Planetary boundaries
In 2009, Rockström led an international group of 28 leading academics, who proposed a new Earth system framework for government and management agencies as a precondition for sustainable development.
The framework posits that Earth system processes on the planet have boundaries or thresholds that should not be crossed. The extent to which these boundaries are not crossed marks what the group calls the safe operating space for humanity.
The group identified nine "planetary life support systems" essential for human survival and attempted to quantify just how far seven of these systems have been pushed already. They then estimated how much further we could go before our survival is threatened; beyond these boundaries, there is a risk of "irreversible and abrupt environmental change" which could make Earth less habitable.
Boundaries can help identify where there is room and define a "safe space for human development", which is an improvement on approaches that aim to minimize human impacts on the planet.
According to critics, the exact location of six of these "planetary boundaries" are not proven but arbitrary, such as the 15% limit of earth use to cropland. It is claimed that increased earth use has increased global well-being. They are also connected to local rather than global consequences.
"Agriculture and food production globally present the greatest climate change challenge of all. Their big adverse effects on the ecosystem are compounded by associated impacts through deforestation, agricultural monocultures, biodiversity loss, and the declining health of soils and water"
If we do all that, “we have a 66 percent chance of staying under 2 degrees C,” Rockström says. But even that will cause ecosystem changes, moving us away from the Holocene, the geological epoch over the past 11,000 years which never saw temperature variations greater than plus or minus 1 degree C. This climate sweet spot was a “Garden of Eden”, Rockström says, in which humans have flourished.
Click here for more information: https://stories.ehf.org/new-zealand-must-play-a-leading-role-in-the-agricultural-revolution-9eda705a2376
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