Big World, Small Planet: Abundance Within Planetary Boundaries

by Johan Rockström

In the article, entitled “A Safe Operating Space for Humanity,” we proposed to track “planetary boundaries” for critical natural systems such as the global climate, stratospheric ozone, biodiversity, and ocean acidification.

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.

We did just that in the spring of 2012, launching our first book, The Human Quest: Prospering Within Planetary Boundaries, with barely enough time to hand out copies to delegates at the UN Summit on Sustainable Development in Rio de Janeiro. That conference, known as Rio+20, was a follow-up 20 years later to the 1992 meeting in Rio, which was the first to bring together concerns about the environment and social development. With support from the Swedish Postcode Lottery, we presented our book, with a foreword by President Bill Clinton, to more than 130 heads of state and government.

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.

We can feed nine billion people without destroying our forests. We can deliver power to our economies without burning fossil fuels. But the only way to achieve prosperity is through green growth. This is not a burden or sacrifice. It is an investment in future world prosperity. Business-as-usual is no longer an option.

Let’s be realistic. Inspiring a mind-shift to sustainability could take a generation, and we should have started long ago. If we wait 30 more years, it will be too late. So we advocate a two-track approach: 1) tackle the most urgent problems right now, such as climate change, nitrogen and phosphorus overload, and loss of biodiversity, but also 2) do everything we can to reconnect with nature over the long term. Earth deserves nothing less. Our world depends on nothing less.

We didn’t need planetary boundaries in the 1980s, when we still lived in a small world on a big planet.

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.

Some politicians have argued that a CO2 concentration as high as 450 ppm would be safe, under the assumption that it would lead to an increase of only 2°C (3.6°F) in the average global temperature, and that the consequences might not be so bad. There is, in fact, very little scientific evidence to link 450 ppm with a 2°C increase or to say that such an increase would be safe. On the contrary, there’s plenty of evidence that a 2°C increase would be costly and dangerous, and might even trigger catastrophic tipping points. We pointed this out in our piece.

I think the reason why we see a growing discrepancy between what science states is necessary and what politics claims is possible is that politicians are afraid that ambitious sustainability goals will threaten economic growth.

What does the future hold for a boy in Rwanda? Sustainable solutions offer him and the rest of his generation the best chance to alleviate poverty.

Data on the pace and global distribution of sea level rise, for example, remains incomplete and uncertain. So does information about the energy exchange between oceans and atmosphere in the global ocean conveyor belt; the global rate of biodiversity loss; actual melt of ice sheets in Antarctica, the Arctic, and Greenland; cloud dynamics and local shifts in rainfall as a result of global changes in weather patterns; and the importance of air pollution for the global climate. To put it simply, we need to measure, measure, measure, not to get certainty, but to understand risk and become cleverer stewards of nature for our own benefit.

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.

When environmental risks are properly understood, that is, they become security risks, stability risks, foreign policy risks, financial and business risks. Developing a strategy to manage environmental problems becomes a question of risk management.

The possibility that businesses could lose market shares and profit margins is taken so seriously that companies on the stock market provide quarterly reports on their performance.

Imagine if there were Earth pages next to the financial pages in the Wall Street Journal, presenting quarterly reports on greenhouse gas emissions and use of ecosystem services among the largest companies in the world.

Kate Raworth, then at Oxfam, now at Oxford University.

The current subsidies for fossil energy amounts to an astounding 500–600 billion USD per yr, or about a third of the investment needed to unleash a global transformation to a clean-energy future within a climate boundary.

Only Sweden has operated a systematically high carbon price for a long period. Since 1990, Sweden has had a comprehensive carbon tax across all energy sectors of approximately 100 USD per ton of CO2. This tax has resulted in a decoupling of the Swedish economy, allowing continued economic growth while reducing national CO2 emissions from industry. It has also resulted in a transformation of the heating sector, shedding off the last fossil energy sources in favor of heat production based on biomass residue from the forest industry. Placing the right price on carbon can thus trigger an energy transformation.

Agriculture today represents the single largest cause of biodiversity loss and greenhouse gas emissions (about 30 percent of global GHG emissions originate from agricultural production, roughly half from cultivation and the other half from deforestation).

The progress we’ve made in combating poverty today may be undermined tomorrow by environmental feedbacks from Earth due to growing human pressures on the planet.

The question shouldn’t be: What’s the cost of moving toward a low-carbon society. It should be: What different kinds of benefits will investments in low-carbon energy systems, transportation, and food production generate for families, sectors, nations, and regions?

We live, after all, in an increasingly turbulent world, where crossing tipping points and “peak everything” are imminent threats, resulting in price volatilities, unacceptable risks of disastrous outcomes, and a scramble for resources.

Clearly we need major breakthroughs on at least three fronts—exponential technologies from nature, innovations to reduce impacts, and wider system changes—to navigate a sustainable future of growth within limits.

In fact, our hunger for meat is one of the main reasons why world agriculture is threatening planetary boundaries. Our appetite for meat also creates a great deal of waste. Almost half of the animals we slaughter for consumption ends up as waste—in Europe about 150 kg (330 pounds) per person.

This work, together with initiatives by Richard Branson of the Virgin Group, including the Carbon War Room and establishing the Elders network, inspired these two business leaders to establish The B Team, which includes a dozen or so business leaders such as Paul Polman of Unilever and Ratan Tata of the Tata Group. The most interesting thing about The B Team is their belief that “global business leaders need to come together to advance the wellbeing of people and the planet.” In fact, they say, business has to think in this way in order to thrive.

the Baltic had crossed a tipping point by 1989, incidentally exactly at the point in time we have argued the world tipped over from being a small world on a big planet to a big world on a small planet, becoming locked in an unfortunate new ecological regime.

About a sixth of the Baltic has actually become a “dead zone”, the largest such area on the planet, with very low levels of available oxygen.

We have crossed a tipping point, with more than half of the world’s population living in cities. There are now 28 mega-cities with more than ten million inhabitants, a number expected to rise to 40 cities by 2030. By 2050 almost two thirds of everyone on Earth will live in cities, which means 2.5 billion new urban inhabitants.

It is thus increasingly clear that São Paulo, as Brazil’s financial and business heart, can only beat successfully if it receives life-giving rainfall from a sustainably managed Amazonia. At the moment, things don’t look encouraging. Deforestation in the Amazon region jumped by an astounding 29 percent between 2012 and 2013, the first increase since 2008. Studies have shown that continued deforestation could lead to a 20 percent reduction in dry season rainfall on average by mid-century, and that we can’t rule out the possibility that the rainforest is about to cross a tipping point, shifting irreversibly into a drier savannah system.

Instead of being a “limit” to growth, defining a safe operating space on Earth with absolute budgets for carbon, water, and land, will do just the opposite. It will unleash innovation, enabling us to achieve growth within limits for human prosperity in a “good” Anthropocene.

As Ulrich Spiesshofer, CEO of the Swiss industrial giant ABB, recently put it, “we need to run the world without consuming the Earth.”

We’ve concluded that, for a long time, humanity got it all wrong. For centuries, we clung to the belief that we could have growth without limits on a finite planet.

So today we’re proposing a new playing field of growth within limits. By combining what we know from science about Earth’s biophysical limits with emerging evidence about transformative technologies and values, we see unlimited opportunities for abundance through a combination of wisdom, innovation, and worldwide collaboration.

To guide us in this direction, we’re offering an easy-to-remember but scientifically robust number—a number we can teach to our children, since they’re the ones likely to be alive in the year 2100. That number is zero.

We know with a high degree of certainty that by the second half of this century we must reach a zero-emission global society as part of a fully decarbonized world economy. We must also attain a zero rate of species loss to halt declining biodiversity. Finally, having transformed half of the Earth’s surface to farmland and cities, we must now find ways to feed the world within existing agricultural lands. Enough is enough, and in order to secure future rainfall, carbon sinks, and habitats for all living species, we must feed humanity with zero expansion of agricultural territory. The next green revolution will be truly green, occurring through sustainable intensification on current agricultural land.

This triple zero formula—zero emissions, zero loss of biodiversity, and zero expansion of agricultural land—constitutes a science-based agenda for world development that defines a significant part of Earth’s safe operating space. It’s an easy number to remember. A number with little uncertainty. A visiona...