Social Foundations for Planetary Boundaries

This chapter discusses the social foundations for the planetary boundaries. This goes back to the Brundtland Report of 1987, which defined sustainability as a relationship between humans and nature. At the Rio+20 conference in 2012, Oxfam proposed the Oxfam Doughnut, in which they recognized the importance of the planetary boundaries as setting the environmental ceiling for a safe Earth operating space, but which also argued for a fair and just world to recognize the social foundations of that safe operating space, including eradicating poverty and increasing justice. This chapter notes the importance of local knowledge; there are many community-level initiatives for sustainability, such as fair-trade certification which reduces the negative impact of business, which increase fairness and global justice.

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