What are the Earth’s boundaries? And where does humanity stand? 🌍
A few years ago, I heard about the Planetary Boundaries. It was an interesting model, but also largely incomplete due to missing data. But recently The Stockholm Resilience Centre has been able to quantify it, and it’s the bleak news we probably expected. Here’s what’s been happening.
If you’ve never heard about the Planetary Boundaries, they are indicators of boundaries in which humanity can safely operate. That means boundaries that should not be reached if we want to ensure a safe, healthy and equitable existence as humans.
Novel Entities
In February, the boundary for novel entities was determined. It’s an extreme transgression beyond what’s considered safe. Novel entities is essentially chemical pollution and includes pesticides, industrial compounds, antibiotics and plastic (and more plastic) amongst 350,000 chemical pollutants.
Green Water
A few weeks ago, new research was published on water, specifically green water, and showed the same grim results. An overshoot far beyond the safe level. Green water refers to the water that plants have available to them and includes measures on evaporation, rainfall and soil moisture (whereas blue water indicators are mostly in ground water reserves).
With this extra data, I’m looking forward to including the planetary boundaries model more in my sustainability work. Every goal and target should be linked not only to CO2 and to an SDG, but also to a planetary boundary as we look to support earth and humanity back to safety.
