse every day. Within the next 50 years the world could run short of many important metals, including silver, gold, lead, zinc, tin, copper, and nickel. We may also be hitting the ceiling for economical sources of other critical resources, such as crude oil, natural gas, phosphorus, and rare earth metals.
How long will economical sources of key minerals last if every human on the planet consumes even half as much as the average rich-world citizen does today? The answer is alarming. According to estimates published a few years ago, the world supply of antimony, to name one metal, could run out in only ten years. Silver could be gone in less than five. And indium could be used up in only a few years, if we don’t find substitutes or start recycling more.
If every person in the world consumed half as much metal as an average US citizen, we would run out of easily accessible metals within the next two to three decades.
If industries were more efficient in their use of copper, for example, and boosted recycling rates to 95 percent, the world’s economical supply of copper might last for another 600 years, instead of the 31 years currently predicted.
peak oil doesn’t mean that the oil is all gone. Rather, it implies that all efforts to increase the oil production rate fail.
Peak oil and peak minerals aren’t the only problems facing us in the 21st century. Another problem that could strike us at least as hard is a shortage of phosphorus, which could threaten agricultural production and food security for billions of people.
A transition to sustainability can only be attained by combining technology with deep system innovations and lifestyle changes. But technology can play an important role, perhaps even a dominant role, in five key global transformations: • Renewable and sustainable energy systems • Sustainable and healthy food systems • Circular economic models for business, societies, and communities • Sustainable urban futures in a world where 70 percent of all people live in cities • Sustainable transportation systems
The way we produce food is the single largest “culprit” in our transgression of planetary boundaries. Food production consumes the most land and freshwater, emits the most greenhouse gases, represents the biggest threat to biodiversity, and is a key source of nutrient loading. If we can get it right on food, then we stand a very good chance of pursuing wellbeing within a safe operating space.
They point out, for example, that the remanufacturing costs of cell phones could be reduced by 50 percent if the industry produced phones easier to take apart, improved the reverse production cycle, and offered incentives to return phones.
We’ll soon live in a world in which 70 percent of all people inhabit cities.
