Can our planet continue to support the current scope of human activity?
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These videos are from the SDG Academy course Planetary Boundaries and Human Opportunities, first launched in 2014 and led by Johan Rockström, originator of the planetary boundaries framework.
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There is rising scientific evidence that humanity has now entered a new era that is defined as the Anthropocene, in which humanity is shaping the entire biosphere in a…
Welcome to the Anthropocene
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The planetary squeeze, or the driving forces that explain why we’ve ended up with rising environmental risks, originate from four different areas: population…
The Quadruple Squeeze
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Professor Carl Folke discusses a social-ecological system approach, in which people are looked at as being part of, and changing, the planet, in addition to being…
Social-Ecological Systems
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This chapter is about the challenges and opportunities that urban centers face. Urban centers are expanding beyond traditional urban boundaries in a process called urban…
Cities: Challenges and Opportunities
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A planetary boundary process is an environmental process that is part of the Earth's regulatory system, helping it to remain in our current desired state of the…
Justification for Planetary Boundary Selection
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This chapter explains the concern about atmospheric aerosols, which are liquid droplets or particles that are suspended in the atmosphere. They absorb and reflect light,…
Aerosol Loading
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We are now a big world on a small planet. The Great Acceleration starts with the expansion of human exploitation of the world, seen in urbanization, land-use…
The Great Acceleration
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This chapter discusses human impacts on the global nitrogen and phosphorus cycles that link the living and non-living parts of the Earth system. These chemical…
Interference with Global Nitrogen and Phosphorous…
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This chapter discusses the social foundations for the planetary boundaries. This goes back to the Brundtland Report of 1987, which defined sustainability as a…
Social Foundations for Planetary Boundaries
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Resilience has a dual nature, of thinking about sustaining what we want to sustain, AND building the capacity to adapt or transform toward something better. We live in a…
Non-Linear Thinking in the Anthropocene
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Challenges arise when trying to define quantitatively the boundary position for each global process. First, a control variable is identified as a parameter that…
Quantification of the Nine Planetary Boundaries
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This chapter explores the origins of the planetary boundaries, which comes from the recognition that we’ve entered the Anthropocene and that the exponential…
Introducing the Planetary Boundaries Framework
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To develop within a safe operating space, there must be a global transition to a renewable energy system, as growing economies are projected to have growing energy use…
Energy: A Promising Pathway
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Biodiversity is an important planetary boundary because, without the living species, we would not have biomass, carbon sequestration, rainfall, or the regulation of the…
Biodiversity Loss
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How can the world of policy and science respond to the latest advancements in science? In the Anthropocene, we can no longer avoid catastrophic tipping points; we need a…
Development of the Sustainable Development Goals
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This lecture provides evidence for why climate change is a planetary boundary, based on temperature changes since the Industrial Revolution. We have already seen 1…
Climate Change as a Planetary Boundary
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