According to a recent report, six of nine planetary boundaries—climate change, deforestation, biodiversity loss, synthetic chemicals including plastics, freshwater depletion, and nitrogen use—are already deep in the red zone.
Key points
- Two of the remaining three—ocean acidification along with the concentration of particle pollution and dust in the atmosphere—are borderline, with only ozone depletion comfortably within safe bounds.
- Planet boundaries are a framework that identifies guardrails for humanity’s impacts on the Earth system.
- It sets limits on how much humans can be allowed to impact not only the climate but also other global processes that are essential for maintaining conditions on the planet to support modern civilisations.
- Developed in 2009, the framework includes nine planet boundaries that scientists believe capture all of the processes critical for maintaining the Earth’s system state.
- The broken boundaries mean the systems have been driven far from the safe and stable state that existed from the end of the last ice age, about 10,000 years ago, to the start of the industrial revolution.
- The whole of modern civilisation arose in this time period, called the Holocene.
- The planetary boundaries are not irreversible tipping points beyond which sudden and serious deterioration occurs
