Planetary Boundary Emergency
You have probably noticed unusual weather volatility, including deadly tornados in the midwestern US and warmer than normal spring temperatures. You may be electrifying your home, biking, eating organic, avoiding plastics, recycling, and moving your money into climate friendly banks and investments. But individual actions alone are clearly not enough. Despite pledges by nations, companies, and individuals to reduce climate-harming emissions, those emissions have continued to grow, and their impacts are accelerating. We need science-guided policy and a global approach to managing the earth systems on which life depends. That also requires an electorate (that is us!) that demands leaders to take meaningful action.
In an Earth.org interview by Martina Igini, April 16, 2024 climate scientist Johan Rockström said, “Boundaries are set to avoid tipping points, to have a high chance to keep the planet in state as close as possible to the Holocene, that allows it to maintain its resilience, stability, and life support capabilities. Go beyond and we enter a danger zone… the uncertainty range of science,” Rockström explained. In 2023, he and other scientists at the Stockholm Resilience Center in Sweden published an update of the framework. The study found that six of the nine planetary boundaries are already transgressed, placing the Earth “well outside of the safe operating space for humanity.”
Daily sea surface temperature (°C) averaged over the extra-polar global ocean (60°S–60°N) between 1979 and 2024. Data: ERA5. Graph: Copernicus Climate Change Service/ECMWF.
“The moment a system absorbs more [heat energy] than it releases, it has crossed a tipping point, and you cannot stop it. It goes from a cooling to a self-warming system,” explained Rockström.
PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America) published a paper by Rockström and colleagues in January 2024 “The planetary commons: A new paradigm for safeguarding Earth-regulating systems in the Anthropocene”.
The authors recommend a framework for protecting the planetary systems that support life on earth. These systems provide common goods and services for all but cross many jurisdictional and “ownership” boundaries. Humanity must work together to safeguard these resources for the benefit of all.
Proposed categories of planetary commons. The Earth system, represented by the outer gray frame, constitutes the ultimate overarching planetary common, given its interconnected self-regulating characteristics. The Earth system is configured by planetary commons “spheres” (atmo-, hydro-, bio-, litho-, and cryosphere) and other subsystems within and across these spheres, namely the tipping elements (in bold font) and other biophysical systems that may not exhibit tipping behavior but play a vital role in regulating the livability on Earth. Image credit: Reprinted with permission from ref. 6.
Wouldn’t it be powerful if the news media spent as much time interviewing scientists, entrepreneurs and policy makers working on transformative policies and actions as they are spending on every detail of the criminal trials of a former President? Likewise, what if the UN, our federal, state and local governments made well-being of ecosystems and other life support systems at the top of their agendas? Let’s help make that happen.