Planetary boundaries

Click on image to download illustration. Credit: J. Lokrantz/Azote based on Steffen et al. 2015.

The planetary boundaries concept presents a set of nine planetary boundaries within which humanity can continue to develop and thrive for generations to come

In 2009, former centre director Johan Rockström led a group of 28 internationally renowned scientists to identify the nine processes that regulate the stability and resilience of the Earth system. The scientists proposed quantitative planetary boundaries within which humanity can continue to develop and thrive for generations to come. Crossing these boundaries increases the risk of generating large-scale abrupt or irreversible environmental changes. Since then the planetary boundaries framework has generated enormous interest within science, policy, and practice.

Click here to watch Johan Rockström introduce the Planetary Boundaries framework at TED Global 2010.

Read more about how the research on the planetary boundaries came about

Click here to learn more about each of the nine planetary boundaries

Key publications

2009

Ecology & Society: Planetary Boundaries: Exploring the Safe Operating Space for Humanity

Nature: a special section and feature article published in Nature

2015

Most recent update of the framework, published in Science. It stated that society’s activities have pushed climate change, biodiversity loss, shifts in nutrient cycles (nitrogen and phosphorus), and land use beyond the boundaries into unprecedented territory.

Planetary boundaries: Guiding human development on a changing planet

Click here to access figures and data for the updated planetary boundaries framework

2017

From 2017, Johan Rockström’s ERC Advanced Grant Earth Resilience in the Anthropocene is funding an exciting new phase in this work. Centre researchers including Sarah Cornell, Tiina Häyhä, Ingo Fetzer, Steve Lade, Andrea Downing, Jonathan Donges, and Avit Bhowmik have all been actively involved in advancing these frontier areas, and building collaborative research links among a growing international community of scientists.

Policy and practice

2011

Former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged global society to “Help us defend the science that shows we are destabilising our climate and stretching planetary boundaries to a perilous degree.”

Centre researchers kept planetary boundaries in the forefront of policy-advisory processes leading up to the agreement of the global Sustainable Development Goals. Policy-makers working at national and European levels are also interested, catalysing a research network, PB-net.org, which links scientists involved in translating the global framework to operational decision-making scales.

2018

Operationalizing the concept of a safe operating space at the EU level – first steps and explorations. Stockholm Resilience Centre Technical Report, prepared in collaboration with Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) and PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency. Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, Sweden.

2013-2016

A report to the Swedish Environmental Protection AgencyPDF (pdf, 901.8 kB) assessed Sweden’s responsibility, and a 2016 study for the European Environment Agency assessed the contribution to global boundaries both of activities within Europe’s territory and of effects of its citizens’ consumption. Increasingly, companies are asking for guidance on putting the planetary boundaries into business practice.

The World Business Council on Sustainable Development, a forum for 200 companies including some of the best-known brands in the world, used the planetary boundaries framework to shape their Action 2020 strategy. Since then, there has been further engagement with companies in financial investment, food, textiles, building, technology, and household goods sectors.

2017

Stockholm Resilience Centre became the scientific partner in a research project with the Ellen MacArthur Foundation and the Swedish clothing retailer H&M group, working to integrate the planetary boundaries framework and the circular economy concept.

Related content

  • Publications
    Here you can find the original articles behind the research along with related publications
  • Background
    How did the research on the planetary boundaries come about?
  • About the research
    Since the planetary boundaries were first presented in 2009, researchers from around the world have sought to advance the concept

Contact

Related info

For direct inquiries about the planetary boundaries concept and its research, please contact Sarah Cornell, Planetary boundaries coordinator

sarah.cornell@su.se
Phone +46 (0) 73 707 8580

Key publications

Rockström, J., W. Steffen, K. Noone, Å. Persson, et.al. 2009. Planetary boundaries:exploring the safe operating space for humanity. Ecology and Society 14(2): 32

Rockström, J., Steffen, W., Noone, K., Persson, Å., et.al. 2009. A safe operating space for humanity. Nature 461: 472-475 DOI 10.1038/461472a

Steffen, W., K. Richardson, J. Rockström, S.E. Cornell, et.al. 2015. Planetary boundaries: Guiding human development on a changing planet. Science 347: 736, 1259855

Download illustrations

The illustrations are free to use in publications, scientific or otherwise, describing the planetary boundaries concept. Correct credit is required.

Download 2015 Planetary Boundaries illustration (credit: J. Lokrantz/Azote based on Steffen et al. 2015)

Download 2015 Planetary Boundaries illustration in black and white (Credit: J. Lokrantz/Azote based on Steffen et al. 2015)

Download Swedish version of 2015 Planetary Boundaries illustration (Credit: J. Lokrantz/Azote based on Steffen et al. 2015)

Download Spanish version of 2015 Planetary Boundaries illustration
(Credit: J. Lokrantz/Azote based on Steffen et al. 2015)

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Theme publications

A safe operating space for New Zealand/Aotearoa: Translating the planetary boundaries framework

Policy brief or report | 2020

A safe operating space for New Zealand/Aotearoa: Translating the planetary boundaries framework. 2020. Report by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Stockholm Resilience Centre and the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change. Commissioned by New Zealand Ministry for the Environment.

The purpose of the report is to translate the planetary boundaries framework for New Zealand to inform government approaches to environmental stewardship, well-being and economic development. • The planetary boundaries framework provides an international and long-term context for national policy setting. It can be used as a benchmark for measuring progress towards environmental goals. • The framework provides a systems view ...

Feeding ten billion people is possible within four terrestrial planetary boundaries

Journal / article | 2020

Gerten, D., Heck, V., Jägermyr, J., Bodirsky, B., L., Fetzer, I., et.al. 2020. Feeding ten billion people is possible within four terrestrial planetary boundaries. Nat Sustain (2020) doi:10.1038/s41893-019-0465-1

Global agriculture puts heavy pressure on planetary boundaries, posing the challenge to achieve future food security without compromising Earth system resilience. On the basis of process-detailed, spatially explicit representation of four interlinked planetary boundaries (biosphere integrity, land-system change, freshwater use, nitrogen flows) and agricultural systems in an internally consistent model framework, we here show t...

Integrating the Water Planetary Boundary With Water Management From Local to Global Scales

Journal / article | 2020

Zipper, S.C., Jaramillo, F., Erlandsson, L-W., Cornell, S.E., Gleeson, T., Poorka. M. 2020. Integrating the water planetary boundary with water management from local to global scales. Earth's Future, DOI: 10.1029/2019EF001377

The planetary boundaries framework defines the “safe operating space for humanity” represented by nine global processes that can destabilize the Earth System if perturbed. The water planetary boundary attempts to provide a global limit to anthropogenic water cycle modifications, but it has been challenging to translate and apply it to the regional and local scales at which water problems and management typically occur. We dev...

Challenges and opportunities towards improved application of the planetary boundary for land-system change in life cycle assessment of products

Journal / article | 2019

Bjørn, A., Sim, S., King, H., Keys, P., Erlandsson, L-W., Cornell, S.E. et.al. 2019. Challenges and opportunities towards improved application of the planetary boundary for land-system change in life cycle assessment of products. Science of The Total Environment Volume 696, 15 December 2019, 133964

Life cycle assessment (LCA) can be used to translate the planetary boundaries (PBs) concept to the scale of decisions related to products. Existing PB-LCA methods convert quantified resource use and emissions to changes in the values of PB control variables. However, the control variable for the Land-system change PB, “area of forested land remaining”, is not suitable for use in LCA, since it is expressed at the beginning of a...

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