A “Planetary Boundaries” Straw-Man

Update:  I work at the Stockholm Resilience Centre, headed by Johan Rockström and Carl Folke. The opinions reflected here are my own, and not the organizations. The notion of “planetary boundaries” and its potential policy implications, are without doubt worth discussing. But the last blogpost by Roger Pielke Jr. (professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, as […]

Postdoc on Planetary Boundaries at Stockholm Resilience Centre

The Stockholm Resilience Centre seeking a research coordinator to coordinate and initiate interdisciplinary research on Planetary Boundaries. The job ad is here: The successful candidate will benefit from a dynamic research environment at the SRC as well as the wider network of Planetary Boundary research partners. He/she will be based in the Global and cross-scale […]

Visualizing Planetary Boundaries

Seems like Christmas comes early this year! Visualizing.org just announced the results  of the Visualizing Marathon 2010. One of the challenges was to visualize planetary boundaries, i.e. the concept of multiple and non-linear earth system processes presented by Johan Rockström and colleagues last year. The winner: MICA Team #3 and the project One Day Cause + Effect: […]

Johan Rockström at TED on planetary boundaries

Johan Rockström, from the Stockholm Resilience Centre, talks at TED about strategies people can use to transform our civilization (citing work on Latin American agriculture, the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, Kristianstad in Sweden, and Elinor Ostrom‘s work) to enable the Earth System to remain within planetary boundaries. Ethan Zuckerman provides a summary of the […]

Johan Röckstrom talks about Planetary Boundaries

Johan Röckstrom recently gave a talk on Planetary Boundaries based on the papers Nature (doi:10.1038/461472a) and Ecology and Society. In those papers the authors propose propose nine planetary boundaries, beyond which the functioning of the earth system will fundamentally change from the conditions in which human civilization has emerged.  They argue that we have crossed […]

Planetary Boundaries

A number of resilience researchers, and many others, have proposed the concept of planetary boundaries in a new paper A safe operating space for humanity in Nature (doi:10.1038/461472a). Johan Rockstrom and others propose nine planetary boundaries, beyond which the functioning of the earth system will fundamentally change.  They argue that we have crossed the climate, […]

A Planet without Humans? Two Short Reflections on “Does the terrestrial biosphere have planetary tipping points?”

Are “planetary tipping points” likely? Trends in Ecology and Evolution recently published a very thought provoking article by Brooks et al. that challenges the notion of abrupt global threshold change. In the authors’ own words, we are likely to experience “[…] relatively ‘smooth changes at the global scale, without an expectation of marked tipping patterns.” “Planetary […]

Can science deliver? Only twenty more years to come up with sustainable solutions to many planetary dilemmas

Today, April 30, is the last day of the Open Meeting of the International Human Dimensions Programme (IHDP).  It is a transdisciplinary meeting where scientists from all over the world come together to discuss solutions to the pressing social and environmental issues facing our societies in the 21st century.  Over the course of 3 days, […]

Critically reflecting on social-ecological systems research

Guest post from Simon West, Diego Galafassi, Jamila Haider, Andres Marin, Andrew Merrie, Daniel Ospina-Medina, Caroline Schill Critical reflection is a core competence for sustainability researchers and a crucial mechanism through which research evolves and breaks new ground. For instance, Lance Gunderson and C.S. Holling stress in the canonical social-ecological systems (SES) book Panarchy that SES […]