Planetary Boundaries: Beyond Climate Change

This summer, humanity has not remained indifferent to the adverse phenomenon of climate change. Lethargy no longer takes its toll; consequences are greater.

No region of the planet escaped the climatic imbalance: the floods in Pakistan that left 50 million displaced and the droughts and fires in the USs, China, France and Spain with historic record-high temperatures.

Consequences are no longer hypothetical, nor are they just about the forecasts contained in the reports of the Interdisciplinary Group on Climate Change Studies (IGCS). Rather, it is about our new reality. These events  will no longer be an exception, but the new normality. Unfortunately, they will increase for at least the next 100 years.

Although there is already concern and most countries are carrying out actions to mitigate the phenomenon of climate change, the environmental problem is not going to be solved by reducing greenhouse gas emissions. It is one of the challenges, perhaps the greatest, but it is not the only one.

Since the 1970s and the book The Limits to Growth, by a group of scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) who were commissioned  by the Club of Rome, we have know that if we continue with our current  social and economic model,  which implies a consumer society at all costs, mechanized and chemical agriculture, the expansion of urbanized areas, the loss of biodiversity, extraction of raw materials and the contamination of our activities, among other activities, our destiny is the collapse of society. This model requires raw material that is subtracted from the planet based on the belief of a planet with infinite resources and a great resilience and absorption capacity.

But in reality, if the state of affairs remains the same, human actions will have a negative, irreversible impact of depleting our natural resources, affecting ecosystems and ultimately ourselves as a civilization and individuals.

New data shows us that humanity is experiencing an exponential population explosion with all the material necessities of modern life. In recent decades, our agricultural needs have increased fourfold, energy needs by a factor of 10 and construction materials by 30 — there is more concrete and cement mass than that of biomass. At this rate, we will reach the planetary limit faster, which would mean the end of our known world as we know it. But what does this concept of planetary boundaries mean?

One of the consequences of a finite Earth is the existence of certain limits that we cannot exceed if we want to continue enjoying the current conditions that have allowed the development and apogee of humanity. It is undeniable that our human activities affect the planet and its ecosystems. So exceeding those thresholds would result in  a degradation of our quality of life and the possibility of a collapse. 

The Limits to Growth was pioneering in  its day and incidentally, it was the first computerized projection that measured the consequences of our productive and economic system. It designed models with variants that inexorably concluded a civilizational collapse. That book  — like more recent publications  produced by the United Nations — was  not the work of some enlightened neo-hippies who came out of Woodstock, but was produced by eminent figures from the best American universities at the request of the Club of Rome, an organization made up of the richest countries in the world who promoted the free market. This is important to underline because it represents a breaking point.

After its release, in March 1972, no leader could claim that he did not know the consequences of our actions or inactions.  From that moment on, the first modern environmental regulations and laws emerged worldwide to generate awareness.

New models were created to calculate our consumption of raw materials and what it represents on a planetary scale, which created the famous ecological footprint that  allows us to measure how our needs use many resources that we have to extract increasingly more from our place of belonging.

To  give an example,  The ecological footprint model allows us to conclude that London and its inhabitants have an impact comparable to the size of the UK. In other words, the territory of the British Isle and everything it produces can only satisfy the people of London.

Which inevitably causes a planetary imbalance because to meet the other needs of the UKm, resources from other places have to run out.

The most overwhelming fact of the ecological footprint methodology is that if all of humanity wanted to reach the standard of living of Americans, 10 planet Earths would be necessary to satisfy the necessary resources for the long-sought-after American way of life.

After having discovered the phenomenon of the greenhouse effect and given the need to evaluate and calculate the emissions of CO2 and similar gases to comply with the provisions of the Kyoto Protocol and then the Paris Agreement, a new methodology emerged: “Bilan carbone.”

This was created by the Environmental and Energy Control Agency (ECA), a French governmental agency. The Bilan Carbone is a diagnostic instrument to understand and analyze human activities, both individually and in industrial, agricultural, business or human agglomerations, and the different levels of government in the area of direct and indirect emissions of gases that cause greenhouse effects.

This methodology is used by the signatory states of the Paris Agreement. That is why it has become so popular. But awareness of global warming and the duty to attack its causes have distorted environmental struggles. Although it represents the greatest challenge, the socio-environmental problem is much more complex and goes beyond the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.

As I referred to in a previous article, the so-called clean energies are actually non-carbonized energies; they serve to reduce the emissions of gases that cause climate change, but they do have a negative impact on the environment, since they are generally highly extractivist energies that require large amounts of minerals.

The preponderant fight against climate change has displaced and blurred several of the problems of environmental deterioration and the vast majority of efforts to fight against pollution are concentrated in this area. Unfortunately, this is only one of many socio-environmental problems. For this reason, since 2010, several scientists have materialized another methodology that encompasses the main environmental challenges that humanity has to face.

At the beginning of this century, several scientists, including Eugene F. Stoermer and Nobel Prize winner Paul Crutzen, at an international meeting at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), forged a new word that designates a new geological era: "the Anthropocene." As its root indicates, it is a geological era whose formation is not due to natural phenomena, such as the explosion of a meteor in the Yucatan Peninsula, but due to human activities.

From the study on the Anthropocene, scientists Crutzen and Stoermer demonstrated that large-scale human activities definitely negatively affect the good state of terrestrial ecosystems and ultimately our entire biosphere. The thesis emphasizes that our modus vivendi, that is, of the extreme consumer society, is not compatible with the planetary balance.

Ten years later, Johan Rockström and Will Steffen took up the idea of the Anthropocene, and together with a working group of 26 scientists from the Stockholm Resilience Center, came to the conclusion that there are planetary limits that humanity cannot exceed if  we don't want to risk not only our human civilization but all  life and the conditions of our planet. 

The group identified that there are nine planetary limits that must not be exceeded in the following order: climate change; the erosion of biodiversity; the flow of biochemicals: destabilizing concentrations of nitrogen and phosphorus; the hoarding of land; fresh water quality; ocean acidification; the thinning of the ozone layer; contamination from volatile particles in the atmosphere; and chemical contamination from new particles or artificial materials.

Exceeding the thresholds of these planetary limits corresponds, according to the methodology, to the imbalance of the planet's ecosystem that allows the viability of terrestrial life, and this is sometimes irreversible.

The methodology makes it possible to delimit the comfort or sustainable security zone where humanity can develop and satisfy its needs without compromising future viability. The authors of the methodology, at the time of its conceptualization, considered that we had already exceeded three limits for which we had measurable or comparable values.

The planetary limits methodology, according to Rockström and Steffen, allows us to identify the processes of material and chemical flows that regulate the stability, but also the resilience of planet Earth, through a quantitative measurement of the thresholds of humanity that should not be exceeded in order to sustain our well-being.

It  finds answers to the question: up to what limits can the Earth absorb anthropic pressure without compromising the optimal conditions for human life and without considering the other species on the planet and ecosystems?

In 2010, with the tools and data available to the group, it was possible to observe that three limits had been exceeded. With scientific advances, calculation processes and current databases. Unfortunately this year in January and May, we have gone from three to six exceeded limits.

For greater clarity of the methodology, its classification is divided into three groups:

1. Limits yet to surpass

2. Limits surpassed

3. And finally, limits that we do not have the capacity, for the moment, to quantify.

 The limits yet to surpass:

1. Ocean Acidification

2. Use of freshwater

3. Stratospheric ozone depletion

The limits surpassed:

4. Integrity of the biosphere or biodiversity

5. Incorporation of new entities or chemical contamination

6. Biochemical fluxes of nitrogen and phosphorus

7. The phenomenon of climate change

8. Land system change

And one more for which we still do not have data or the capacity to measure is that of the concentrations that could indicate status, although there is a suspicion that the threshold has been crossed:

9. Atmospheric Aerosol Loading

It is worrying to note that since 1972 with the publication of The Limits to Growth until this new update regarding planetary limits, in which it is observed that six have already been exceeded recently, it is urgent that we change our habits and forge new models of coexistence and economic growth.

The mass consumer society and its democratization for emerging and developing countries is simply impossible. The model of planetary limits is also very illustrative regarding the fact that one should not focus on just a few problems, such as the strategy to fight climate change with the supposed clean energies that are not clean, only decarbonized.

We need to visualize the seriousness of the matter and as the model demonstrates, we do not have time to spare if we want to reverse the trend and avoid reaching the nine planetary limits that would mean the end of modern society as we know it.