Ten years ago, a group of scientists gathered in the Swedish town of Tällberg to attempt something that hadn’t been done before. Their task: carry out the most detailed analysis of humanity’s environmental footprint the world had ever seen. They didn't succeed right away. But a few months later, their perseverance was rewarded.
In the decade since, the ground-breaking model they devised has expanded our understanding of the threats humans pose to the natural systems crucial to life. The Planetary Boundaries framework, as it's known, has also shaped the thinking of governments, businesses and investors worldwide.
Its distinguishing feature is precision. The model establishes numerical limits for the nine most damaging environmental phenomena, from climate change and freshwater use to biodiversity loss and land use.
Breach any of these thresholds, the model says, and there’s a risk of triggering abrupt or irreversible damage to the Earth's biophysical systems. In the 10 years since the PB was developed, four of its boundaries have been transgressed.
Dr Sarah Cornell, who leads a team of international researchers working on the PB model at the Stockholm Resilience Centre, says the framework’s gloomy findings have forced people to reconsider the environmental impact of their activities.
"The Planetary Boundaries framework helps us think about the cumulative effect of local changes in the environment. Quantification is really important in diagnosing the scale of the planetary problem which humans are contributing. Planet Earth has a fever. It’s a red alert indicator," she says.
“The framework fills an important gap in environmental governance which the society can use to steer our activities on our planet.”
Beyond carbon
Dr Cornell says her ambition is to transform our approach to the environment. Until a few years ago, the debate was dominated by climate change. Countries and companies were judged solely on the ambition of their carbon emissions targets.
But, she explains, the planet’s problems go beyond global warming.
“Climate change is straight-forward in that it allows us to make a global budget for emissions that correspond to the global targets for temperature,” she says.
“But life is more complex than just a physical climate. Not all environmental issues have the same research infrastructure behind them. So we’re working with public sector agencies, NGOs and companies to translate the diagnosis of the Planetary Boundaries into real-world action targets in reducing pressure on the planet.”
As part of the education effort, Dr Cornell, with her colleagues, has carried out research showing how the PB model can be used by businesses and investors to measure and cut pollution and waste. Specifically, her work has set resource use and emissions limits for every industry in the global economy – expressed as amount relative to one million dollars of revenue.1
“The biophysical world is very different from the corporate world, but companies have important interactions if you think about long-term sustainability of businesses or the society,” she says.
“We need to know how to make the shift for the entire society to adopt a very new way of living. Investors play a big role in enabling companies to make the changes they know they need to make and shift to becoming the new, enduring and sustainable sectors.”
New dynamism in environmental governance
Of the four PB thresholds that have been breached, biodiversity loss is Dr Cornell's biggest concern.
The PB states that for biodiversity to remain sustainable, the acceptable loss rate for animals and plants must be below ten extinctions per one million species a year.
The model finds that the current pace of biodiversity loss is 100 times higher than the natural background rate.
“We don’t understand what it means to destroy the life around us, or what it means to pull a thread in the web of life. I’m very anxious about it,” she says.
“We change and simplify the ecosystem because it gives us short-term efficiency gains. We… benefit immediately from having higher agricultural production or higher energy yields. But in doing this, we are creating long-term vulnerability.”
The economic cost of inaction on biodiversity loss is substantial. The OECD - a thinktank - estimates that between 1997 and 2011, the world lost up to USD20 trillion per year due to land-cover change such as deforestation and urbanisation and another USD11 trillion a year from land degradation.2
Businesses are under pressure to take action.
The OECD estimates that investments aimed at protecting biodiversity stand at just USD39 billion. That's a paltry sum compared with USD500 billion per year that is directed to activities that lead to biodiversity loss, such as fossil fuel extraction and agricultural subsidies.
Dr Cornell says it's essential that businesses and governments face up to – and take action to solve – some of the pressing environmental challenges highlighted by the PB model.
“The environmental problem in the coming decade seems more urgent than in the last decade. But one of the things that really encourages me the most is there’s a better dialogue between businesses, academia and the wider public. We have a new dynamism in environmental governance,” she says.
“Companies have made environmental promises. Do they add up? We have to keep the scientific scrutiny. Consumers are voting with their wallets. Companies can’t hide anymore.”
[2] OECD (2019), Biodiversity: Finance and the Economic and Business Case for Action, report prepared for the G7 Environment Ministers’ Meeting, 5-6 May 2019.
