One planet, one experiment.

— Edward O. Wilson The Diversity of Life

Pushing the Boundary

ANY SYSTEM — biological, financial, mechanical, or digital — has safe operating limits. The trouble is that without an operating manual we don't know where precisely these limits are when it comes to Spaceship Earth. We do, however, know that we're exceeding several already.

We also know that, even within these limits or planetary boundaries, there are tipping points. Past these points, things begin to go swiftly, irreversibly, unpredictably, dangerously, and even fatally wrong. Our momentum can then carry us clean through the boundaries and leave us stranded on the other side.

These boundaries and tipping points apply wherever we look to our global commons, a phrase used to refer to shared resources over which no individual or state has sovereignty such as fresh water, air, biodiversity, and, of course, the ocean.

As wonderful as this shared heritage and legacy might sound, we have thus far been slow to protect and preserve our commons. Most of the global governance institutions designed to do this are struggling. They need to be rethought, restructured, reorganised, and retooled. Luckily, the extraordinary age in which we're living — this Fourth Industrial Revolution of ours — offers ways of safeguarding our commons for future generations.

Back in 1798, the economist Thomas Malthus first proposed his famous theory of population and growth. In essence, he argued that human populations have the potential to grow exponentially (the rate at which they grow accelerates), whilst the rate at which food production increases stays the same (the rate is linear). When a population begins to outgrow its ability to feed itself, it is automatically checked — and brutally so.

Besides the differing growth rates of population and food production posited by Malthus, we have a more obvious problem. Even if the latter could keep up with the former, how could it do so indefinitely? What's more, the problem presented by our burgeoning population is further compounded by that population's lifestyle. Even though the growth rate is slowing and birth rates are starting to level off globally, the proportion of the global population living carbon-heavy lives of bourgeois domesticity and consumption is increasing. This is the trade-off at the heart of the ideological conflict between, on the one hand Malthus and his belief in natural limits to growth, and on the other, economists such as Adam Smith (1776) and David Ricardo (1817) whose work on labour specialisation, free trade, and comparative advantage describe a world of unfettered economic growth and innovation, limited not by natural resources but by human ingenuity. Human ingenuity, they argued, was not a scarce resource — until we started to hit against the maximum capacity for our planet to support life, with our current demands.

Few will argue that you can support infinite growth from finite resources. As Sir David Attenborough told the Royal Geographical Society in 2013, 'anyone who thinks you can [...] is either a madman or an economist.'

PLANETARY BOUNDARIES

Whether we're madmen, economists, mad economists, or none of the above, two things are clear. First, our global population is growing. Second, as economies grow, a greater and greater proportion of this population aspire to what those in the West might call a middle-class lifestyle. Both these facts mean that the demands put upon the planet's resources are increasing. One of our most important objectives is to reach a new definition of economic growth and uncouple it — as well as population growth — from increased resource intensity.

All over the world, more and more of us are driving more and more cars, using more water and electricity, heating or cooling more and more homes, and eating more and more meat and seafood. We currently demand more of the regenerative resources from the Earth than it can sustainably provide and produce more greenhouse gases (GHGs) from the burning of fossil fuels than it can absorb. We need, in fact, 1.5 worlds, or around 18 months of Earth's operating budget, for fresh water, food, and so on to meet our demands each year.

If we imagine the world's resources to be a bank, where once we were living off the interest generated by the capital, we are now working our way through the capital itself. As we do so, the amount of interest that the capital is able to generate is reduced. This makes living off it, as future generations will have to do as well, increasingly difficult.

It's predicted that by 2030 we'll need twice what the Earth can provide if we carry on with 'business as usual'. We are living beyond our means and beyond our planetary boundaries.

In 2009, researchers at the Stockholm Resilience Center published an article in the journal Science in which they identified nine such boundaries:

'Four of nine planetary boundaries have now been crossed [...]

The four are: climate change, loss of biosphere integrity, land-system change, [and] altered biogeochemical cycles (phosphorus and nitrogen).

Two of these, climate change and biosphere integrity, are what the scientists call core boundaries. Significantly altering either of these core boundaries would "drive the Earth System into a new state".'

We are also nudging the red line on several other core boundaries like ocean acidification and stratospheric ozone depletion.

In addition to all this, there are measurements where we don't even know where the red line is. For example, what is the minimum diversity of life required to make the Earth's biosphere function? Take another example: We think that the 'safe' level of atmospheric carbon dioxide is 350 parts per million but we don't know for sure. We do know, however, that it has already broken through 400ppm.

Nor do we know the maximum particulate pollution load the atmosphere can withstand. What is the impact of all the novel chemicals and compounds we release into the environment? We have a fair understanding of some of these such as industrial cooling fluids (like PCBs) and heavy metals like mercury, but the full impact on cellular biology and ecology of others, like plastic, are far from clear.

How we use the planet's resources and how our colossal population interacts with the world's life-support systems needs radically rethinking if we are to stay within our planetary boundaries and keep those systems operating.

TIPPING POINTS

It's more complicated than that, though. Even were we to live within these...