Key Messages & Final Remarks: Planetary Boundaries

This chapter serves as a conclusion to the course Planetary Boundaries. We are living in the Anthropocene, and while the Holocene supported human civilization for thousands of years, today we live in a biosphere shaped by humanity and we must act, accordingly, as stewards of the planet. Economic growth has come at the expense of biodiversity loss, eutrophication, pollution, and destruction of the climate system; and yet the Earth system has been resilient up until the last half century. We are now undermining the ecosystem services and functions that undergird the resilience and capacity of the Earth system to deal with shock. We are facing the quadruple squeeze, and there has been a collision between a rich minority causing environmental problems and, on the other hand, the need to eradicate poverty and raise incomes of billions of Earth inhabitants. The Holocene is the only state of the planet that can support life as we know it, and we use knowledge of this era to define the planetary boundaries. The planetary boundary framework takes away a purely human-driven definition of biophysical boundaries and places boundaries in a planetary realm, in which humans will necessarily need to operate in a safe space. There is, finally, an ethical dimension to the idea that we are an interdependent connected world that needs to share the ecological space on earth. Professor Rockström ends the course with a call to action.

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