In 2009, Johan Rockström, the head of the Stockholm Resilience Center, and a group of 28 internationally renowned created the planetary boundaries concept — a set of nine planetary boundaries within which humanity can continue to develop and thrive for generations to come.
Planetary boundaries are a framework to describe limits to the impacts of human activities on the Earth system. Beyond these limits, the environment may not be able to self-regulate anymore. This would mean the Earth system would leave the period of stability of the Holocene, in which human society developed.
Crossing a planetary boundary comes at the risk of abrupt environmental change. The framework is based on scientific evidence that human actions, especially those of industrialized societies since the Industrial…
Read the full article originally published at cleantechnica.com.