Big World, Small Planet: Abundance Within Planetary Boundaries

by Johan Rockström

We believe the public’s lack of awareness about the global risks we face is largely due to the shortage of user-friendly, attractive, and widely accessible information, and that new scientific insights advance so fast that educational systems can’t keep up. That makes education our number one priority. If every secondary school classroom in the world were to tear down its geological charts and replace them with one that includes the Anthropocene, we would already have come a long way. We need new curricula for high schools and undergraduate programs at universities. Above all, we need to train a new generation of economists who understand that generating wellbeing for society means keeping the economy within planetary boundaries. As Kate Raworth at Oxford University has pointed out, if every student studying economics would start his or her program learning about planetary boundaries, the world would look different.