Week 10: Planetary Boundaries and Global Equity - Post 1
Lecture 1 - Interactions Between Planetary Boundaries - Dr. Sarah Cornell
-Now we've really made some advancements. You've covered the Anthropocene, all the thinking around resilience and tipping points, the great acceleration, and now we've also covered all the nine planetary boundaries.
-Now we've really made some advancements. You've covered the Anthropocene, all the thinking around resilience and tipping points, the great acceleration, and now we've also covered all the nine planetary boundaries.
-We saw that three of them have already been transgressed
-And this means that we will now be coupling the biophysical analysis with the human dimensions. It is not enough to think only in terms of the safe operating space but also a just and fair operating space for humanity. The social boundaries, the floor for development, will now be linked into and broadening the whole framework on planetary boundaries.
-The boundaries are the precautionary limits that we think society should set about how to deal with biological, chemical, and physical regime shifts and thresholds that may happen in the Earth system.
-The mechanism for these cascading effects is really the fact thatwe've got complex feedbacks that link the different components of the Earth system. In other words, the feedbacks between land, atmosphere, oceans, and the living organisms that make up the biosphere. Some of these feedbacks are also relatively well understood. Here we have an example of a positive feedback that links land use and the water cycle.
-We also have negative feedbacks that tend to damp down the initial pressure on the system. We are beginning to understand the interactions between climate and biosphere, and here again we have an example. If we cause deforestation we remove the capacity of living organisms to take up CO2 through photosynthesis. That weaker CO2 uptake leaves more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, because CO2 is a increase the warming of the atmosphere. Most vegetation responds to a warmer temperature by increasing its growth. So in this case by reducing vegetation in the first place ecosystems will tend to respond by increasing their biomass production. Now obviously this kind of feedback is really important in balancing environmental changes. Negative feedbacks
-help to keep the Earth in balance in a particular regime. But they don't go on forever Vegetation has an upper limit to its temperature tolerance, and so as we increase temperatures we will also see an increased risk for abrupt changes when these negative feedbacks break down.
-It isn't just a question of understanding the physics and chemistry and biology of the planet, however. Because these processes all have human drivers it's also requiring us to have new interactions with researchers from across all disciplines, and with policymakers, with businesses, and with people in civil society. You can see that these are very complex problems, many people call them wicked problems. The challenge is that it's not just a scientific issue, although we have an enormous need still for basic data on all of these various dimensions. It's about how science interacts with wider society. We need to have better dialogue between scientists and the decision makers all across society that deal with the different sectors that are contributing to the problem.
-We aren't just changing the variability of the processes, we're changing the whole risk spectrum because we're altering the feedbacks themselves. And so this requires us to treat the problem with more urgency than any we've ever seen before. And although these are global problems we can only deal with them in our own place, in our location, in our academic discipline, or our profession, whatever that may be.
Lecture 2 – Issues of Access and Distribution: Peak of
Everything – Johan Rockstrom
-In the Anthropocene with rising exponential pressures on
our finite Earth system one very obvious issue arises, which is whether or not
we're running into resource constraints to the extent that we can talk of
passing the peak of resource availability for humanity.
-But if we add to that the recognition that we have to
operate within a safe operating space of a stable Earth system an additional
elements adds even to the peak, namely the need for a fair distribution of the
remaining budgets with regards to each of the planetary boundaries
-we
are in the realm of equity and just distribution of space, particularly in a
world with 1 billion absolute poor and in a world that will soon have more than
two new billion co-citizens on Earth predominantly born in what today is
developing countries.
-It
is analyzed by combining the classical parameters that add up to human impacts
on Earth, the so-called IPAT equation, impact equally population multiplied by
affluence, multiplied by technology. And here you see these entities expressed
in terms of population numbers, technology is expressed in the number of
patents registered, and affluence simply as world GDP.
-What
is so remarkable with this journey which you have to recognize is that we often
blame population growth for causing this. In fact that's not the predominant
number. If you look at this analysis carefully you see that the largest influence
is affluence, which is the number one driver of increased resource use.
-The fact that we're leaving behind
the era of cheap oil. In fact we see today the rising volatility of global oil prices
is occurring at a very high level, between 75 and over a 100 in fact, sometimes
a 110, a 120 US dollars per barrel of oil. This is a signal that we are at or
approaching peak oil in terms of cheap oil availability.
-All of this adds up to the conclusion
that we need to consider resource constraints as a fundamental part of
navigating the Anthropocene.
-Phosphorous:
We are in a danger zone for the planetary boundary phosphorous even though we
are not approaching a resource peak.
-Biodiversity
we can clearly say we are at a peak with regards to collapse of many
ecosystems, and we are transgressing, so there you have a one-to-one relationship.
Climate change, the same. We are seeing evidence of peak, particularly on oil,
but we're also in a danger zone with regards to climate change.
-So this is an example of how the
comparison of the two concepts can be done to guide also sustainable development.
Therefore it falls naturally to then ask the question: how does the planetary
boundary analysis address the issue of distribution among nations and citizens
in the world?
- So the global boundary on biodiversity
loss and biosphere integrity was originally set as the maximum allowed amount
of number of extinctions we can allow ourselves on Earth. But now we're able to
downscale this to look at the maximum amount of biodiversity loss in different
ecosystems, and do that in a way that can increasingly address both the number
of species, but also the ecological functions they represent, and project that
across time, and thereby be able to identify the hotspot regions in the world where
we need to very, very rapidly transition into a sustainable management of
ecosystems, but we can also see the areas where in fact we're doing progress
already on staying within a safe operating space.
-Importantly we can do this also for
the interference with the nitrogen and phosphorus cycle. And if you map out the
global boundary of phosphorus, the global boundary of nitrogen, and apply it to
where it is actually originating from, which is predominantly in the
applications on agriculture land, what appears that is not surprisingly an
overuse of boundary, in fact a transgression into a danger zone, in the richest
nations in the world, where we have the hotspots in terms of overuse of
nitrogen and phosphorus, while you see the parts of the world that so far stay
very clearly within a safe operating space. And this addresses heads-on the
distributional issue of the boundaries. It shows for example in this case that
poor developing nations in Africa have a right and a need to increase their use
of nitrogen and phosphorus to be able to raise food production, and can still
do so within a safe operating space. While the rich nations in the world actually
need to drastically reduce the use of nitrogen and phosphorus, and particularly
phosphorus because it's also one of these resources that are [is] hitting
peaks.
–
Water use
–
Land Use – forests
Conclusion:
Our analysis of planetary boundaries
defining a safe operating space shows we need to be really precautious. In fact
the analysis indicates that way before we reach a peak level of overuse, we may
have to seriously consider boundaries beyond which we risk crossing tipping
points that can undermine our abilities to thrive in the future. But my
conclusion is we need to put these analyses together, recognizing both peak resources
and the global budgets that we now need to distribute in a fair way among all
citizens in the world to truly have not only a safe sustainable development but
also a just sustainable development.
Lecture 3 –
Social Foundations for Planetary Boundaries – Dr. Sarah Cornell
-Back
in 1987 the Brundtland Report defined sustainability as how many between humans
and nature and how many among people? In other words, environmental processes and
social processes have to be working together for us to achieve global
sustainability.
-A
couple of years ago at the Rio+20 conference this challenge of global
sustainability was the main topic that brought the world's nations together. We
recognize that we're increasingly pushing the world into biophysical
unsustainability, but we've also got major social unsustainability problems
too. If we want to apply the planetary boundaries framework in practice, which
really means applying it at sub-global levels, we have to address the human
dimensions, the human drivers and impacts of environmental change.
-And
they recognize the importance of the planetary boundaries as setting out the
environmental ceiling for the safe operating space for humanity. But they also argued
that for a fair and just world we need to recognize the social foundations of
that safe operating space too. They argued that any framework or vision of
sustainable development for the world that we now live in needs to recognize
that eradicating poverty and increasing justice all around the world is
intimately tied to the biophysical processes of ecological sustainability too.
-Solutions:
We have some practical experience in linking social activities and these global
environmental changes. For example at the global level, the International
Convention on Biological Diversity recognizes the importance of local and
traditional knowledge as an important part of protecting ecosystems and
preventing the loss of biodiversity. We have many community level initiatives
for sustainability. You may be familiar with the Transition Towns, for instance.
That starts to recognize the importance of everybody's action at the local
level to contribute to global sustainability as well. In Transition Towns
people are working together to see how their everyday activities can reduce
their carbon emissions and reduce the pressure on climate change. Businesses are
also engaging in ways of reducing their environment impact, and they need our
encouragement at every step. Fairtrade products are one example and certification
systems that reduce the impact on ecosystems, fisheries, forests, and so on.
These are very practical approaches where we're trying to see how our local social
activities reduce the pressures on global environmental dynamics. We need many
more of these activities, and we need many more to engage in them all around
the world. But these show us that we're moving in the right direction.
Lecture 4 –
Reconnecting Human Development to the Biosphere – Professor Carl Folke
*The biosphere, as you all know, is
this thin layer around the Earth that is the only place in the huge universe
that we as know have hosts life. So we live on this small, little round ball in
this immense universe and have the chance to be alive for up to eight, nine,
ten decades. We're part of this biosphere, we're imbedded in it.
-Since
land was considered not to be a limiting factor for economic and social
development in the mid and late 1900s, it was removed from the economic model.
This removal of land was a clear example of an economics ‘disconnected from the
biosphere.’ Ecological economics was a first attempt to re-work mainstream
economics to bring the biosphere back in. It did this by moving from land as a
factor of production to the concept of “natural capital”. This included “the
land” of the original factor of production but also enabled consideration of
services provided by ecosystems to be included in economic analysis.
-So
in the late '80s we started something called ecological economics to try to
reconnect land, which we later called natural capital, into the model of
economic development.
-And
today when you hear a lot of talks about the green economy, you hear a lot
about efforts to value nature and ecosystem services. It's about making the
natural capital visible in the way we operate the economy. From the level of
big companies in their books and all the way to how we measure GDP in economic development.
But the real model we should strive for is a model where we look at the economy
as a part of society, and society as part of the planet.
-We cannot be independent of the planet
we live on
-So we're living on this little round ball and shaping it
fast and have forgotten about it, which is not very smart for a species that
calls herself, himself homo sapiens, the smart monkey actually.
-So the challenge is really to use our innovative
capacities, our fantastic gift that we have of thinking, and reflecting, and
developing innovations, in line with the biosphere that we're part of and
depend on.
-So the whole idea of reconnecting is really about doing
something very obvious; to appreciate being life on this little round ball, to
reflect on it, and reconnect ourselves. A big challenge when we are living in
urban areas. About 50, 60% of people are in urban areas today and are not
always connected to the broader planet on a daily basis.
Reflections on People in the Biosphere
Because the
world is round it turns me on. Because the wind is high it blows my mind.
Because the sky is blue it makes me cry. –Beatles
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