| 1. |
- Downing, Andrea S., et al.
(författare)
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Learning from generations of sustainability concepts
- 2020
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Ingår i: Environmental Research Letters. - : IOP Publishing. - 1748-9326. ; 15:8
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Forskningsöversikt (refereegranskat)abstract
- Background: For decades, scientists have attempted to provide a sustainable development framework that integrates goals of environmental protection and human development. The Planetary Boundaries concept (PBc)-a framework to guide sustainable development-juxtaposes a 'safe operating space for humanity' and 'planetary boundaries', to achieve a goal that decades of research have yet to meet. We here investigate if PBc is sufficiently different to previous sustainability concepts to have the intended impact, and map how future sustainability concept developments might make a difference. Design: We build a genealogy of the research that is cited in and informs PBc. We analyze this genealogy with the support of two seminal and a new consumer-resource models, that provide simple and analytically tractable analogies to human-environment relationships. These models bring together environmental limits, minimum requirements for populations and relationships between resource-limited and waste-limited environments. Results: PBc is based on coherent knowledge about sustainability that has been in place in scientific and policy contexts since the 1980s. PBc represents the ultimate framing of limits to the use of the environment, as limits not to single resources, but to Holocene-like Earth system dynamics. Though seldom emphasized, the crux of the limits to sustainable environmental dynamics lies in waste (mis-)management, which sets where boundary values might be. Minimum requirements for populations are under-defined: it is the distribution of resources, opportunities and waste that shape what is a safe space and for whom. Discussion: We suggest that PBc is not different or innovative enough to break 'Cassandra's dilemma' and ensure scientific research effectively guides humanity towards sustainable development. For this, key issues of equality must be addressed, un-sustainability must be framed as a problem of today, rather than projected into the future, and scientific foundations of frameworks such as PBc must be broadened and diversified.
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| 2. |
- Downing, Andrea S., et al.
(författare)
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Matching scope, purpose and uses of planetary boundaries science
- 2019
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Ingår i: Environmental Research Letters. - : IOP Publishing. - 1748-9326. ; 14:7
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Forskningsöversikt (refereegranskat)abstract
- Background: The Planetary Boundaries concept (PBc) has emerged as a key global sustainability concept in international sustainable development arenas. Initially presented as an agenda for global sustainability research, it now shows potential for sustainability governance. Weuse the fact that it is widely cited in scientific literature (>3500 citations) and an extensively studied concept to analyse how it has been used and developed since its first publication. Design: From the literature that cites the PBc, we select those articles that have the terms 'planetary boundaries' or 'safe operating space' in either title, abstract or keywords. Weassume that this literature substantively engages with and develops the PBc. Results: Wefind that 6% of the citing literature engages with the concept. Within this fraction of the literature we distinguish commentaries-that discuss the context and challenges to implementing the PBc, articles that develop the core biogeophysical concept and articles that apply the concept by translating to sub-global scales and by adding a human component to it. Applied literature adds to the concept by explicitly including society through perspectives of impacts, needs, aspirations and behaviours. Discussion: Literature applying the concept does not yet include the more complex, diverse, cultural and behavioural facet of humanity that is implied in commentary literature. Wesuggest there is need for a positive framing of sustainability goals-as a Safe Operating Space rather than boundaries. Key scientific challenges include distinguishing generalised from context-specific knowledge, clarifying which processes are generalizable and which are scalable, and explicitly applying complex systems' knowledge in the application and development of the PBc. We envisage that opportunities to address these challenges will arise when more human social dimensions are integrated, as we learn to feed the global sustainability vision with a plurality of bottom-up realisations of sustainability.
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| 3. |
- Lade, Steven J., et al.
(författare)
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A prototype Earth system impact metric that accounts for cross-scale interactions
- 2021
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Ingår i: Environmental Research Letters. - : IOP Publishing. - 1748-9326. ; 16:11
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Human activities are disrupting the Earth system's biophysical processes, which underlie human wellbeing. The planetary boundary framework sets 'safe' global limits on these pressures, but a sub-global assessment of these pressures, their interactions and subsequent systemic effects is needed to enable corporate and public entities to assess the systemic environmental impacts of their decisions. Here, we developed a prototype Earth system impact metric that is savvy to Earth system interactions. First, we quantified sub-global interactions between climate change, surface water runoff, and vegetation cover using the global dynamic vegetation model LPJmL (Lund-Potsdam-Jena managed Land). Second, we used a feedback model to study how these interactions amplify environmental impacts. We found, for example, that interactions more than double the Earth system impacts of deforestation in some tropical forests. Finally, we combined these amplification factors with an assessment of the current state of the Earth system to create a prototype Earth system impact metric. We envision that future versions of our prototype metric will allow corporate and public actors to better assess the systemic environmental impacts of their decisions. Our ambition is that these results catalyse further scientific work to extend and improve this metric, as well as action by investors, companies, cities, and governments to deliver sustainable outcomes across the private and public sectors.
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| 4. |
- Tobian, Arne, 1992-, et al.
(författare)
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Climate change critically affects the status of the land-system change planetary boundary
- 2024
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Ingår i: Environmental Research Letters. - 1748-9326. ; 19:5
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The planetary boundaries framework defines a safe operating space for humanity. To date, these boundaries have mostly been investigated separately, and it is unclear whether breaching one boundary can lead to the transgression of another. By employing a dynamic global vegetation model, we systematically simulate the strength and direction of the effects of different transgression levels of the climate change boundary (using climate output from ten phase 6 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project models for CO2 levels ranging from 350 ppm to 1000 ppm). We focus on climate change-induced shifts of Earth's major forest biomes, the control variable for the land-system change boundary, both by the end of this century and, to account for the long-term legacy effect, by the end of the millennium. Our simulations show that while staying within the 350 ppm climate change boundary co-stabilizes the land-system change boundary, breaching it (>450 ppm) leads to critical transgression of the latter, with greater severity the higher the ppm level rises and the more time passes. Specifically, this involves a poleward treeline shift, boreal forest dieback (nearly completely within its current area under extreme climate scenarios), competitive expansion of temperate forest into today's boreal zone, and a slight tropical forest extension. These interacting changes also affect other planetary boundaries (freshwater change and biosphere integrity) and provide feedback to the climate change boundary itself. Our quantitative process-based study highlights the need for interactions to be studied for a systemic operationalization of the planetary boundaries framework.
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