Museologia Social e Fronteiras do Planeta

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Ficha Técnica: Heranças Globais – Memórias Locais Revista de práticas de museologia informal Nº 8. spring 2016 Diretor Pedro Pereira Leite ISSN - 2182-7613 Edição: Marca d’ Água: Publicações e Projetos Redação: Casa Muss-amb-ike Ilha de Moçambique, 3098 Moçambique Lisboa: Passeio dos Fenícios, Lt. 4.33.01.B 5º Esq. 1990-302 Lisboa -Portugal

Revista de Praticas de Museologia Informal nº 8 Spring 2016

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Índice Introduction .................................................................................................................................. 6 1 – The Antropocene .................................................................................................................................... 9 1.1 – The Big Picture ............................................................................................................................. 11 1.2. The Quadruple Squeeze .................................................................................................................. 14 1.3. The great acceleration ..................................................................................................................... 18 2 -Visions of the Anthropocene .................................................................................................................. 23 2. 1. Humanity's period of grace: the Holocene e Anthropocene ........................................................... 23 2.2. Entering the Anthropocene ............................................................................................................. 28 2.3 Non-linear thinking in the Anthropocen .......................................................................................... 32 2.4. Imagining the Anthropocene ........................................................................................................... 36 2.5.- Making the case for the Anthropocene .......................................................................................... 40 3. Social-ecological resilience .................................................................................................................... 44 3.1. Social-ecological systems ............................................................................................................... 45 3.2. Feedbacks, interactions and regime shifts ....................................................................................... 49 3.3. Example: Ecological surprises ........................................................................................................ 54 3.4. Understanding complexity in a turbulent world .............................................................................. 59 3.5. Earth-resilience and cross-scale interactions ................................................................................... 65 3.6. Understanding complexity in a turbulent world .............................................................................. 68 4. A new framework for human development ............................................................................................ 73 4.1. Introducing the planetary boundaries framework............................................................................ 73 4.2. -Justification for the planetary boundary selection ......................................................................... 77 4.3 - Quantification of the nine planetary boundaries ............................................................................ 81 4.4 - Climate change .............................................................................................................................. 86 4.5 Ocean acidification .......................................................................................................................... 90 4.6. Stratospheric ozone depletion ......................................................................................................... 95 5. The four "slow" boundaries .................................................................................................................... 97 5.1. Biodiversity loss .............................................................................................................................. 98 5.2. Land and water use change ........................................................................................................... 102 5.3 Interference with global n and p cycles .......................................................................................... 107 5.4. Aerosol loading ............................................................................................................................. 111 5.5. Novel entities ................................................................................................................................ 114 5.6. Synthesis and progress on planetary boundaries ........................................................................... 117 6. Resources and interactions ................................................................................................................... 122 6.1. Interactions between planetary boundaries ................................................................................... 123 6.2. Issues of access and distribution: peak everything ........................................................................ 128 6.3. Social foundations for planetary boundaries ................................................................................. 134 6.4. Reconnecting human development to the biosphere ..................................................................... 137

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7. Global Governance ............................................................................................................................... 141 7.1. Existing structures of global governance ...................................................................................... 142 7.2. New and emerging perspectives on global governanc .................................................................. 145 7.3. A Shifting Development Paradigm ............................................................................................... 148 7.4.- Promising pathways to success .................................................................................................... 152 7.4. 1-Energy - a promising pathway ............................................................................................... 152 7.4.2.. The role and risks of technology in the anthropocene .......................................................... 154 7.4.3. - Cities: challenges and opportunities .................................................................................... 156 7.5. Feeding humanity in an urban world´ ........................................................................................... 159 8. Science, Policy and Individual Action in the Anthropocene ................................................................ 162 8.1. Development of the sustainable development goals ..................................................................... 163 8.2. Science in the Anthropocene ......................................................................................................... 167 8.3. Interviews. Reflections on taking action in the Anthropocene ...................................................... 169 8.4. Key messages and final remarks ................................................................................................... 170

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Introduction We face an unprecedented global challenge. We, humanity, and predominantly the rich, developed countries have imposed upon ourselves nothing less than a planetary crisis. Scientific evidence now indicates that our own influence has altered Earth system processes to a point that we have begun transgressing planetary boundaries that have enabled modern civilizational development over the past 10,000 years. Planetary boundaries are the critical biophysical boundaries that we need to stay within to avoid unacceptable environmental change with serious, potentially disastrous consequences for societies. Together with scientific colleagues from around the world we have shown that we're close to, or beyond, at least four of them:    

climate change, the rate of biodiversity loss, nutrient loading or pollution, and ocean acidification.

However, this deep scientifically founded concern for the future are coupled with an equal share of hope. Based on the vast treasure of opportunities, the ability to innovate, and the good chances of succeeding in a global transition to a world within a safe operating space of planetary boundaries. This is a formidable challenge. In fact, the largest challenge the world has ever faced. For the first time in modern history we now have the real opportunity of eradicating absolute poverty and hunger in the world within one generation. All citizens in the world have a right to development in a world that will soon be hosting 9 billion people. To succeed in lifting all up on the development ladder will require continued economic development, but now we need a global transition to a sustainable economic development, a sustainable growth and development within the safe operating space of a stable earth system. This is an entirely new challenge for humanity: both in pace, and in scale. These insights constitute the kernel of this online course on Planetary Boundaries and Human Opportunities, which myself, and my colleagues at the Stockholm Resilience Centre are hosting with SDSN.edu. When you think of it it's quite remarkable. One single species among many millions of species on mother Earth have recently taken over the planetary driving seat, and now determines its future journey. We, human beings, have become our own geological epoch - the Anthropocene. Where human action is now influencing every aspect of the Earth, at a scale akin to the great forces of nature. There are now so many of us using so much resources, and changing so profoundly the living ecosystems on Earth that we're disrupting the grand cycles of biology, chemistry, and geology. Almost all of planet's ecosystems bear the marks of our presence. Unsustainable patterns of production, consumption, and population growth are challenging the resilience and the stability of the planet to support human activities. Still, despite the obstacles and rising global risks, I believe

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there's reason to be optimistic. Why? Well, the first reason, which is at the heart of this course, is knowledge. We are the first generation to know that we've become a threat to our own existence as a modern civilization. Denial and doubt is no longer an option. These global scale changes can sometimes feel overwhelming, but during the course we will guide you through a number of more local cases and examples of success where challenges and the possible solutions have become more easy to grasp, often with synergies that positive solutions, not only for people, but also for planet. And many of them revolving around agriculture, fisheries, energy, and other aspects of food security - practical operational solutions. One such example is from my own research among poor smallholder farming communities in northern Ethiopia. Here farmers are extremely poor, but proud. They have knowledge, capacity to innovate, and remarkable resilience, by coping and adapting everyday to immensely variable rainfall conditions. They experiment with new innovations, for improved water, soil nutrient management. We all have a lot to learn from them. And this is the second reason for hope. We humans are remarkably adaptable, innovative, and good at cooperation. Scientific findings, emerging technologies, innovations, and existing know-how implies unique opportunities for us to embark on the most challenging and exciting journey ever. A transition to a world that reconnects our society and well-being to the biosphere, and generates human prosperity within safe planetary boundaries. This course gives students an overview of a range of emerging concepts within sustainability science, like the Anthropocene, planetary boundaries, and resilience. These are all at the core of contemporary research and debate on global sustainability. There are key to frame and understand rapidly changing trends in global environmental change, caused by us humans, and to assess responses that aim at reversing global environmental changes that occurring at an even faster pace. They also help us explore pathways for ensuring safe and just human well-being for present and future generations. Me and my colleagues who will guide you through this course are convinced that this journey towards development that is truly sustainable and resilient starts with new relationship between ourselves and planet Earth. This is no small step. In fact, it's a deep mind shift. It turns our conventional development paradigm upside down. Now economic growth and human development must take place within Earth's safe operating space, respecting planetary boundaries. A thriving global society, now and in the future, is impossible without living forests, lakes, waterfalls and oceans, including the atmosphere, and bio-geochemical cycles.

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This course aims at expanding and updating the participant's conceptual toolbox in matters of global sustainability. Upon successful completion, a participant will be able to demonstrate clear understanding of key concepts on global environmental change and the theoretical underpinning, as well as an update on understanding the current debates in understanding global sustainability. And emerging examples of approaches, solutions that are currently being developed in order to transition towards truly global sustainable development. Participants following the course will also become familiar with challenges and opportunities that rapidly emerging technologies pose to our political, economic, ecological, and social systems. My colleagues and I, Sarah Cornell, Victor Galaz, Garry Peterson, Carl Folke, Thomas Elmqvist, Lisa Deutsch, and Kevin Noone, will give lectures and hold interactive online hangouts to answer your questions about the course and sustainable development issues. In addition to this, participants will have access to discussion forums, where you can engage with fellow students across the world, and course staff. The course is also rich in activities that will illustrate the application of concepts, theories, and connect global and local contexts in practical examples. The success of the course, however, depends as much, or even more, on you. An active student base representing a diverse set of experiences, nationalities, cultures, and perspectives is absolutely key in order to make this course a success.

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1 – The Antropocene Welcome to this first lecture of our course. It's a lecture that will give you a broad introduction of the challenges and content of the course. And it all starts with the rising scientific evidence that humanity has entered a completely new era, what will talk much more about, that science now defines as the Anthropocene, an era where humanity is shaping the entire biosphere. We've entered the globalized phase of environmental change. This is not so surprising and difficult to understand. We have got used to the fact that we are totally globalized in our economy, in our trade, in our communication systems, and now we must recognize that we're also in the globalized phase of environmental change. In real time, if someone goes to work emitting carbon dioxide in one part of the world it has, in real time, effects on livelihoods for other individuals in other parts of the world. This is a completely different development paradigm for the world, and we will be exploring what this means for economic development, for social development, for livelihoods, for poverty alleviation in the world. It arises from something quite dramatic. We've all got used to defining sustainable development as the three pillars of development: social, economic, and ecological development - the modern thinking around sustainable development. This course will challenge that concept. We will be putting forward evidence to suggest that we have to redefine development, and we now have to think of the world in terms of providing wealth, development, livelihoods, human prosperity, within the safe, resilient life support systems on Earth. This is truly a fundamental change. It shifts how we think on economics, how we think about poverty, ethics, and even relationships between human beings on Earth. So we'll go through many of these dimensions, what we call the social-ecological complex around human prosperity in this new era of global change. Now normally we discuss large global environmental challenges as something that happens way in the future, something that happens in the next century, or end of this century. What we will walk through during this course is that evidence that, in fact, change is occurring today. It is affecting the economy and livelihoods today. Already at only 1 degree Celsius of global warming, we see evidence, for example, that we can no longer exclude, that the earth system, that has been dampening change could actually change direction and self-accelerate change. For example, by releasing massive amounts of methane, which would mean that the earth system loses resilience and self-accelerates change in a negative direction. We have actually rising evidence that even social instabilities in the world, such as the Arab Spring, which was an enormous rising of a well-educated, socially-connected new generation

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rising against a dictatorial rule over many decades. In fact, cannot be explained in terms of going to scale without also factoring in rising volatility of food prices, and enormous food riots arising from climate change combined with lack of phosphorous, and oil price rises. Probably the first example of how social and environmental changes interplay at the large regional scale causing sudden, abrupt social shifts. We have the evidence from Australia that twelve years of drought actually affects even global food prices, and certainly policy in that part of the world. And finally when Hurricane Sandy, one and a half years back, suddenly veers in from the Atlantic right in over Manhattan, putting even the Wall Street three meters underwater. A kind of a sarcastic reminder that even a financial system is connected to the environmental system in the world. Science shows it's very difficult to explain the sudden and unprecedented veering in of a hurricane if we don't also factor in the fact that the Arctic has changed so rapidly in terms of warming that the cold weather system holding high pressure air in the Arctic has collapsed, probably pushing down pressures, which may have caused a hurricane veering suddenly in on land instead of moving out in the Atlantic. These are a few examples that we already today see impacts of global environmental change on society. And the reason for all this is that over just the last 100 years, we have moved from being a relatively small world on a large planet to a situation where we today, with a lot of empirical evidence, can say that we've now become a large world on a small planet. And that this shift is actually very recent, it's just over the past fifty years. And we'll be discussing and providing a lot of the evidence around this great acceleration, as we define it. Now, the fact that we have entered this globalized phase of environmental change, that we have a great acceleration of human pressures, is something that we simply have to recognize. It's now time for us to navigate the global phase of change in the world. Humanity is now the driver of change, and therefore we're in the driving seat. We can actually make a choice. Either we continue on an unsustainable path, or we transition into a sustainable pathway, which we'll be defining in the following way: as human development within the safe operating space of a resilient and stable planet. And we're excited about this because science has advanced so much that we can now define the safe operating space by identifying planetary boundaries. And the new challenge for humanity is therefore to recognize that we can no longer just manage nations, or businesses, or communities. We must now become planetary stewards of human well-being within a stable and resilient planet. And that's what we're going to focus on in the sessions in this course.

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1.1 – The Big Picture It is a very profound, not to say dramatic, insight that we've now entered the globalized phase of environmental change, that we are now a big world on a small planet. And I can tell you that from science this has been something that has been emerging of the enormous advancements in research over the past 10-15 years. And it's just very recently, just over past 5-10 years that the syntheses in all the data have been put together. It's not something we've known for a very long time. And now I'll be presenting to you the very latest evidence that proves that we have entered a completely new era. So this is story, the scientific story, of the Great Acceleration. Now the Great Acceleration starts with the enormous expansion of human exploitation on the world. We see it from urbanization, we see it from the fact that we've transformed 40% of land area into food production, and it's all translating now into data, which looks as follows. On these graphs here you see from the Industrial Revolution until today the exponential rise for everything that we value in terms of welfare and development, from population growth, economic growth, but even to the number of our paper consumption, and telephone use, and tourism, motor vehicle rising. And you all see the exact same exponential shape. But it all translates to an enormous pressure on planet Earth. So the graphs on exactly every key process in the environment, be it biodiversity loss, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, deforestation, ocean acidification, air pollution, overuse, and eutrophication of lakes and waterways through overloading of nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus, they look exactly the same way as in this right-hand plate. The exponential curves of pressure over the past fifty years. So this is the drama, that the Great Acceleration is based not on theory or models, it's based on real world observations of the exponential rise of pressures on essentially every parameter that matters for our own human well-being. If you put all these curves into one curve it looks like this. Up until roughly the mid-1950s, in fact, we had quite limited pressure on the planet as a whole. It's not as if we haven't caused major environmental damage, even disasters, in the history of humanity. In fact, environmental change has had, and caused, and contributed to the collapse of the Mesopotamian irrigation societies, the Maya culture, major, major disruptions. But these were local to regional consequences. From the mid-1950s onwards we start the exponential rise to the point where we're today risking the entire stability of the Earth system. The warnings came early, as you all are aware, with Rachel Carson's Silent Spring in the early 1960s, with The Limits of Growth from the Club of Rome in 1972. But if you would plot those little points on this graph, and I would urge anyone to do that, you'll see that, perhaps it wasn't all that surprising that conventional economists, and policymakers, and business leaders actually criticized and questioned these warnings, which came so early, insightfully, way before we had the evidence. You know, the curve, which had barely started to rise, could actually go anywhere in the future. But today we are at the top of that exponential curve. Today we're sitting on a mountain of empirical evidence that we are causing a vast, large global experiment on planet Earth.

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We are in fact the first generation to know that we're undermining the ability of the Earth system to support human development. This is a profound new insight. It is not very, very scary potentially. It is also an enormous privilege because it means that we're the first generation to know we need to change. We're the first generation to know that we now need to navigate a transformation to a global sustainable future. And this is where the real excitement arises, that sustainable solutions exist to be able to carry out that transition. Now this all comes across as relatively theoretical when we look at these large curves of exponential pressure. But they do translate immediately to, for example, measurable temperature rise, which has risen in the order of 0.6 degrees Celsius just over the past thirty, forty years, 1degree C over the past hundred years, causing already today challenges for the world economy. And we see it from the empirical data in terms of temperature trends across the world, and we get it documented in scientific synthesis, such as the latest update from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. So there's an enormous amount of evidence to support the conclusion that we are in the Great Acceleration, and need a great transformation. But it's not only about the environment. So here you see a joint set of curves showing on the right-hand side what I previously showed you, the exponential pressures in terms of biodiversity loss, carbon dioxide, fertilizer use, etc. But you see on the very left-hand side you see curves that are very similar to this trend. The upper one is the trend on obesity and stuntness. We have today a world with almost 1 billion obese and over 1 billion of absolutely malnourished, a trend where the obesity is rising, and lifestyle-related diseases are rapidly moving in the wrong direction. The second graph shows antibiotic resistance in our food producing systems. So we are today aware of the fact that agriculture is the world's largest single source of the negative exponential rise in environmental pressures. But it also has tremendous health implications in terms of everything from lifestyle-related non-communicable diseases, in terms of the exponential rise in the world of, for example, Diabetes Type 1. But also in rising risks because were situating ourselves in a position where antibiotic, which is used very intensively in livestock production, can no longer securely help us treat very basic diseases. S o it's a complex again where we need to understand in an integrated way the social, ecological, the health, human well-being, and environmental changes we're posing and subjecting ourselves to in this situation of a Great Acceleration. To add to the challenge we need to recognize that we have two giants colliding right at this very moment. Because you see the pressures we've discussed so far are only, so to say, manifesting the degree to which we're putting pressure on the planet. The big question, of course, is how planet Earth responds. So the first giant that we now need to face is the recognition that these pressures translate increasingly to risks of abrupt tipping points that the Earth system may respond by suddenly and irreversibly undermining the ability, for example, of forests, land areas, and oceans to deliver to the economy.

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But the second giant, which is colliding right as we speak, is something that we often underestimate. The global curves I've showed so far, the exponential rise of pressures have at large been caused by the rich minority on planet Earth, the 1.5 billion affluent people that have been largely part of the Industrial Revolution and its success so far. It is now we're going to scale with the ability of all citizens on the Earth to have a right to development, and that adds up to a completely new magnitude of pressures. But you should also recognize that we need to translate that to the reverse, namely the ethics of providing the right for all inhabitants to have an equal access to the ecological, the remaining ecological space in the world. And that is one of the key challenges we need to discuss much more in terms of defining development in the future. It also translates to exponential curves related to development. This is data showing a very similar exponential hockey stick curve, but showing water scarcity in the world. Over the same period as the Industrial Revolution we have almost, can you believe it, three billion people suffering from water scarcity, almost half of the world's population. And the exponential curves you see in dotted lines here is a success story of trying to solve this problem. This is the expansion of dams, reservoirs, irrigation systems, boreholes, etc., showing that even though we have used technology as far as we ever can, we're still chasing our own tail. We still have a very large proportion of people in the world suffering from water scarcity. So on top of all the challenges in the future we must recognize that we have an enormous challenge also related to the current situation in the world. The same goes for energy. This is the exponential curve in energy use in the world, on the lefthand side originating from the Global Energy Assessment, a large assessment that was finished roughly 1.5-2 years back, showing that our economic development requires modern energy use. So we have this enormous challenge of a rising demand and use of energy, that we with nine billion people increasingly affluent must increase energy use, and at the same time we need a transition, shown in the right-hand graph, to a world which is largely free for emissions of carbon dioxide by mid-century to be able to stay below 2 degrees Celsius. This is the grand challenge for humanity to be able to do this transition by bending these exponential curves in the Anthropocene. But we're not only facing negative exponential curves of pressures on the planet. We also have exponential curves of solutions, and, for example, to solve one of the world's absolute largest challenges, the transition of the world's energy system into a sustainable energy future, we are also seeing today almost a surprisingly rapid exponential rise of adoption of renewable energy systems. And in these graphs you see examples of data showing the installations of solar PV systems and wind power systems just over the past twenty years. And up until just ten years back the rises were very slow, and now we're on an exponential rise, which actually shows that for many economies in the world we're starting to go to scale with renewable energy systems. Exactly this opportunity of understanding the challenges, translating those to different forms of incentives and market-based regulations, policies, that can unleash innovation, not only in the energy system but also in terms of a transition to a sustainable food production, to a transition to circular business models in all types of industries, which can enable an exponential rise in sustainable solutions, which can enable us to bend the curves of negative change so that we enter the desired safe operating space of a stable planet. Revista de Praticas de Museologia Informal nº 8 Spring 2016

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1.2. The Quadruple Squeeze In this lecture I'd just like to lay out to you what are the driving forces that explain why we've ended up in this new juncture with rising global environmental risks. And it arises from what I've called a planetary squeeze, originating from four different large driving forces, the so-called quadruple squeeze from the world on planet Earth. This squeeze arises from four different areas. And the first one is clearly population pressure. And population pressure is not about just the numbers, but it's worth laying them out. We were three billion people at the point where we started the great acceleration of human pressures on the planet in the mid-1950s. We're today seven billion people and we're on our way, in fact committed, to nine billion people in only less than forty years, by 2050. But you see that absolute main driving force which is coupled to human population is not about numbers, it's about affluence, it's about what we call the 2080 dilemma, that the bulk of the global environmental problems that we face today are caused by the rich minority that stepped onto the Industrial Revolution in the mid-18th century. And the vast majority of co-citizens on Earth, the poor co-citizens in our world, have actually contributed very little to the damage and degradation we see so far. But we've just now come to juncture, which is absolutely unique. It is now we're starting to see the positive opportunity of eradicating poverty in the world, of eradicating hunger in the world, of having the majority, in fact the projection shows that we are moving from a world with 1.52 billion middle income citizens in the world to a world with 4, 5, 6 billion people with an average income equivalent to the developed nations in the world. This is enormously positive, it's an enormous opportunity, it's even a right to development, but of course poses enormous challenges if we continue on an unsustainable route. The second pressure is the one that we almost always focus on when we talk about global environmental change, namely human-caused climate change. Here we also have a dilemma related to three numbers. The first one is 450 ppm, the concentration of greenhouse gases that normally is translated from science as the point beyond which we risk very damaging and even dangerous temperature rise. The dilemma is that we have reached 450 ppm. 2014 is the year when we reach 450 ppm for all greenhouse gases. We are already in a danger zone. In fact science shows that we should try to stabilize at 400 ppm or below, meaning, to put it a bit bluntly, that even if we shut down the world today we are in a danger zone, and all projections show that emissions of greenhouse gases continue to rise in the world. And the dilemma is that the pathway we're heading is toward 560 ppm and beyond, which is a level way beyond anything that science stipulates as safe.

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So this is the climate pressure. And you would have wished that this in fact, the largest ever environmental experiment to be performed on planet Earth, human-caused destabilization of the energy system in the atmosphere, would occur on a resilient and strong planet, you would have wished to have a strong, experimental object when you punch the system so hard as were doing when we are emitting greenhouse gases. But unfortunately we now know from science that over the last fifty years we have undermined the ability of the Earth system to cope with climate change faster than ever before. The United Nations Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, the first global health control of the world's ecosystems, show very clearly that over the past fifty years we've lost approximately 60% of the ecosystem functions and services that not only support human well being directly, but also which regulate the capacity of the Earth system to buffer, for example, climate change. One of them being, for example, the carbon sinks in ecosystems and oceans that we'll come back to throughout the course. But this is not enough. Not only do we have a climate crisis and an ecosystem crisis, the space within which we can operate safely is reduced by the insights that we can no longer exclude abrupt, sudden changes, what we'll be calling "tipping points" or "thresholds." And these tipping points and thresholds mean that the space, in terms of how many resources we can utilize on Earth, reduces very drastically. And it arises from the insight that we've always assumed that we can predict changes in the Earth system, such as in the oceans, and in forests, and lakes, and ecosystems in a predictable way, and that things change slowly and linearly. But science now shows that that is the exception. The rule is surprise, very long periods of in fact very limited change, because systems have an in-built resilience to deal with change, just like you can see a boxer in a boxing competition getting one punch after the other and still standing. But then suddenly comes that final punch which means a knockout. Exactly the same type of abrupt knockouts is what we're seeing in the biosphere. And these are the four driving forces that changes the situation for humanity on Earth, that our precious Earth system is subject to a population, climate change, ecosystem, and the insights of surprise, which reduces the space for human development on Earth. Now what are some of the examples behind this evidence? Well the first one is on affluence. And this is data from the OECD showing the quite dramatic projections until 2050, where we'll be nine billion people, shown here on the x-axis, and the green big area here shows the projected economic growth for the world. Can you imagine? The world is projected to have a three times larger world economy in just 2050. The reason for this is predominantly shown in the red and yellow boxes, which shows the very positive trajectories for the world's developing nations. Almost 500% GDP growth over the next thirty years. This is the affluence driving force.

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The climate driving force is very well articulated in the latest scientific update from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Here are just some key findings. On the left-hand side you see the very dramatic scenarios to the future, which takes us all the way to the end of this century, and the possible trajectories in terms of the temperature rise. The red curve, the curve which we certainly do not want to end up with, is the curve that on average takes us to 4 degree C warming, a place where we haven't been for the past four million years. The blue curve is if we would be able to bend the emission of greenhouse gases over the next 5-10 years and take us to a safe future below two degrees warming. But look at the black dots on this graph, and I really recommend you to study this graph particularly, if you have a chance. The black dots are observations. We're following the disastrous 4 degree C pathway. So this is why we have such a large squeeze on climate. On ecosystems, I'm just taking one example here, we'll come back to this, which is showing the risks of deforestation. We're learning more and more for rainforests, and this is an example from the Amazon rainforest, that if we cut down large tracts of rainforest, that combined with climate change, means that we dry out the entire system. And that is very dangerous for rainforests because the majority of the rain in rainforests is self-generated. You need a very, very large canopy of trees, which evaporate water, self-generates rainfall. But when you open up these systems they self-dry and can cross the tipping point and become savannahs. So this is an example of the risks we take because this undermines freshwater supply to big cities, it undermines the ability to produce food, and therefore is an enormous risk with regards to livelihoods. It also makes us lose one of the large global carbon sinks. And finally the risk of tipping points, which is moving from this example of a beautiful biodiverse marine coral reef system, supplying livelihoods for hundreds of millions of people in coastal regions worldwide, which we know today can abruptly shift over and become dead zones. For example, triggered by long, long periods of overfishing, eutrophication, sediments from agriculture, global warming, the system loses resilience slowly but surely, becomes vulnerable, but then a trigger, such as a linear event means that the whole system due to bleaching topples over and becomes permanently locked in a

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desertified state. We'll come back to the following graph which is a very dramatic piece of research showing that if we continue losing biodiversity at this pace by mid-century we can no longer exclude a global tipping point in terms of loss of genetic diversity on Earth. And if we lose that biodiversity we would lose the basis for human development and world prosperity as we know it. So this is just some of the flavors of the science, why we can today say we are subjecting our own Earth, the basis for our own world development, to a quadruple squeeze of population affluence, climate, ecosystem crisis, and the understanding that we can no longer exclude abrupt tipping points that can lead to sudden changes that permanently puts us in a very undesired situation. This is the challenge we're facing, and this is what we need to navigate if we are really thinking about future generations.

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1.3. The great acceleration It is a very profound, not to say dramatic, insight that we've now entered the globalized phase of environmental change, that we are now a big world on a small planet. And I can tell you that from science this has been something that has been emerging of the enormous advancements in research over the past 10-15 years. And it's just very recently, just over past 5-10 years that the syntheses in all the data have been put together. It's not something we've known for a very long time. And now I'll be presenting to you the very latest evidence that proves that we have entered a completely new era. So this is story, the scientific story, of the Great Acceleration. Now the Great Acceleration starts with the enormous expansion of human exploitation on the world. We see it from urbanization, we see it from the fact that we've transformed 40% of land area into food production, and it's all translating now into data, which looks as follows. On these graphs here you see from the Industrial Revolution until today the exponential rise for everything that we value in terms of welfare and development, from population growth, economic growth, but even to the number of our paper consumption, and telephone use, and tourism, motor vehicle rising. And you all see the exact same exponential shape. But it all translates to an enormous pressure on planet Earth. So the graphs on exactly every key process in the environment, be it biodiversity loss, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, deforestation, ocean acidification, air pollution, overuse, and eutrophication of lakes and waterways through overloading of nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus, they look exactly the same way as in this right-hand plate. The exponential curves of pressure over the past fifty years. So this is the drama, that the Great Acceleration is based not on theory or models, it's based on real world observations of the exponential rise of pressures on essentially

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every parameter that matters for our own human well-being. If you put all these curves into one curve it looks like this.

Up until roughly the mid-1950s, in fact, we had quite limited pressure on the planet as a whole. It's not as if we haven't caused major environmental damage, even disasters, in the history of humanity. In fact, environmental change has had, and caused, and contributed to the collapse of the Mesopotamian irrigation societies, the Maya culture, major, major disruptions. But these were local to regional consequences. From the mid-1950s onwards we start the exponential rise to the point where we're today risking the entire stability of the Earth system. The warnings came early, as you all are aware, with Rachel Carson's Silent Spring in the early 1960s, with The Limits of Growth from the Club of Rome in 1972. But if you would plot those little points on this graph, and I would urge anyone to do that, you'll see that, perhaps it wasn't all that surprising that conventional economists, and policymakers, and business leaders actually criticized and questioned these warnings, which came so early, insightfully, way before we had the evidence. You know, the curve, which had barely started to rise, could actually go anywhere in the future. But today we are at the top of that exponential curve. Today we're sitting on a mountain of empirical evidence that we are causing a vast, large global experiment on planet Earth. We are in fact the first generation to know that we're undermining the ability of the Earth system to support human development. This is a profound new insight. It is not very, very scary potentially. It is also an enormous privilege because it means that we're the first generation to know we need to change. We're the first generation to know that we now need to navigate a transformation to a global sustainable future. And this is where the real excitement arises, that sustainable solutions exist to be able to carry out that transition.

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Now this all comes across as relatively theoretical when we look at these large curves of exponential pressure. But they do translate immediately to, for example, measurable temperature rise, which has risen in the order of 0.6 degrees Celsius just over the past thirty, forty years, 1degree C over the past hundred years, causing already today challenges for the world economy. And we see it from the empirical data in terms of temperature trends across the world, and we get it documented in scientific synthesis, such as the latest update from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. So there's an enormous amount of evidence to support the conclusion that we are in the Great Acceleration, and need a great transformation. But it's not only about the environment. So here you see a joint set of curves showing on the right-hand side what I previously showed you, the exponential pressures in terms of biodiversity loss, carbon dioxide, fertilizer use, etc. But you see on the very left-hand side you see curves that are very similar to this trend. The upper one is the trend on obesity and stuntness. We have today a world with almost 1 billion obese and over 1 billion of absolutely malnourished, a trend where the obesity is rising, and lifestyle-related diseases are rapidly moving in the wrong direction. The second graph shows antibiotic resistance in our food producing systems. So we are today aware of the fact that agriculture is the world's largest single source of the negative exponential rise in environmental pressures. But it also has tremendous health implications in terms of everything from lifestyle-related non-communicable diseases, in terms of the exponential rise in the world of, for example Diabetes Type 1. But also in rising risks because were situating ourselves in a position where antibiotic, which is used very intensively in livestock production, can no longer securely help us treat very basic diseases. So it's a complex again where we need to understand in an integrated way the social, ecological, the health, human well-being, and environmental changes we're posing and subjecting ourselves to in this situation of a Great Acceleration. Revista de Praticas de Museologia Informal nº 8 Spring 2016

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To add to the challenge we need to recognize that we have two giants colliding right at this very moment. Because you see the pressures we've discussed so far are only, so to say, manifesting the degree to which we're putting pressure on the planet. The big question, of course, is how planet Earth responds. So the first giant that we now need to face is the recognition that these pressures translate increasingly to risks of abrupt tipping points that the Earth system may respond by suddenly and irreversibly undermining the ability, for example, of forests, land areas, and oceans to deliver to the economy. But the second giant, which is colliding right as we speak, is something that we often underestimate. The global curves I've showed so far, the exponential rise of pressures have at large been caused by the rich minority on planet Earth, the 1.5 billion affluent people that have been largely part of the Industrial Revolution and its success so far. It is now we're going to scale with the ability of all citizens on the Earth to have a right to development, and that adds up to a completely new magnitude of pressures. But you should also recognize that we need to translate that to the reverse, namely the ethics of providing the right for all inhabitants to have an equal access to the ecological, the remaining ecological space in the world. And that is one of the key challenges we need to discuss much more in terms of defining development in the future. It also translates to exponential curves related to development. This is data showing a very similar exponential hockey stick curve, but showing water scarcity in the world. Over the same period as the Industrial Revolution we have almost, can you believe it, three billion people suffering from water scarcity, almost half of the world's population. And the exponential curves you see in dotted lines here is a success story of trying to solve this problem. This is the expansion of dams, reservoirs, irrigation systems, boreholes, etc., showing that even though we have used technology as far as we ever can, we're still chasing our own tail. We still have a very large proportion of people in the world suffering from water scarcity. So on top of all the challenges in the future we must recognize that we have an enormous challenge also related to the current situation in the world. The same goes for energy. This is the exponential curve in energy use

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in the world, on the left-hand side originating from the Global Energy Assessment, a large assessment that was finished roughly 1.5-2 years back, showing that our economic development requires modern energy use. So we have this enormous challenge of a rising demand and use of energy, that we with nine billion people increasingly affluent must increase energy use, and at the same time we need a transition, shown in the righthand graph, to a world which is largely free for emissions of carbon dioxide by midcentury to be able to stay below 2 degrees Celsius. This is the grand challenge for humanity to be able to do this transition by bending these exponential curves in the Anthropocene. But we're not only facing negative exponential curves of pressures on the planet. We also have exponential curves of solutions, and, for example, to solve one of the world's absolute largest challenges, the transition of the world's energy system into a sustainable energy future, we are also seeing today almost a surprisingly rapid exponential rise of adoption of renewable energy systems. And in these graphs you see examples of data showing the installations of solar PV systems and wind power systems just over the past twenty years. And up until just ten years back the rises were very slow, and now we're on an exponential rise, which actually shows that for many economies in the world we're starting to go to scale with renewable energy systems. Exactly this opportunity of understanding the challenges, translating those to different forms of incentives and market-based regulations, policies, that can unleash innovation, not only in the energy system but also in terms of a transition to a sustainable food production, to a transition to circular business models in all types of industries, which can enable an exponential rise in sustainable solutions, which can enable us to bend the curves of negative change so that we enter the desired safe operating space of a stable planet.

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2 -Visions of the Anthropocene 2. 1. Humanity's period of grace: the Holocene e Anthropocene Hello everyone. I hope you had a good first week, where we introduced the big picture, the science behind the evidence showing that we can welcome humanity to the Anthropocene, the Quadruple Squeeze on planet Earth, and the Great Acceleration of the human enterprise. This coming week, we'll now explore the Anthropocene in much more depth, digging ourselves into the different perspectives and visions on the Anthropocene. Professor Garry Peterson, one of our senior head researchers in regime shifts at the Stockholm Resilience Centre will be joining us this week. And please don't miss our first hangout at the end of this module. To understand the human predicament in the globalized phase of environmental change, in a situation where we recognize increasingly that the Earth system self-regulates its stability and that it could push itself away from its current stable state if we trigger the planetary system too far. We must explore something profoundly important in order to help us in the pursuit of global sustainable development, namely to identify what is the desired state of planet Earth? We often illustrate it in the following way, namely showing in different cups the stable states that an ecosystem, or in this case the entire planetary system, can reside in. So one of the largest and most important questions for science today is what is the desired state of planet Earth to support the modern world as we know it? And what is really exciting is that science increasingly shows that we have an answer to this question. And the answer originates, not surprisingly, from paleoclimatic data on ice cores. Now you've probably seen this set of data, the fantastic evidence going all the way back almost 1 million years, here at the ice core data going back 800,000 years, showing temperature variability over this period, and the twisting and churning of the Earth system in and out of two stable states; namely, the deep glacial states, the cold, lower points in these graphs that often have a duration of roughly 120-150,000 years, separated by relatively short periods of interglacial warm periods where we have essentially an ice-free state of the planet with ice in the caps.

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Now what is really interesting with this graph is to look particularly at the last two interglacial periods. You see the label Eemian, and then you see the label Holocene. Holocene is the period that we are in right now, the period where we've been for the past 10,000 years. But the last time we had a warm interglacial is the Eemian, roughly 120,000 years back. Now this period is interesting because over several thousand years it was two degrees warmer than what we have today in the Holocene. And research shows quite clearly that during that period of 2 degrees Celsius warmer than what we have today in the world of the Holocene, sea levels were in the order of 4-6 meters higher than today. And this is to me an enormously clear reminder that the Earth system actually has stayed over very long periods of time within very narrow bands of environmental boundaries or levels, and that even small changes can lead to very, very abrupt and large shifts in life conditions on Earth, in this case manifested at sea level rise. What you also observe from this curve is something quite extraordinary. On the Y axis you see that temperatures on average change with only +/-4 degrees Celsius, and that's the difference between having two kilometers of ice above our heads, and the warm, lush environmental conditions that we are so used to in the world of today. So this is one reminder of the extraordinarily important insight that the environmental conditions on Earth vary and that we have stable states. But let's not go into trying to answer the question of what is our desired state. Then we can go into exactly the same data, which is shown here, but only over the past 100,000 years. So this is the last 100,000 years on Earth, again on the Y axis showing variability of temperature, a good proxy of how it was to live on Earth. And what you'll see now is that this was indeed over almost the entire period a very jumpy ride for humanity indeed.

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We were hunters and gatherers during this period. We were a few million people and we had a very rough time because predominantly because of these enormously rapid jumps between very cold and very warm periods. It's an interesting period because we were modern humans during the entire phase, so we had the same ability, both physically and intellectually, to develop civilization as we know it. Recent genetic paleoanthropological data shows in fact that the cold point that you might there at roughly 75,000 years back when we had hundreds of meters lower sea level than today and most of the fresh water in the world tied up as ice in the polar regions, we're probably down to only 15,000 fertile adults on Earth. We were hidden in the Ethiopian highlands and we had a very rough time of survival. We were essentially extinct. And we go through this entire very tough period and enter then this final stable phase which is shown in a circle here which we have learned in school to call the Holocene. The Holocene is an extraordinarily stable phase for human development. In fact temperatures vary with only +/-1 degrees Celsius. And even though the genetic diversity has been around for millions, often hundreds of millions of years, it is now that everything we know in terms of ecosystems, nature, the biosphere, settles in. This is where the rainforest, the coral reef systems, the temperate forests, all the wetlands, settle in and establish themselves very permanently in the state that we know. It is now the rainy seasons become predictable. It is now in the northern temperate zone we know that we have almost every year a hundred days of temperature, which allows us to grow food. It is now in the tropical regions we have a hundred days of secure rainfall, allowing ourselves to be able to produce food. And not surprisingly we barely enter the Holocene and what do we do?

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We embark on the most important invention of all time; we invent agriculture. And the exciting thing is that we invent agriculture right at the start of the Holocene in at least four different places simultaneously on Earth. And because we didn't have SMS or e-mail or chat rooms it's absolutely proven that this occurred entirely independent of each other, and because of the stable environmental conditions on Earth. We go into the civilizational development starting off with agriculture, the Mesopotamian empires, the Egyptian empires, the Maya, the Chinese, the Latin American civilizations develop all the way to the great acceleration in the mid1950s. We're three billion people and then off we go in the Great Acceleration. We're 7 billion people today, committed to 9 billion people. And the scientific conclusion of this single graph is as simple as it is dramatic, that the Holocene is the only stable state of the Earth that we know can support the modern world as we know it. We can live outside of the Holocene, the planet isn't bothered, but we would probably not have any chance to support the modern world as we know it, soon with nine billion co-citizens. Now this simplifies life tremendously for humanity because we know the Holocene very well. We can define very well the environmental conditions that we need to fulfill in order to remain stable in the Holocene. We understand the carbon cycle, the nitrogen cycle, the phosphorus cycle, the big ecosystems, and this helps us tremendously in defining global sustainability. Now the proof that we have had major problems during this period are shown in this graph showing the very large exodus that we were triggered or forced to embark on during periods of often very, very cold, dry, and food security-wise challenging situations for humanity. We also know during this period from data from Greenland that the jumps in temperature could be 10-15 degrees Celsius over just periods of decades. In fact we have 25 such abrupt shifts over just the past 100,000 years, as evidence that it was a very, very difficult ride for humanity during this cold period before entering the Anthropocene.

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So overall we need to recognize that the biomes and ecosystems in the world sustain and support the Holocene state of the world. That systems such as rainforests that regulate the carbon sinks in large parts of the rainforest systems, and the rainfall systems regionally; that we have coral reef systems that also regulate the resilience in the ocean, and the ability to circulate heat, and the ability to take up carbon dioxide; the large permafrost regions holding vast amounts of methane; the temperate forest regions that provide a canopy that reflects back heat back into space through its darker colour, but also massive carbon sinks; the systems on the savannahs which in turn regulate large parts of heat fluxes, rainfall trajectories, and also carbon sinks; are all systems that together form part of regulating the stable state of the Holocene. And the conclusion is that we understand the Holocene, we need to preserve the Holocene, and the Holocene is the state that we know can support human development in the future.

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2.2. Entering the Anthropocene Science increasingly shows that the Holocene is our desired state; the state that is stable and able to support human development in a world soon to become 9 billion people. Now the drama is that the evidence on the human pressures on the planet point at the risk of us moving out of the Holocene. And in fact it's gone so far that science today indicates that we are entering a whole new geological epoch, the Anthropocene. Anthros for us humans, 7 billion people multiplied by our industrial metabolism today constitute a force of change, which is in pace and magnitude larger than the geological forces of change that has been pushing the planet in and out of ice ages over the geological history of Earth. This is indeed a tremendous change in the way we are managing and taking responsibility for our Earth system. And the large changes are increasingly so well documented, not only in terms of the scientific data but also in terms of what we see around ourselves, in terms of deforestation, overfishing, overwhelming use of unsustainable fossil energy sources, and the expansion of many times unsustainable urban developments. So this is the notion and the recognition that our pressure is translating into an entirely new geological epoch. The definition of the Anthropocene is important. It is actually not a small thing to change all the books and the definitions we have learned in school in terms of the geological epoch we're in. In fact it's so significant that the institution that defines which geological epoch we're in, of course the United Kingdom's, Great Britain's, Royal Society has put up a whole committee which is currently working on exploring whether we have evidence enough to redefine our epoch to the Anthropocene as a new geological era of man and the dominant force of change on Earth. I think it's important to recognize that in the Anthropocene we must simply relate to the new challenge of navigating what I've called a 3-6-9 world. On average science points in the Anthropocene that we're moving towards a 3 degrees Celsius warming in this century. Again, this is a place we haven't been over the past 3 million years. We are in the sixth mass extinction of species, the first mass extinction to be caused by human beings, another species in the world. One of these six, by the way, is when we lost the great, large dinosaurs some 65 million years back. And we are committed to 9 billion people.

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And that this 3-6-9 world is the world of Anthropocene, which we now need to navigate in terms of finding sustainable development. It's a world where we cannot exclude rising risks of abrupt, sudden extreme events. Science clearly shows today that already at 1 degree Celsius warming, and the environmental changes we see today in ecosystems we see a larger frequency and impact in terms of heat waves; in terms of influence and effects on rainfall patterns; and in terms of abrupt extreme events, such as the impacts of hurricanes, such as the impacts of sudden extreme weather events, related both to flooding and to droughts. It's a reality where global changes in Anthropocene affect local conditions, and we can no longer separate what happens locally from the global change. And therefore we need to interact across all levels in societies in order to be able to provide prosperity. It sounds challenging to think of economic development in a large urban area having today to relate to the complex changes in the Earth system, but that is the reality. We can not develop a city, a household, an agricultural system today, planning for fresh water, clean air, ecosystem support, without also understanding that we're changing the planetary system because it hits back on that local scale, across different scales in the world. Now another insight of the Anthropocene is the recognition that the Earth system has stayed within very narrow bands for many of the environmental processes that we discussed, as key for sustainable development. This is one graph showing that over the past 400,000 years, for methane and carbon dioxide, we stay within a very narrow band of just +/- a few hundred ppm on carbon dioxide, in fact never exceeding 280 ppm carbon dioxide over the entire last 500,000 years, and similarly for methane. And we just look, for example, on the situation where we are today, we are seeing that we are vastly moving out of the graph of the maximum/minimum carbon dioxide fluctuations over the past half million years.

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So we're truly in the Anthropocene performing an experiment, which is way outside of the stability domain we've had on the planet for the last several million years, and that these limit cycles are really important because the Earth system tries itself to apply its biogeochemical processes to stay within very narrow bounds for carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, fresh water, temperature, and that this is a key insight in terms of also our world development. We also must, as we increasingly recognize, connect these very, very narrow bands of limits within which the Earth system has evolved, the pressures that we're putting on the system, to the risk of abrupt changes. And this is one example of a very seminal piece of work led by colleagues by the Potsdam Institute of Climate Impact Research showing what are the big systems that could actually tip over a tipping point and abruptly change the conditions for life on Earth. For example, that would destabilize the Southeast Asian monsoon systems; for example, that the western Arctic ice sheet abruptly and irreversibly melts, holding several meters sea level rise; for example, that we shift the entire Atlantic thermohaline circulation system, which would make many parts of the northern temperate zones uninhabitable; or that we knock over the Amazon rainforest to a point where it turns into a savannah. These are the challenges we now must incorporate in our development paradigm. It links also to health. If we start moving along the worst scenario on climate change, which is the red curve shown here that takes us towards 4 degrees C, we must then also recognize that infectious diseases, crop pests and diseases, heat waves and droughts, food insecurity, will increase in the world as temperatures rise, and also reach completely new geographical regions which never had these kind of impacts previously. And now we have projections that would take us 2, 3, 4, 5, potentially 6 degrees C degrees outside of that range. This is a situation where we now must address how can we bend development back towards Holocene-like conditions, even though we are in the Anthropocene? And that we want to avoid a situation where we let unsustainable development go unbounded, which could take us to a transition into a completely new stable hot state of the planet which would not support the modern world as we know it. So to conclude, the challenge for humanity is to recognize that the Holocene is our desired state, we're moving into the Anthropocene, placing us in the driving seat, but we still have a choice. We can navigate ourselves away from the largest risks that the Anthropocene pose. Is this increasingly understood? I would argue yes. And the last Revista de Praticas de Museologia Informal nº 8 Spring 2016

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slide here shows examples of media outside of science welcoming humanity to the Anthropocene. And The Economist has this wonderful citation in its issue welcoming humanity to the Anthropocene, which I think is a good reflection of how science feels today in the face of these global risks. And it says exactly as follows, "That when reality is changing faster than theory suggests it should a certain degree of nervousness is a reasonable response." And I think that is one of the guiding principles for sustainable development in the Anthropocene that precaution must be operationalized as a guiding principle for human development.

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2.3 Non-linear thinking in the Anthropocen So I'm Garry Peterson. I'm a professor at the Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University. And, I come from an interdisciplinary background, but one of my areas in which I've particularly worked is on resilience, and trying to apply resilience to environmental management and governance. And why I work on resilience is I think resilience is actually a very key idea for working in the Anthropocene. And I think it provides a very useful framework or operating system for organizing our thinking of how to live in the Anthropocene because it has a dual nature of both thinking about sustaining what we want to sustain, to keeping what we want to keep, and building capacity to adapt or transform into something better. Also resilience is very different from a lot of conventional ways of approaching the environment. And these conventional ways are not wrong or bad, but they don't always fit with especially the world we live in today. A lot of the ways we think about managing the environment derive, from ideas of optimization and efficiency, which really work well in situations where we know how the world works and we can control what's going on. However, in many ways we live in a world, which is increasingly uncertain and surprising and difficult to control. And this is the domain of resilience thinking. Some of which has a lot of thought behind it, and some, especially in these areas of how to deal with really uncertain and uncontrollable situations, there needs to be a lot more work. So what do I mean by conventional management? Well I think people may or may not have heard about maximum sustained yield, but it's one of the basic ideas in a lot of natural resource management, which is the idea we want to maximize what we can get out of something over a long period of time. And this is sort of embodies this kind of optimization type approach, and this really works well, when we know how the world works we can control things, and we can optimize it and do really well over time. However, this view of the world is really key. It depends upon that the world works in kind of a linear way, and I like this figure for thinking about it, meaning that if we hit the world, if the world is changed, that the

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consequences of that change diminish in time and space. So if a tree falls in the forest that's important for a moment, but it doesn't have a big effect further away. And after some years the forest is back to as it was. And that's true for many things in the world. But it's also not true for many things in the world. In many cases the impact of some action is actually larger far away and over a longer period of time than immediately. And I'm sure everyone can think of cases of this. But one place where I work where we think is a really, excellent example of this, is the Arctic. As many people and animals in the Arctic have very high levels of persistent organic pollutants in their body fat. And that's because industrial pollution from industries in Europe, especially Asia and North America, are transported by processes to the Arctic and then are biomagnified by animals that live in the Arctic, and then eaten by people who live in the Arctic. And so people who live in what many people would consider almost a pristine environment have some of the highest levels of industrial pollutants in their bodies. These effects are distant in time and space from where they occurred. And this type of situation is very common, maybe not as common as simple cases but is common in many places where people have transformed the planet and made novel connections. And this is what we're having more and more in the Anthropocene. And what this suggests is that we need to have different ways of approaching uncertainty and controllability as first, rather than as viewing management as a solution we have to think of it as a sort of a proposition or idea. And if we accept that we don't know everything about how everything works, and that even if we do know how things work, it's like they're going to change over time, it suggests that our management should be viewed much more, rather than answers, as a learning process where we kind of test different ideas, see what works, but we're really thinking about having some pluralism and change in what we do. And this is a lot of types of approaches people have developed these ideas of thinking about adaptive management or experimental management, but there needs to be learning embodied in managing nature. And this is quite different from how most things work. The other one is that controllability in a diverse world, often you can't tell people what to do. When rivers cross borders, when carbon dioxide is mixed in the atmosphere to impact all the people of the world, we need to work on ways in which - how do we bring people together? - to agree upon stuff. And when we recognize that it's not also

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just about balancing interests, that sometimes a compromise may be ecologically or socially impossible. We need to think about processes that can build social learning, not just understanding how things work, but shared agreement and trust among people to improve the ability of people to act collectively. And this is again a really different, focus away from a kind of technocratic approach to management to enabling what kind of institutions, (and) what types of actions enable social learning. So this kind of comes into sort of what in resilience thinking we would say is sort of three big kind of areas for action. One is trying to develop new understanding to cope with uncertainty, the unknown, and the evolution of new things. We need to think about social, technical, and institutional ways to enable learning. If we also have novelty though, we also need to build resilience to the unexpected, we need to be prepared for the unexpected, both to be able to cope with shocks, but also to take advantage of potentially positive surprises. And finally, I think and maybe most important of all, we need to develop capacity to navigate change. And this is basically so that the learning and change can be very traumatic and people - I mean everyone, myself, you want to keep doing things the way you want to do it, and the way you've been used to doing things. But in a changing and transforming world that's not necessarily an option for us, but we need to make sure there's some kind of broad social capacity to enhance the ability of people to navigate change, especially people who are maybe marginalized or having change imposed upon them. And what are fair, just and desirable ways to do this is a huge area of research. So just to finish up, I think it's also useful that resilience has become a very popular word in the past decade as people have tried to understand and live in the turbulent era were are in. But I think a lot of this linear thinking gets into the way people think about resilience. And I think if you hear people talking about something that is "resilient," it should be maximized or good, it's not really thinking about resilience in a good way. I think resilience thinking is about trying to understand dynamic change, understanding all

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sort of different processes that interact at different levels that mean you can't ever sit still even if you want to. And we need to both have institutions, and ways of managing that embrace uncertainty, and diversity to cope with novelty and surprise. We need to have approaches that navigate rather than, just optimize resilience. And these have to deal with the fact that increasing the resilience of one thing can decrease the resilience of something else. And we have to understand how we deal with these trade-offs, and that we need to have discussions not just about increasing resilience, but what type of resilience do we want to increase? Of whatever is desired it can be increased, but there's lots of ways that, dysfunctional, undesirable things, such as, for example, our current fossil fuel economy are amazing resilient. And we need to understand how to undermine the resilience of these things. And it's this kind of understanding what creates, destroys, trades-off resilience that really needs to be developed in as a resilience thinking for navigating the Anthropocene.

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2.4. Imagining the Anthropocene We're all living in the Anthropocene today, and I believe that there's no way that our children will not be living in the Anthropocene, that we have, at least in the terms of centuries, we have transformed the planet in such a way that there's no going back. So if we're going to talk about how we want to live, or anyone wants to talk about how we're going to live in the future, we have to imagine living in the Anthropocene. And what I think is that we haven't thought enough about living in the Anthropocene, and unfortunately we lack thinking about how we would like to think we would live in the Anthropocene. And there's a paucity of, especially thinking of more positive visions, of what the Anthropocene could mean. And this doesn't mean that the Anthropocene is good, but it is, and good for people, but it means that we have to think about how we can make the Anthropocene, whoever "we" is and whatever "good" means, as good as it can be for us. So one of the ways I like to think about the Anthropocene is through also popular representations of the future, and, at least in the Englishspeaking world, there's been a boom in dystopian literature in the last ten years. And it's interesting when you try to look through different visions of the future, of how rarely you see positive visions of the future. And these range from, things like, embodied in stuff like Cormac McCarthy's The Road, a novel and a movie, to "Mad Max," and all these other films about a collapsed world where the biosphere is severely degraded, and humanity in on the way out, and there people are just struggling to survive. In another sense you have this, with the widespread exception of the Anthropocene, there's been an idea we're living on engineered Earth, and these futures often downplay the fact of how much we have transformed the planet, but how much we rely upon the biosphere to keep our civilization functioning, which is absolutely essential. And we need to, in this sense, have more futures that try and think about both how humanity can better fit with the biosphere, and what could it look like if the world didn't collapse? There are some visions of this. An old one from California in the '70s is Ernest Callenbach's book Ecotopia, which tried to imagine a sustainable society. But one of the challenges of this kind of thinking is these are often kind of more, locally-based, little sort of, pocket utopias that don't think about the rest of the world, of what's going to happen to people who don't already live in rich countries, and don't have lots of land. And then there's sort of more sort of visionary work, which is very much only in the science fiction world, of thinking about how people could really be planetary engineers,

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say for example, works by science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson thinking about transforming the planet. But I think as more sustainability scientists, and as people on the planet we need to think about what are ways that we can imagine desirable socialecological futures? And I think there’s many different things with the Anthropocene that we're not really thinking enough about. One of them is that the Anthropocene challenges us to think about there needs to be new ways of thinking about global social integration, because if the world has become a social-ecological system, our webs of global trade, migration are radically changing the planet. And we need to think about the ways in which all the difference in the world can be done to support the biosphere that underpins all our wealth and well-being. Due to these really big differences on the planet we can expect surprises, as we've seen so far in the 21st century. We can expect new types of migration, new types of diasporas, new social identities, and new social movements, and new types of economics, and we should be trying to envision what are ways we could live on the planet more positively rather than just thinking about what are the dangers to the status quo. Because I think we really need to have a new world and we need some pluralism in how we think about a new world to move forward. And this takes lots of work. I think a good place to start, or my place to start, is to think about the basic definition of sustainable development, which is generally, something to do with that we need prosperity, there's an economy that exists within some kind of society, where we need to have fairness, and this is supported by the biosphere, which needs to be sustainable. And I think three, maybe utopian, but reasonable ways of thinking about what would be good for the world, that a lot of people would agree with, and can at least be a starting point for discussion. Fairness is something that your, who your parents are doesn't dominate your life chances, and that the world, offers opportunity for all the children who are born in it.

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That is prosperous, that people have an opportunity to live fulfilling lives, and that the current civilization isn't eliminating the possibilities for people to have good civilizations in the future. And of course how are we doing today? I think as everyone is aware, our world today is very prosperous, it's the most prosperous it has ever been. But it's also extremely unfair in that this prosperity isn't shared around the world, and it's not sustainable. So prosperity, we're now richer as a planet than we've ever been before. People live longer, people are higher educated, and this development is broad-based around the world. However, we're also hugely unequal. This figure shows, a bit complicated, people's incomes, in different countries, in different 5% steps, and the total income distribution in the world. And what this shows is that the richest 20-35% of the people living in Uganda, Mali and Tanzania are poorer in terms of income than the poorest people living in Denmark - that the world is tremendously unfair, and this is not a good world. And finally with sustainability. There's many different ways of thinking about sustainability, but we know lots of things about how the world works, and we're not on good trajectories. This graph is a recent graph showing that how from based on looking at IPCC scenarios for the future of just climate change we're on a very bad trajectory, and that we don't have to be on that trajectory as a world, but we are on this one so we need to change. However, we also know that there's a lot of capacity to have a better planet, that looking at what contributes to human well-being and inequality is showing by actually having a fair world could greatly increase the well being of the planet. We know that by transforming the way we farm, eat, and distribute our food, we could support many more people with the same amount of farmland we have today. And we also know that, as people more and more move to cities, we have lots of opportunities in building new cities and building new urban environments to provide environments that are better for people and nature as people move around the planet. So there's a lot of latent capacity. I believe there's a lot of evidence for having a good Anthropocene, but the challenges, how do we reach this? And I think we need to have more integrated research that tries to better unite these three, sort of pillars of the Anthropocene, of trying to have more fair -- think about how fairness, prosperity, and sustainability can reinforce one another. But I think as I was talking about in terms of how the 21st century is likely to be surprising, we need to think more about also resilience, that we have to be planning for surprise, maintaining diversity, and keeping our capacity to self-organize to enable us to experiment our ways towards a better Anthropocene because no one knows what that exactly will look like.

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And I think it's also very much we need to kind of keep thinking in these -- we need to have these visions of the world, and I think it's important to look to literature, film, and art to get inspiration to move towards a more beautiful and fun world, not just something that provides income and opportunity to people, but is really an inspiring place to move towards, to enable our transition towards a better Anthropocene. And I think this, expansion of the possible ways of living is very important, because without this when we have transformation, when we have shocks, we're less likely to be able to use those to move towards a better world, and we have much more opportunity to end up in these bad futures we've been envisioning. So in conclusion, I really believe that we need to have more thinking by more people and more diverse groups of people about what a desirable Anthropocene would look like, and what are some pathways to achieve it. And I think one of the things, to come back to what I've said at the beginning, is to try and imagine in fiction, in film, in all sorts of visual representations: what would a world that's probably going to be warmer, has different animals in it, and has different amounts of nutrients flowing through it, what kind of world would, could that be? Not would it be, but could it be. And what kind of world would you like it to be that we think we can achieve? And what are kind of things that people can do to work towards this? And I think there's no way we're going to get a blueprint, but by having a diversity of visions from different perspectives; from Asia, from indigenous perspectives, from urban perspectives, from rural perspectives; we can work towards a vision of a better future. And while dystopias tell us where not to go, they often give us little guidance about where we should strive for, and I think to try and get these stories of thriving, of fairness, of justice, of reconciliation between people, and between people and nature, is something that's vitally needed. And I urge everyone who's listening to this to think about, both for themselves, and trying to think about how we can encourage and spread more desirable positive visions, whatever your definition of positive and desirable is.

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2.5.- Making the case for the Anthropocene The recognition that humanity is now a force of change at the planetary scale, the evidence that we're putting exponential and never seen before levels of pressure on the planet is probably the most important message from science to humanity. So of course it raises the question whether in fact we're standing on solid scientific grounds when we, based on this evidence, conclude from science that we've entered a whole new geological epoch, the Anthropocene. The reason why this is important is far away from only being a question of semantics, of whether we in school teach our children that we are in the Anthropocene rather than the Holocene. It is of profound importance because if we recognize that we are in the Anthropocene, if we recognize that we are in the driving seat of changing, and defining the conditions for world development, it also profoundly shifts our attention in terms of economic growth, in terms of social well-being, in terms of development. So, it is important to look into, a bit deeper, what are the different discussions? What's the case behind the onset and our thinking on the Anthropocene? But I would argue, that there's no doubt whatsoever that this citation holds. That in this current era, whether or not we have an onset of the Anthropocene, over the last hundred years or the last fifty years, the 21st century is in no doubt a situation for humanity where we are defining what nature is. There's no untouched, virgin system or piece of nature anywhere left in the world. Everything is influenced by and interconnected between humans. That's why we never anymore talk about environmental systems and social systems. We talk of social-ecological systems. But it should also be recognized that the notion of the Anthropocene has really taken off. It is a notion that has gone way beyond just the scientific domain. It is true it originates from science, and has been articulated very eloquently, and based on the latest evidence from science, but is also increasingly recognized outside of science, in both popular literature and in movies and media, and in different debates around development in the future. So, it's truly something that is increasingly recognized as a

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core part of our development paradigm. It, for example, opened the entire Earth Summit in 2012 where the United Nations gathered world leaders in the Rio+20 Conference on Sustainable Development. The "Welcome to the Anthropocene" film was the starting point of that summit. One major question is, 'So when in fact did we enter the Anthropocene? And this graph, which looks quite detailed, and is worth really looking into a bit more profoundly, shows that humanity has of course had an enormous influence on the Earth system for millennia, particularly over the last ten thousand years. Since we entered the Holocene, we invented agriculture eight thousand years back which was the starting point of a transformation at very large scale based on plowing land, cutting forests, starting to take out fresh water from our rivers, and starting to anthropogenically manage the Earth system. We've transformed 40% of land areas into agriculture. That has occurred over thousands of years. So many scientists argue that the Anthropocene in fact starts, and as the onset, with the invention of agriculture eight thousand years back. But then we have the very important evidence that up until very recently all these changes that have occurred for thousands of years had very little impact on the Earth system as a whole. And this graph summarizes all those pressures and shows that it's not until we enter the last hundred years, from the 1900s onwards, fifty years into the larger, let's say going to scale with our Industrial Revolution, that we start seeing the curves bending upwards. This to me is an argument, which many scientists share, that the onset of Anthropocene in fact is more recent. Even though we have managed large tracts of land and water over Revista de Praticas de Museologia Informal nº 8 Spring 2016

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millennia, it's not until just the last fifty, sixty years that the exponential pressures start rising, from the point of the great acceleration in the mid-1950s. Now the reason why this is important to recognize is again taking one step back to just remind ourselves that the Holocene, portrayed here in terms of ice core data in both the Arctic and Antarctica, has been so extraordinarily stable. So we have this, this sleeping, stable Earth system, which for ten thousand years has remained very stable and also in a predictable way providing a good support for human development. And it's only then in the last fifty, sixty years that the curve starts moving away from this stable condition. Now to set the exact onset date is not easy, of course. And just let me share with you a few propositions, which are shown in this very nice summary of the different suggestions.

One is a very exact point, namely the 16th of July 1945. This was the moment of the socalled Trinity experimental detonation of the first nuclear weapon. This US experiment of the nuclear detonation is according to geologists a potential onset point for the Anthropocene because the stratigraphic conditions for geological epoch is in fact that it does leave a layer, a traceable layer, in the sediments that geologists in the future could trace back. And in fact a nuclear detonation would provide such stratigraphic evidence to the future.

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So that would be 1945. I would argue that the strongest candidate though is 1955, which is the point when we start the acceleration of human pressures, which shown - which manifest themselves in the exponential curves of pressures. But this is just to give you a few examples of the debates going on within science with regards to the onset of the Anthropocene. But the conclusion is actually not subject to very large uncertainty, I would argue. Whether it started eight thousand years back, or 16th of July 1945, or in the mid-1950s, the evidence is overwhelmingly clear that we as humanity today constitute the overriding force of change on planet Earth superseding the pace and magnitude of the natural changes, which have occurred over the past millions and billions of years, but today the change is in pace and magnitude unprecedented. And this is the Anthropocene. And whether we like it or not we now have the opportunity to take responsibility in Anthropocene, and attempt to navigate this into what we could call a good Anthropocene, allowing ourselves for sustainable development within a safe operating space.

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3. Social-ecological resilience Well done. You’ve now worked yourself through the second module where we dove deeply into the Anthropocene, including how to turn it into something good, where we humans become wise stewards of planet Earth. Now this is actually key for the continuation of our modules; the recognition that the insights of the Anthropocene is neither good nor bad. It's the recognition that we are now in the driving seat, determining our own future. With this as a base, we will now move into the next module, where we will be probing much more in detail what :    

we mean with social ecological systems, how humans and nature are interwoven, how societies and ecosystems are interdependent, and how our world depends on a sustainable and resilient Earth.

We’ll also be exploring new concepts of positive and negative feedbacks, regime shifts, teleconnections, and tipping points. So it will be a challenging module, but it will give you the tools to understand and be able to address some of the more applied opportunities further on. Professor Carl Folke, the Science Director at the Stockholm Resilience Centre, will be joining us this week for these lectures. And during this week, please do activate and really engage in the forum so that you can share your personal insights with all the participants on the course.

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3.1. Social-ecological systems Hi, everyone. My name is Carl Folke. I'm a professor here in Stockholm at the Stockholm Resilience Centre. I'm Science Director, and also directing a place at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, called the Beijer Institute for Ecological Economics. Today I'm going to talk a little bit about why we need to study and understand socialecological systems, and not just social systems or ecological systems. So I start out a little bit with what is the social-ecological systems approach? To us it's a concept where people are looked as being part of the planet we're living on. That may seem extremely self-evident, but it's not always clear when you look at the relations between people and nature. Really this point that people and nature are intertwined, and humans are really an embedded part of the planet, and shaping the planet now from local to global scales. And especially the global scale has become a fairly recent one where we are now in the Anthropocene era. And at the same time, as we are shaping the planet, we are also fundamentally dependent on the capacity of this little round ball that we're living on to supply us with the basics of food, water, and a lot of ecosystem services, like recycling of basic nutrients and minerals salts that our body needs, or other types of services like regulating the climate. So, I thought of giving you a few examples of these ecosystem services. Some classical ones often talked about are things like pollination of crops, or seafood production, the capacity of marine systems to produce the food we get from the sea. Carbon sinks are of course a lot of discussed in relation to the climate issue. How can we draw down carbon that we emit into nature through marine systems or through forests? And also regulation of water cycles through rainforests, or the role of parrotfish and other big fish on coral reefs in regenerating reefs after they'd been hit by cyclones. So ecosystems supply an enormous amount of services that people depend upon. And I'd like to use the idea of ecosystem services to illustrate social-ecological systems. So first let's move into an area in southern Madagascar. It's an area where people are poor and live in very worn down landscapes. So if you look from a map of southern Madagascar what you see is really worn down landscapes. But if you would increase the resolution through a GIS system, or another remote sensing system, you would start to see that there are green spots in the landscapes, like small forest remnants here and there, many of them. And what's interesting is that these green spots, they connect biodiversity in the region. So everything like lemurs, and a lot of other species need those green small areas. And they also have natural beehives in them and the bees go out in the fields and increase the food production by 30 to 40 to 50% in those regions. So what would you do if you were an ecologist and you would like to protect those

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green spots? And we would presumably contact the big international conservation NGO, and go to the government of Madagascar and try to make those into protected areas, excluded by humans. So the reason they are there is social and cultural, and not ecological. And actually the whole culture there is dependent on those services generated by those green spots, but they are protected by the belief systems and the worldviews of this culture. So some key things to think about in relation to that story is that ecosystem services are not just generated by the ecological system or the ecosystem, but by a social-ecological system. And this is quite obvious now when we're living in the Anthropocene, where people are everywhere shaping all ecosystems all over the planet. And they are complex systems, social-ecological systems, and they are connected across levels; from the local to the global, in time from history to the future. And as we are now living in this interconnected planet I think that the social-ecological is everywhere, it's not just an exception. There are no ecosystems, there are no social systems, it's only socialecological systems. Let's take you to the other case, which is a classical one described in anthropology and other social sciences as one of the really good success stories of collective action, where people actually have come together as stewards of a marine resource: the lobster. And the lobster has not been overexploited, which is very unusual in fisheries, as you may all know. And in Maine, people from the lobster fishers have developed norms and rules, and are connected up to the State domain and to global markets, and have a very lucrative industry there around the lobster. So, it has really been described as a fantastic collection action success story, no over-fishing, and beautiful collaborations. But if you expand the horizon from the single lobster to the whole ecosystem in which the lobster lives you discover that the lobster is there largely because all the other species that ate the lobster have been overexploited. So the lobster has taken off like an insect population in the sea and become a huge, vast monoculture. And as you know monocultures are susceptible to shocks and crisis like diseases, for example. And for the south in Cape Cod, about 80%, 75 to 80% of the lobster population has been wiped out due to shell disease. And that seems to be moving up towards Maine now. So the lesson here is that if you create simplified ecosystems for production of a commodity that has a high market value right now, you create vulnerable systems sensitive to these types of shocks. And that moves us to the whole idea of resilience thinking. Resilience is the capacity to be able to deal with change, to live a change and to make use of change, not only incremental and sudden change, but also shocks and crisis, to turn crisis into

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opportunities

basically.

And in the Maine case they have reduced the resilience of the ecosystem so much that they are susceptible to these type of crises. And the question is to what extent they will be able to deal with it. Resilience is often divided in three parts.  

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The first part is about persistence, how do we continue to live and develop in the face of these changes? The second part is about adaptability, basically how do we continue to develop on the same path that we are on, and adapt on the path in the face of changing conditions? And the third, which is a very critical one now when we are in the Anthropocene, is how we can shift pathways, development directions into novel ones or new ones?

And we call that transformation; how we can transform societies into new development paths in line with the way the planet operates for human well-being, and for a good life for people on Earth. The core of resilience thinking, a metaphor for resilience thinking, could actually be from the music industry. A person like Madonna, for example, who has been going through lots of changes on her career path, and actually complete changes in the way she do the music, but still remained on the path of being an artist for a very long time. So, that's an example of being resilient in the face of change, and also created innovation and novelty in the music as part of that. Another way to think about resilience, and what we often use, is some type of diagram called the ball and the cup. Where we have found by looking at the real world cases we often do, we often try to look at the real world, and not just do theories around it. We have studied several places on the planet with these type of interactions, and we find that they often go through a cycle of three phases.

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Where they first start to build resilience they know that they're on a path that's not sustainable, they try to build resilience to get out of the path, but they can't do it because they're locked by other laws, or social norms, or government policies, or business activities. But then suddenly there's a window of opportunity where the forces aligns, and they can shift over the whole governance structure into a new pathway. And that requires skillful leadership and other actors, and then they can after that start to build resilience of the new path they're on to be able to continue on that path and live a change. So, the Great Barrier Reef in Australia is one example. A lot of landscapes in southern Sweden are other examples. And also the whole agricultural revolution in in Latin America, a third one.

So here I tried to talk tried to talk about social-ecological systems and gave you two examples of why we need to think about people and nature as totally intertwined, and especially in the Anthropocene. And we're operating through a new interdisciplinary, or transdisciplinary platforms in the world called sustainability science, which is more defined by the problem that it addresses rather than by the discipline it employs. So any discipline where any knowledge system or any understanding that can contribute to dealing with these problems of sustainability are part of sustainability science. And the social-ecological approach is a critical one for sustainability science and resilience thinking, another critical way of operating on that pathway. Thank you very much.

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3.2. Feedbacks, interactions and regime shifts So, today I'm going to talk about feedbacks, interactions, and regime shifts in socialecological systems. And this is basically the idea of how ecosystems, or socialecological systems, can go from being organized in one way to being organized in a very different way. And this is a concept that's been around for a long time in ecology, and is in many other fields under many different names. And the term I'm going to use is regime shifts, but this also can be talked about in terms of tipping points, alternate ecological states, or critical transitions. And what I mean when I say a regime shift, I use the definition, which is focused on people and the way they interact with nature. So thinking about, some change in a socialecological system where you go from getting one set of ecosystem services to a different set. And this persists over a time that matters for people, so usually at least a couple of years. And there's some kind of stickiness to this that makes it, not just go back to where it was before, but there's something that keeps it in this new type of state. So this is showing in this figure where you're going from one set of ecosystem services to another, and there's some really, distinct change over time, which persists. So, why is this important? Why is this a useful concept? Well, there are two reasons why it's useful. 

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One is that a lot of ways people think about the world are based on sort of gradual or linear change, when that isn't always true, how things happen. So, it's at least sometimes useful to think well, what happens when we have changes that are abrupt and persistent? The other one is that these types of changes often have much bigger impacts on people. If a fishery, so say like the Newfoundland cod fishery, ends up closing as the Newfoundland fishery's been closed for 20 years, this has huge impacts on both individual fishermen, but also the ability of towns to survive. So, these impacts can have very big consequences. Also when these occur they're not easy to reverse. So once you've gone over these thresholds it's much harder to come back; both in terms of the amount of effort, and in terms of costs in human resources and money. Finally, one of the other things that's very tricky about regime shifts is that they're very difficult to predict, even when we know they can occur.

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So say, for example, people who study lakes. We still don't know when exactly they're going to occur, because they are non-linear and difficult to predict. So this means we often need to think about managing things differently. And this requires thinking about the context, the history, and the possibility of surprise rather than just trying to get things right or trying to adjust to some kind of thermostat or dial to get the optimal outcome. So it's really quite a different way of thinking about things when regime shifts occur. So, what is a real example of regime shift? Well, one of the best studied ones in the world is coral reefs. In coral reefs all over the world there's been shifts from diverse coral reefs, which are: dominated by coral, have rich fish populations, often have ability to support lots of tourist industries and protect the coast from storms, to algaedominated reefs where there's much less fish often, much smaller fish, and not a diverse community of things. And this can have big impacts for both the ability of local people to persist, and on the conservation of nature. But not all big changes that you see in nature are regime shifts. For example, stuff can change around a lot, but if it returns to where it was before it's not really regime shifts.

This figure is trying to show an example of this. If you have something changing over time and you get maybe a storm, or you get some invasion of a new species and the system changed in the response, that's not a regime shift. A regime shift is when you get a big shift, which doesn't go back to where it was before. And so you can see evidence for these regime shifts in time series stayed over time, but you can also guess that often it can be quite ambiguous of actually whether you've got a regime shift of not. And it can take some time to resolve this. So often there's some uncertainty about what's going on with regime shifts. But one of the key things of regime shifts is that they're maintained by feedbacks. And this figure here is showing an example of one of the other classic types of regime shifts,

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which is the change of shallow lakes from being clear water to being turbid and full of algae.

And there's feedbacks that maintain both of these regimes, and it's the competition between these different types of feedback; between a benthic-dominated, clear water regime, and a pelagic-dominated murky water regime that controls how likely you are to have one of the regime shifts to occur. And when you have these regime shifts occur different feedback dominate. So to understand regime shifts requires understanding feedbacks. A simple way of thinking about this is that these types of regime shifts are generic features that you can expect to occur in all types of complex selforganizing systems, where you have lots of different processes interacting with one another. That's because a whole bunch of different feedback processes interact. And a way of simplifying this is these sort of ball and cup diagrams, representing a whole set of complex interactions as a ball, which is representing your system, or your ecosystem or social-ecological system, and a landscape where the shape of the landscape is determined by the interacting feedback loops. So this is saying you can think about how regime shifts occur in two ways. 

One is where you have shocks, which cause the feedback process to be overwhelmed, and a system to shift from one state to another. For example, a big pulse of nutrients coming into a lake can cause a lake to shift from being clear water to being turbid water.

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The other less obvious one is changes in the feedback processes themselves that can reduce the resilience, or the ability to persist in one of the states. So this could be, for example, changes in the fish community of a lake could reduce the ability of the lake to cope with nutrient inputs.

So all these kind of inputs that formerly wouldn't cause a shift in a lake start to be able to cause a shift in a lake, and maybe unexpectedly you get a big shift which you can't go back to because the feedback processes have changed. And this is often one of the key features of regime shifts, is this gradual erosion of resilience where shocks that previously could be coped with, can't be coped with. And this is also one of the things that makes predicting regime shifts so difficult, because even if you fully understand these slow processes the actual triggers of the regime shifts are these very difficult to predict, or almost unpredictable, shocks. But often it's quite difficult to understand these slow processes. So just to kind of wrap up, what does this mean for management? Well, there's basically three different ways you can kind of think about managing regime shifts, and this goes with thinking about the shocks and slow variables. 

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The first one is to try and think well what are all these perturbations that are affecting a system and how can you reduce the ability, the exposure of the system to these perturbations? For example, reducing fishing can enhance the ability of coral reefs to persist, or reducing land processes that are putting nutrients into a coral reef can decrease these shocks. Similarly you can think about maintaining the feedback loops, or enhancing the feedback loops, that are managing these sort of slow variables that increase the resilience of a system to regime shifts by, for example, ensuring there's a diverse set of fish, there's lots of different types of coral structure. But finally, and especially something that's really key to think about in the Anthropocene, as we're changing processes all around the world, is: well, what are the possibilities of novel regimes, as new species enter a system, new types of human activities? What are novel types of regimes that we either want to really avoid, or we'd like to restore systems to?

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So it's sort of three different ways of thinking about both these fast and slow processes as more normal ways, and then for the Anthropocene trying to think about what are novel outcomes we want to, achieve or avoid. Thanks.

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3.3. Example: Ecological surprises I’m going to now talk about ecological surprise. And ecological surprise is both something that’s been persistent throughout the history of people on Earth, but also something that’s maybe not so much, incorporated in our ecological thinking because it is surprising. But what we can kind of, I think, improve how we think about ecological surprise. And the first thing, I think, to think about is really to be aware of how common ecological surprise is. And one of the ways of thinking about this is that, as we’ve increasingly dominated the planet, often our domination has produced a lot of surprising things as went along, not things that people never thought would happen, or no one ever thought would happen, but things that were really missing from the mainstream or the dominant way that people were doing things. I think four kind of classic examples of surprise from the 20th century that probably most people know about to some extent are these I’ve got listed here. 

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So one’s the use of pesticides to control pests and pathogens worked, but very quickly nature evolved resistance to these in many, many cases. And one of the most famous ones is DDT where malarial mosquitoes rapidly evolved resistance to DDT, making it less effective. But also other ones that have been a bit more surprising was toxins being biomagnified in food chains. One of the classic examples of this is mercury being biomagnified. As people released mercury to the environment thinking it was inert, that it wouldn’t go up in the food chain, but unknown bacteria living in the bottom of the sea turned this into forms of mercury that are organic and could be accumulated. And so you ended up with people being contaminated by stuff that no one expected. And this is also something where you have today people in the Arctic who are distant from all the industries of the planet sometimes have the highest levels of toxins, which are biomagnified in food chains in somewhere distant from where the toxins are produced and used. Another type of example is how agriculture, which has been hugely beneficial to the people, also by changing the disease ecology of local places has led to the emergence of new diseases. One of the classic examples of this is how irrigation led to the rise of River Blindness in West Africa, by providing habitat for, one of the animals that transmits this disease. A final example, that’s especially relevant in North America and Europe, is how the simplification of ecosystems, particularly by removing top predators from land and from oceans, has destabilized these ecosystems, causing them to become more variable, and have more ecological regime shifts. So these are all examples from the 20th century.

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But we can also see, emerging kind of novel social-ecological surprises in the 21st century. And some of these are what we call more regime shifts. Where we’ve had changes in fishing, leading to the collapse of fish stocks. And one of the, most well known examples of this is the Newfoundland cod collapse, which was one of the longest-lasting, most productive fisheries in the entire world, which then collapsed in the early ‘90s in Canada, was closed with the idea that it could recover, but now after two decades of closure it still hasn’t recovered. And people are really not sure why this has occurred. There’s some idea it’s been a transformation of the food web, maybe something with changing climate, marine algae populations, but not completely clear. And if people had known there was the possibility of this collapse that couldn’t be recovered from, or in any short time recovered from, people might have managed this fishery quite differently. Another example of more of a novel type of connection is this new and relatively recent increase it seems in coupling and turbulence in world oil and food markets. After almost three decades of relative stability in global food prices, we’ve had since 2008 both a lot of variation, and it seems an increased connection between oil and food prices. And this, of course, had big consequences, both in terms of what people have to spend on food and oil, but also some people argue has contributed to things like the Arab Spring, where there’s big changes in what people could afford in their daily life leading to social unrest. And I think it’s these types of novel social-ecological connections is what we can expect more and more to occur in the Anthropocene. So how can we understand these? Well I think two ways of thinking about it is: one is we have these global forces that are changing how local places are connected together, and providing new types of pressure on local places; and the other one is that we’re also just changing how local places work. And I think this is somewhere where you can kind of think about how these sort of social-ecological regime shifts connect to global surprise. And I think one way of thinking about this is to think about regime shifts in agriculture. So this picture is showing, in a cartoon form, the connection between agriculture and water, and how there are three different ways that the connection between water and agriculture produces regime shifts. First, is maybe the most classic, is what people mostly think about water, it’s like rivers and the ocean, what people call blue water. And this is by connecting together different places from running off of land you have connections which can cause regime shifts. But you also have the recycling of Revista de Praticas de Museologia Informal nº 8 Spring 2016

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water from land as it evaporates, then falls as precipitation. This connection of land and how you change these connections through agriculture can also produce regime shifts. Then finally, there’s sort of this brown water, or water that’s soil moisture, and how you have interactions between plants and soil moisture, and between soil structure and water, can also produce regime shifts.

So this figure is showing how you can have these nonlinear changes at a variety of different scales. In orange are these generally faster and smaller scale, soil moisture-related regime shifts, in green these very big scale, moisture recycling regime shifts, and in blue these more regional level, blue water regime shifts. And these types of ecological surprise can occur within a field, or within a whole continent. So the surprise can occur at different levels, but what we really have is in the Anthropocene we’re changing these things at many different places simultaneously. So, we’re also producing multiple types of regime shifts in many different places, and connecting them together in new ways. For example, we have these sort of horizontal couplings across the landscape where, say, agricultural transformation, in somewhere like the upper Midwest in the United States, can produce aquatic regime shifts in lakes, which cause going from having clear water to being murky, and over-fertilized. But also transport across the entire landscapes in the US, through the Mississippi River, can move all these nutrients into the Gulf of Mexico where you can go from having productive fisheries to a dead zone.

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So you can have these small scale processes can be aggregated to have an impact somewhere else. And these produce all sorts of challenges to management of how do you both deal with your local problems, but deal with these long distance transport ones? Secondly, you can have things like with moisture recycling, or the interaction between soil and moisture, and moisture recycling. In somewhere like the Amazon where you have fire (it) can mediate between the ability of plants to grow in different landscapes, and maintain moisture in those landscapes, to have a shift between a savannah and a forest state. But you can also have with moisture recycling over an entire landscape that a savannah doesn’t recycle as much moisture as a forest, making it more difficult for forests to grow. So there can be an interaction between local scale regime shift and a more continental scale regime shift. And a third one, which is less well understood, is how, say, human activities and climate activities, or animal migrations, can provide teleconnections between different places. For example, how, migratory birds can have their populations increased due to agriculture, and then destroy salt marshes in the Arctic; or how long distance, climate fluctuations can mean that changes in land use in one part in Africa have consequences for rainfall in a far distant part. So what I think you can think about with ecological surprise is there’s sort of two ways we can kind of look at this. There’s one from the how do local places function and what ways can they respond surprisingly? But also how can these top-down drivers, or large scale processes, drive these systems in different ways but also connect them in new ways? So I think, just to wrap up, there’s lots of examples of ecological surprise.  

That by looking at them from different angles we can get some understanding of what, surprises we know can happen? What are some of the drivers that can cause things that we could expect to happen?

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But also what are some of the variables that if they change, like nutrients or climate or moisture flow, that [we] could expect to transmit surprises around the world?

That these sort of surprises vary in their impact, but we can expect, as we produce a novel planet, we can expect both more of these surprises, in terms of surprises that we expect to occur, but also in truly novel things in novel types of systems. And to better understand the potential for both of these, we need to kind of have a better understanding of the ways we’ve been surprised about how we’ve been living on the planet, and how we’ve been able to successfully cope with these surprises.

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3.4. Understanding complexity in a turbulent world In the world of Anthropocene, with rising not only human pressures on the planet, but also an increasingly interconnected world in terms of social, financial, and economic exchange across all nations in the world, we must recognize that we are entering a realm where interconnectedness translates into what we call teleconnections. Teleconnections are when changes in one part of the world cascades itself to impacts in other parts of the world. One example is when rainforest is cut down, changing rainfall patterns in, for example, Latin America, which can translate and propel itself and change rainfall conditions and temperatures all the way to inner China. And these kind of teleconnections must be understood because they can themselves trigger surprise and what we call inconvenient feedbacks that can implicate the possibilities for sustainable development. And this is a difference compared to the way we’ve perceived development in the past, where we’ve tried to map out resources, tried to predict and assume that things change linearly and incrementally. That’s on the basis upon which we built our entire economy, assuming that we can predict change in the environment. And now we are in a situation where surprise is a core element of change But on top of that we must also add an element of complexity. Not only is climate, ecosystems, health, and development interacting with each other in the hyper-connected world, not only do we have teleconnections, but what can occur when a series of global drivers, for example climate change and financial change across an interconnected global financial systems, when these global drivers cause an impact which is totally unexpected often in a very, very different part of the world than the very source of the problems, we call that inconvenient feedbacks. These are big, major surprising events that occur based on global drivers translating themselves to unexpected outcomes. These examples of social hyper-connectivity are increasingly well understood. They must be layered together with the recognition that we have exactly the same rising hyper-connectivity, even interdependence, given the teleconnections we see when it comes to changes in the environmental system.

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And if you put this together, the larger scale changes in the social and environmental systems, you come to the recognition that we live in a much more complicated hyperconnected world where changes in the climate system affects ecosystems, which together influences both human health, economics, and development at large. And that this is the new reality that we’re facing. Now the evidence around this of course is well illustrated by global internet connections, by the global transport systems that connect all continents, which means that for example a pandemic in one corner of the world can propel itself very rapidly, a volcanic eruption in Iceland can suddenly shut down large parts of the transport systems, affecting even the world economy. The fact that we’re interconnected in our energy fluxes, which means that a shift not only financially in one corner of the world but even in terms of resource use, for example prices on natural gas, or shutting down, or instabilities in the Middle East, propel themselves across the economy very rapidly. The fact that we can now see changes and democratic movements in one part of the world propelling themselves across Facebook suddenly becoming global movements in the moment of seconds. This is in truth a connected world that has become a

hyperconnected world in just the past couple of decades. But the key insight is that we’ve moved from a hyperconnected world to a totally interdependent world, where all the components of the Earth system, the biomes, the regulative resilience of planet Earth and its ability to stay in the Holocene-like condition is essential for every economy, business community in the world. Now this has been increasingly explored scientifically, recognized the interactions between the climate system, ecosystems, human health, and the economy, and also articulated as a core component of our ability to navigate the Anthropocene. But now it’s not enough to have a stable financial system, we must also have a stable climate system in order to secure health in different parts of our economy.

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But it’s also a world where we must now understand risk and the probability of what we call super wicked problems, that different changes interact and amplify change. And a few examples of this have been, and are, increasingly recognized also by organizations like the World Economic Forum and business leaders across the world. This graph shows a recent analysis among thousands of CEOs, how they perceive risks in the hyperconnected and interdependent world of the 21st century. And what you see here is the fear of predictably financial crisis, regulatory failures, liquidity problems, instabilities in institutions, transparency corruption, which affects the failures or success of global governance in economy disparity. But if you look carefully at this graph you’ll see at the lower left-hand corner infectious disease, chronic diseases, water security, food security, climate change, air pollution, storms, flooding, biodiversity loss, a whole battery of large processes that are increasingly recognized that they do interact in real time with the social, financial, economic parameters in the world which together creates this complex cocktail of potential super wicked problems in the world. An illustration of this, which is still very much debated but I think it’s worth sharing, is the tremendous disaster we’re now seeing playing out right in front of us in Syria, a civil war which is causing massive disaster for hundreds of thousands of people and a complete destabilization, not to say collapse, of an entire nation propelling itself to instabilities in an entire region. Interestingly data shows that just two years before the civil war in Syria was the longest and most profound drought period ever recorded in Syria, probably the worst drought ever recorded since agriculture was invented eight thousand years back, and that this series of years of drought triggered millions of Syrian farmers to move into cities. Now it’s very difficult of course to make the connection between this transformative change of forced migration into cities among poor desperate farmers and the current uprising and the instability we see in Syria, but there’s no doubt that we start seeing example, example after example, of how these kinds of social changes also interact with abrupt ecological changes occurring in the Anthropocene. That Hurricane Sandy, which veered in and is actually the largest ever invoice for any city, forty billion US dollars for New York City due to this unprecedented, totally expected veering of an hurricane moving right into shore, is an example of something that can no longer be disconnected from the Anthropocene. On the right-hand graph you see in yellow the normal trajectory of hurricanes, which do occur as part of the natural variability and the natural part of the weather systems. And in red you see the sudden veering in on land, the westward trajectory of Sunday, which

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can only today be explained by factoring in the warming the Arctic and the changes of the weather patterns up in the polar regions. So again an example of how a financial abrupt change interacts with an ecological change at large scale. Now is this a trend that we’re seeing empirical evidence for? The answer is yes. This is a very messy graph but it’s one of the most telling empirical observations over the past fifty years. This is data from NASA showing from 1955, each map here is a year – all the way to 2011 in the lower right-hand corner, the observed frequency of ultra-extreme events, so-called three sigma event. Three sigma event is statistically extreme weather events that occur less than one in a thousand years, so we’re talking absolute extreme droughts, floods, heat waves. In 1955 the occurrence across the world of these kind of extreme events covered only 1% of the world’s surface, totally stochastic, very chaotic, we can never predict where it occurs, but it occurs over essentially no part of the world, which is why we call them three sigma events, they should in fact not occur. In 2011 it covers an astonishing 14.8% of the Earth’s surface. The unexpected has suddenly become normality. We cannot predict where it occurs but it’s a recognition that we’re moving rapidly into a situation where interactions, feedbacks, and unprecedented inconvenient feedbacks are part of the normal, so to say, geopolitical situation that we now must face. Now in terms of implications for development we must also recognize that it has directly profound operational impacts. Just to give you one example this is a photograph of a standing, stable rainforest, which pumps up vast amounts of water, which creates water vapor, develops into clouds, and generates rainfall. Now the latest science shows the following. What you see here on this world map in red regions are the regions which to 80% or more gets its rainfall from evaporation from forests in neighboring countries. So just look at China here, the vast northern China plains depend to a very large extent on sustainable management of forests in the westward neighboring countries, all the way from Russia, Ukraine, to the Baltic Sea – Baltic states. This in my mind is a geopolitical bomb recognizing that a country like China depends on sustainable management of ecosystems in its

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neighboring countries. Same goes as you see in red here for the Congo region, the wet savannah regions in West Africa, but also the nations that reside downstream or in the southern parts of the Amazon rainforest. Again, a proof of the interconnectedness and teleconnections that we do depend on in terms of development. Same for the Arctic. These are the kind of data we generally see from NASA showing the temperature distribution across the world. What you see here is the anomaly in January 2010 which is an extraordinary period because one, you see this blue region here which is an unprecedented cold lock-in with 2, 3, 4° Celsius colder than normal, an extraordinarily icy and snowy winter period in Russia and in the Scandinavian region. But also see in dark red, which is the extraordinarily heat in the Arctic region. Increasingly evidence shows that there’s a teleconnection between the extraordinary unprecedented warmth in the Arctic region and how that pushes down Arctic air to lower latitudes, explaining why we see these cold pockets of winter climate in lower latitudes. To put it simple, Arctic climate moving southwards, and teleconnections in the Anthropocene. The food system is increasingly understood as being perhaps the core and most significant part of the Anthropocene. Here you see a whole set of front pages in media recognizing that the food system is the number one victim of change in the Anthropocene because food requires fresh water. Fresh water is the first victim of climate environmental change. And reverse, the food system is the number one driver of changes at the planetary scale, a teleconnection and an inconvenient feedback we must recognize. Now the final story here is a complex one showing how small scale fishermen in communities in West Africa, due to European fish policy which means that large, large industrial fisheries empty the coasts of the African fish resources, have increasingly forced small scale fishing men and women to abandon fishing, their livelihoods, and basically, and literally put their boats on the shore and for a livelihood they’re forced to start moving inwards on land to chase bush meat. Similarly with farmers that are losing their livelihoods because of land degradation and droughts, and you see a movement of communities desperately moving into, let’s say, natural ecosystems, forest systems, to hunt for bush meat which in turn leads to rising risk of zoonotic pandemics when we get infectious diseases moving across species from bush meat to human beings, showing a very complex interaction across scale. Climate

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change pushes changes at local level, political decision in one part of the world changing resource access in another part of the world, which in turn forces communities to suddenly change the life support systems, which in turns puts them in a vulnerability that triggers and unexpected change, in this case zoonotic pandemics that you normally

would not see. This is the kind of feedbacks and interactions that we must start understanding when we try to navigate a situation where human development is so tightly connected with abrupt environmental changes from local to global scale.

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3.5. Earth-resilience and cross-scale interactions When we’re exploring sustainable development in the Anthropocene in the era when we no longer can exclude undermining the way the entire Earth system operates, we must understand and explore what resilience means across different scales. So we’ve been exploring the resilience of systems, the ability of a household or an economy or a rainforest to withstand different disturbances without shifting into a different structure or function, for example, a rainforest tipping over into a savannah. We must explore what is the risk of pushing the entire Earth system outside of its stable state. We call this Earth resilience. Earth resilience is entirely dependent on the different components of the Earth system operating together and either through what we call negative feedbacks, meaning processes that dampen change, or through positive feedbacks, where processes actually accelerate change, and applying these interactions regulate the ability of the Earth system to remain either in a Holocene-like state or propel itself outside of that state. So in exploring Earth resilience we must also understand what we call cross-scale interactions, how for example a carbon sink or a methane sink in a local forest, or a wetland, or a savannah, interacts with the atmosphere or the polar regions, so from a local, to a regional, to a global scale. That is different to Teleconnections, which is when one system changes in one place of the world and has domino effects on other systems. For example when a forest system that feeds back moisture and creates rainfall affects the monsoon system several continents further away. These are complex notions but must be understood in the Anthropocene. And in this lecture we’ll explore a bit further what we need to understand when we define Earth resilience. Now it takes us back to the absolute starting point when defining our desired future, which is going back to the ice core data which defines our desired state, namely the Holocene. So this is again the hundred thousand years of change in the world showing that the last ten thousand years in the red circle here is an unprecedented stable state of the planet. In fact we can call this the Eden’s Garden of human development, the stable state within which we want to remain. The reason why referring to this state when exploring Earth resilience is that the Holocene is a state that we understand very well. We know the carbon cycle, the nitrogen cycle, the phosphorus cycle, and the limits within which essentially all the key parameters that regulate the stability of the Earth system have been operating over the past 10 000 years, illustrated for example in this extraordinary set of data showing concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane over the past 400 000 years.

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And if you look very carefully you’ll see the very stable and narrow range within which these gases operate over the past Holocene, and the blue arrow showing how we are moving away from this very stable state. This Is very helpful, it actually helps us define a safe operating space for human development because we understand fairly well how, and what are the conditions, within which the Earth system can operate in the Holocene. Now the excitement about this comes across I think in a very pedagogic way in the following exploration of what role does the biosphere, the ecosystems of the world, play in terms of trying or attempting to maintain a Holocene-like state? And let me just run through this example to you in quite detail. So we are emitting greenhouse gases and have been doing so since the Industrial Revolution in the end of the 18th century. We’ve emitted an estimated 365 billion tons of carbon from industrial emissions, and another 180 billion tons of carbon from land use change. That together ends up in an enormous 545 billion tons of carbon emitted cumulatively since the Industrial Revolution. This is relevant because carbon remains in the atmosphere for over 1000 years. So what we did 200 years back is still warming the planet. The big question is temperature has risen with almost 1° Celsius since the Industrial Revolution. Is it all of these 545 billion tons of carbon that now reside in the atmosphere causing 1° Celsius warming? The answer is no, because the astonishing reality is that over half, roughly 55%, of these emissions are actually absorbed by the living biosphere, 155 billion tons in the oceans, and another 150 billion tons are estimated to have been taken up by terrestrial ecosystems. This is the most profound proof that the Earth system, through its biogeophysical processes, is applying Earth resilience in practice, meaning that the Earth system is Revista de Praticas de Museologia Informal nº 8 Spring 2016

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applying these processes to try to remain in its current stable state, the Holocene, by dampening the impacts of our disturbance, emitting of carbon dioxide in this case. And these carbon sinks are tremendous. And the net remaining amount of carbon in the atmosphere is only 240 gigatons of carbon which has contributed to the temperature rise so far. Same story goes for heat, for example. 95% of the heat caused by global warming is stored deep in the oceans. These are all processes that try to dampen and maintain the self-regulating biogeophysical processes in the Earth system in the Holocene-type state. Now it goes beyond just understanding the big climate system. There are critical functions that all the biomes play in regulating Earth resilience. So the polar regions, for example, are permanent white surface areas that reflect roughly 90% of incoming heat from the Sun, reflecting it back to space. These polar regions are massive air conditioning, cooling systems for planet Earth, thanks to their permanent white surface. These are negative feedbacks. They’re actually cooling the planet. When ice melts and changes color to a liquid surface, just that color change means that instead of reflecting back heat and functioning as a cooler polar regions can transform themselves into becoming net absorbers of heat, meaning becoming positive feedback triggers, selfgenerating heat. Same with rainforests currently being huge carbon sinks, regulating moisture feedback and rainfall patterns across the world, being residuals or residing massive hosts for biodiversity, and also generating oxygen; marine systems functioning and heat conveyers, carbon sinks, and banks of genetic diversity; the world’s temperate organic systems being sinks and huge stores of methane; the temperate forests also being major carbon sinks and regulating rainfall patterns and generating oxygen across the world; and finally savannah systems that are playing also a role as moisture feedback, and regulating carbon and rainfall patterns; altogether systems that define Earth resilience. And the key insight here is the recognition that in the past we’ve been very preoccupied of managing ecosystems at the local scale. This has been important for local livelihoods and local opportunities for good living conditions. Now we must connect the local to the biome scale, and the biome to the planetary scale, and recognize that we have to become stewards of all these systems collectively because they determine the ability for any scale, from household to business to nation, to develop in the future.

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3.6. Understanding complexity in a turbulent world Human development in the Anthropocene requires that we understand not only the rising human pressures on ecosystems, nature, and the planetary system as a whole, we must also understand how nature and the earth system responds. We’re learning more and more from empirical research around the world, that nature doesn’t respond in just incremental and linear ways. In fact, we now recognize that systems from coral reefs, to rainforests, to temperate forests, have several distinctly different states, separated by thresholds. So, a system can be either a rainforest or a savannah. And if a system is pushed through environmental changes, across this threshold, we talk of a tipping point. When a system changes fundamentally its structure and function, and tips over from one stable state to another stable state. So strictly speaking the definition of a tipping point is when a system fundamentally changes structure and function, and settles into a new stable state. And the prerequisite to do so is that a feedback mechanism, which keeps the system tightly in one state, changes direction. For example, a rainforest, its feedback is that it sustains its own moisture – it’s a selfwettening system. The feedback is that the green canopy sucks out a tremendous amount of water from the soil, feeds that back a vapour back into the atmosphere, and self-generates rainfall, and also keeps moisture within its very tight, dense canopy. That’s the feedback keeping it in a rainforest state. When that system is cut open through deforestation, it dries out, and warms up due to climate change, the feedback can change into a self-drying system, where instead it being wettening, becomes a selfdrying system, and the system crosses a threshold, it becomes a tipping point, and gets locked as a savannah. This is “tipping points.” Now tipping points have been explored for decades, and have been understood in small ecosystems from lakes and forest systems, but increasingly we see evidence that large-scale systems can also be subject to tipping points. And this is just one example of a potential tipping point that really, really concerns scientists across the world. It’s data from Greenland, showing on the x-axis months of

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the year, and on the y-axis showing the percentage of incoming heat from the sun, which is reflected back to space – what we call Albedo. Now in the coloured thin lines, you see the stable state with a permanent ice layer on Greenland. When the ice is stable it is a very white colour, and as well all know, a white, light colour reflects back roughly 90-95% of incoming heat. And that’s exactly what we see. It goes down a little bit during the Arctic summer of June-July, when the fringes of Greenland always melt and become a slightly darker liquid surface, but overall, it’s a mirror, it’s a cooling system, it’s a prerequisite for the earth to stay stable in the Holocene. But look at that thick red line, which are observations from NASA in 2012. An extraordinary exception suddenly, for two weeks in July, the feedback changes direction from being a mirror, reflecting back heat, ie. a cooler, to becoming a net heat absorber. More than 50% of incoming heat is sucked up because for the first time in observational history the entire Greenland ice sheet is melting and covered by a liquid darker surface. Now Jason Box at the Byrd Polar Research Institute concludes in calculation that just these two weeks of change in feedback corresponds to a new injection of heat of in the order of 300 exajoules of energy. Now 300 exajoules is a very difficult number, but just to give you some comparisons, the annual energy consumption in the US is in the order of 200 exajoules. The annual global energy consumption is a bit more than 600 (exajoules). So momentarily this means that Denmark bypasses China and the US as the world’s largest climate forcing nation. And this occurs when Mother Earth changes directions in the feedback, which potentially could be a tipping point. Now for the Arctic, for example, there is emerging research showing that several systems can be subject to these kind of tipping points. Such as a flip in the Arctic Sea ice cover, meaning that it could suddenly flip over into a situation with permanent open sea. And other systems that keep the ocean circulation functioning between the Arctic Sea, and for example, the Atlantic. Now recent research on Greenland shows something quite remarkable. Ice core data, looking at the conditions on earth the last time we had a

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warm interglacial, the Eemian warm interglacial period, some 120 000 years back. To explore whether or not the Greenland ice sheet melted in its entirety. The reason why this question is so critical is that at the time, during several of thousands of years, mean average temperatures were more than 4°C warmer than today. And normally, we have always expected that if we would reach a 4°C warming, an exceptional situation which we haven’t seen for 4, 5, 6 million years in a longer time period, that the entire Greenland ice sheet would melt. But this recent data, led by Dorthe Dahl-Jensen, one of the world’s leading glaciologist, shows something surprising. Maybe that Greenland, in fact, did not melt. In fact, only contributed to in the order of 2 metres sea level rise, in a world that we know, with high degree of certainty, had a sea level which was 6-8 metres higher. How come we know that the sea level was 6-8 metres higher? Well, we see that from very, very good data on coastal regions that show remnants of fossils from this period. So, we’re quite certain about the sea level rise. This shows, and gives us something of quite remarkable good news. It indicates, in fact, that Greenland is most likely more resilient than we previously thought. Resilient in the sense that even a +4°C degree warming would still keep the Greenland ice sheet, you know, relatively in tact. But the drama is the following: if that’s correct, and Greenland thereby only contributes to 2 metres sea level rise, where is the lacking difference? Because we’re missing in the order of 4-6 metres sea level rise, which must have caused, or been triggered, from somewhere else. And the trick is that there is only one potential candidate as a source for that rise, and that is Antarctica. Antarctica, which we’ve always thought to be a more resilient system than the Arctic. And remarkably, just this year, 2014, two separate research teams have recently published data of, I would call it even shocking nature, showing from observational evidence that several glaciers in the west Antarctic ice sheet potentially have crossed the tipping point, and now have entered irreversible melting, which could explain this rising vulnerability. If this is correct, it would actually mean that we have to revise our average estimates of sea level rise for this century, from roughly 1 metre to 2 metres, so a doubling in risk for this century. So this is showing why it’s incredibly important for us now to understand the risk of tipping points in large systems that regulate the stability of the earth system. But it goes not only for the polar regions, similarly, science shows the same kind of risk pattern with regard to the large rainforest systems. This is data from the Amazon rainforest, showing the unprecedented droughts from 2005 and 2010, which led to a remarkable penetration of drying, even inside the rainforest. And increasing evidence indicates that these kind of shock events, of droughts related to global climate change, together with the large and vast deforestation, Revista de Praticas de Museologia Informal nº 8 Spring 2016

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which open ups tracts of forest leading to more dry air penetrating the normally moist canopy, could in fact lead to abrupt behaviour, meaning that the system could tip over and, quite

abruptly, shift into a savannah. Mapping out these risks globally is increasingly a key priority for science. What you see here is one such effort of trying to identify the hotspot systems in the world where we could anticipate this kind of shift occurring from one stable state to another stable state if we cross a threshold, leading to a tipping point.

And what you see here is that this goes not only for the polar regions and the Amazon rainforest, but for example, for the large rainfall systems, in both the southeast Asian monsoon, the west African monsoon, which sustains livelihoods for hundreds of millions of people.

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The risk that we get abrupt shifts in methane release in permafrost; a shift from a frozen to a thawing, and permanently thawed system. And these risks of tipping points, now at the large scale, is a fundamental importance in understanding what occurs in the earth system. But finally, this also has direct operational implications for the way we manage large sectors in society. This is an attempt to analyze, for example, is there a risk of inducing tipping points also when it comes to freshwater systems? Not due only to climate change, but the combination of climate change and land management. And what you see here is a first analysis of hotspot regions in the world where you could see a fundamental shift in freshwater supply, if continued unsustainable management is pursued. Where we see shifts in moisture feedback related to deforestation, which changes rainfall patterns, which could abruptly shift runoff flows and rivers, and thereby undermine the possibility for irrigation, and freshwater supplies to cities. So, the large scale regulating systems in the polar regions, for example, connect to the direct operational scales of managing food security in the world, across different scales. So overall the conclusion is that in order to navigate sustainable development in the Anthropocene, we need to understand both pressures and tipping points, and together this allows us to explore: what is a safe operating space for development?

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4. A new framework for human development 4.1. Introducing the planetary boundaries framework Hope you've had a good week. Congratulations. You've gone through the first cluster; the theory and the evidence behind the Anthropocene and social-ecological resilience, so you now have a very firm floor to explore the opportunities and the tools to navigate the Anthropocene. So this was the end of the first cluster and now in the fourth module we'll be taking us into the new cluster on Planetary Boundaries. The first module in this cluster on Planetary Boundaries will be introducing the three large processes, the three large planetary boundaries with global scale tipping points: climate change, ocean acidification, and ozone depletion. To do this in the best way, we've invited Professor Kevin Noone from the Department of Applied Environmental Sciences at Stockholm University who also is a co-author of the Planetary Boundaries research who is joining us for this week. Again, please do not miss our second hangout that we'll have to discuss and debate the issues that we've been discussing so far, and please remember to keep the forum alive. -------------In this lecture we'll be exploring the origins of the planetary boundary framework. And it emerges from fantastic advancements in Earth system science over the past 30 years, and it's the result of the collision of two pieces of scientific enquiry. The first one is the insight that we've entered the Anthropocene; the exponential pressures on the Earth system that we now have become a geological force of change at the planetary scale, which collides with the insight that we can no longer exclude catastrophic, irreversible tipping points in the Earth system. Now when you combine these two you have to conclude that we now need to consider the following very dramatic question. Could we as humanity push the entire Earth system outside of its current stability domain? Which is illustrated in this graph showing that the planet can actually reside in multiple stable states separated by a threshold. But to start that enquiry we must first ask ourselves: what is our desired state? And science shows very clearly, as shown in this following graph, which shows ice core data over the past 100 000 years, that the Holocene, the past 10 000 years of extraordinarily stable interglacial conditions on Earth, is in no doubt humanity's desired stable state which has enabled our modern civilizations to develop as we know them. This is the period when we've had extraordinarily stable climate, varying with only 1 degree Celsius up and down over the entire period. This is a period where we know the global carbon

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cycle, the global nitrogen and phosphorus cycle, all the biogeochemical processes that regulate the stability, which has enabled Earth to stay in the Holocene. So the starting point of thinking around a planetary boundary framework is the recognition that the stable desired state of the planet is the Holocene, and therefore our endeavor is to try and define what are the Earth system processes that regulate the Earth's ability to remain in a Holocene equilibrium, in a Holocene desired state? If we can identify those environmental processes, the next question is: can we for each one of those try and identify a control variable and put a quantitative science-based boundary beyond which we risk feedbacks, interactions, and surprise that could risk the entire system to move over a tipping point and push the system outside of the Holocene? So that in a nutshell is what the planetary boundary framework is about. It's recognizing that today we are potentially moving in this direction where put very, very eloquently and sharply by Ban Ki-moon, Secretary-General of the United Nations, "We have our foot on the accelerator driving towards a threshold or an abyss," meaning that we see signs that we might actually be approaching tipping points in several of the Earth system processes that regulate the stability of the entire planet. Now, I'd really like to emphasize that this work, which was published in 2009 in Nature with a large group of highly recognized Earth system scientists across the world, covering expertise from the climate system, the cryosphere, oceans, hydrology, ecology, this work was based upon empirical advancements in research over the past decades. So it's really the next incremental stage of advancements in research such as the understanding that we can no longer exclude tipping elements and climate; understanding that we have ecological capacities which define the stability of many of our ecosystems, which means that the planetary boundary concept resides on three pillars of scientific enquiry. The first one is clearly the Earth system understanding of the planet as a self-regulating geobiochemical system where the interactions occur all the time between the biosphere, the atmosphere, the cryosphere, the hydrosphere and the climate system, and that we are safely enveloped around the stratospheric ozone layer. The second line of enquiry is the work residing or coming back all the way to the early 1960s around ecological footprints, Herman Daly's work on steady state economy, Kenneth Boulding's thinking around Spaceship Earth, ecological economics research, the research advancements understanding the relationship between human needs and the capacities of our biosphere to support humanity.

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And the third line of enquiry is the enormous advancements we've made in understanding the nonlinear dynamics in complex ecosystems and biomes, the whole domain of resilience theory, complex systems research where we're understanding increasingly that systems can actually cross tipping points and change very rapidly. So planetary boundary theory and its framework originates from these three lines of enquiry and is a natural next step in our understanding. But it differs very significantly from many of the previous concepts that we've been exploring. So you're probably familiar with different concepts such as limits to growth, carrying capacity, guardrails for climate, or tipping elements in the climate system. But the most famous of these is the limits to growth. And I really want to emphasize that even though they complement each other, they're distinctly different, because limits to growth, which was developed by Dennis and Donnella Meadows and was part of the Club of Rome report that came in 1970s, in the early 1970s, was based on the following analysis. It tried to estimate the resource base that we have in the Earth system, natural resources, everything from soil to metals to oil to finite fresh water resources, and then made assumptions regarding technology and tried to estimate human needs. And then it compared the resource base, basically what Earth could provide, the supply side, and humanity's demand side. And when the demand side exceeded supply we were in overshoot. And then the analysis made assumptions around how that overshoot could play out in future risks, for example, the climate system. But it had to make assumptions on technology and human demands. Same for carrying capacity analysis, which always are based on assumptions on technology and human needs. Now history shows that these analyses tend to underestimate human ability to innovate, that we tend to be more clever in terms of, for example, ensuring the capacity to feed ourselves despite resource constraints. The planetary boundary framework does this very differently. It backs off in terms of humanity and simply tries through scientific enquiry to interview planet Earth and see whether Mother Earth could answer the question, "If you were left alone, and if you would like to answer for us, what are the Earth system processes that determine your ability to stay in the Holocene, what are these processes? And for each one of these processes how far can we push you beyond which you will move yourself outside of the Holocene?" So the planetary boundary framework decouples itself from humanity in the diagnostic and the definition of the boundaries. This gives us a safe operating space, which is entirely biophysical. It makes no assumptions of human needs, no assumptions on human innovation capacity. And then you can put back humanity inside that safe operating space. So it liberates ourselves from the risk of making underestimates, overestimates of our ability to develop. And therefore I believe that the planetary boundary framework is so useful in support of our endeavor of enabling and ensuring human prosperity in the Anthropocene, because it's

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entirely a science-based enquiry of what it will take for the Earth system to remain resilient and stable in the desire Holocene-like condition. And then we can take the enormous challenge of finding solutions, exploring technologies, addressing ethics, addressing a fair distribution of remaining ecological space, and addressing the very, very complex questions around democracy, ethics, transparency, governance, economic growth, etc. But that comes inside the safe operating space, it's not being challenged and it's not normative in terms of its definition of the boundaries.

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4.2. -Justification for the planetary boundary selection What makes a planetary boundary process a planetary boundary process? Well, the key criteria that have to be fulfilled is that it's an environmental process that is part of regulating the ability of the Earth system to remain in our current desired state, the Holocene equilibrium that has enabled human development of the past 10 000 years. Together with scientists across the world we plunged into this challenge over several years of enquiry to try and identify what are all the environmental processes that qualify to this criterion of being absolutely fundamental in regulating the resilience and stability of our desired state of the planet? And the result is nine planetary boundary processes. And I can tell you that this enquiry was extremely challenging, and we turned every stone of evidence to see what are the processes that could qualify to play this role? And we were actually ourselves surprised that there were only nine processes rather than 20 or 30 processes. And this was put out, and it's been put out for scrutiny for several years, and there's so far not been any scientific suggestion of adding a tenth or eleventh process, or taking away one of the nine. So we're today quite confident that if humanity can manage these nine processes within safe boundaries we have a very high likelihood of enabling a prosperous future for humanity on a stable planet. Among these nine processes we have different types of planetary boundary processes, some of which have scientific evidence of planetary scale tipping points, some of them which do not have evidence of planetary scale tipping points, but which under the hood of the Earth system regulate the stability of those who have global scale tipping points, or that they have themselves sub-planetary scale tipping points at the ecosystem or biome scale, which if they cross tipping points at enough places in the world simultaneously could cause an impact at the planetary scale. And this is why we define them as different categories of planetary scale and slow variables, which do not have evidence of global scale tipping points. And scientific evidence exploring the paleo record of how oceans have developed in the geological history of Earth indicates that oceans have large scale planetary level tipping points related to acidification, which makes oceans qualify as a planetary scale boundary process. The planetary boundary process is an environmental process that is fundamental in regulating the ability of planet Earth to remain in the Holocene-like state. And the scientific enquiry here has then been exploring and deepening our understanding of what are the different processes that determine, for example, the ability for the climate to stay stable; for our polar regions to

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stay as they are today for the ability of our forests and oceans and land areas to continue to produce both food, air quality, and fresh water as it has been doing for the past 10 000 years. And in doing that and sharing that analysis with international leading scientists across the world the result is nine planetary boundary processes. Now what is fundamentally important to recognize is that to be and to fulfill the criterion of a planetary boundary process does not require that that process is associated with a planetary scale tipping point. The key is what are the processes that regulate the ability of the entire planet to stay in the Holocene? But among the nine processes that we've identified, three of them have evidence of planetary scale tipping points, as shown in this graph.

That is the climate system. Clearly we know that in the past history of the Earth system the climate system has been pushing the entire planet in and out of glacial and interglacial periods, for example. Ocean acidification is another such process where we see paleoscientific evidence that the entire ocean can go from anoxic to oxic events, so basically oxygen-free or oxygen-rich states, that the ocean can actually flip between different stable states. And clearly the stratospheric ozone layer, which is the protective layer in the upper atmosphere, which protects the entire biosphere from harmful radiation from the Sun. But then we have, perhaps more surprisingly, six processes that science now believes qualify as planetary boundaries but which don't have planetary scale tipping points. And they fulfill the criterion for two reasons. One is that they play a fundamental role in regulating whether or not the large-scale processes potentially could cross a tipping point. So for example land use

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systems, fresh water use, and biodiversity, which are fundamental in providing the capacity of land areas to be carbon sinks, and if that ability is not there climate system would very rapidly cross a tipping point. And another example is the ability of land areas to sequester and keep nutrient flows intact as a way of regulating the amount of different pollutants in the air. So among the processes which have this ability of operating under the hood of the Earth system and regulate its ability to stay in the Holocene we've identified four, which are biosphere processes forming part of planetary boundaries. One is the interference, or the way we manage the large biogeochemical flows of nitrogen and phosphorus, which together with carbon are the big cycles in the world. Atmospheric aerosol loading, which is the amount of soot and pollutants in the air, which in turn regulates the stability of the large rainfall systems, for example in tropical regions, such as the monsoon. Global fresh water use, which is one a significant greenhouse gas, as water vapor, but also the fundamental role of water as the bloodstream of the entire biosphere, regulating the amount of biomass which in turn regulates the amount of carbon in the entire Earth system. Land use change, which is the fundamental fabric for all living species on Earth. And biodiversity, the genetic diversity from animals and vegetation and trees, forests, which overall determine the ability of the biosphere to cope with and adapt to changing conditions on Earth. Now finally we also identify that there is most likely one final ninth planetary boundary, which we originally defined as chemical pollution, and increasingly talk of as new entities. This is the recognition from increasing evidence, despite its complexity, that the cocktail of chemical accumulation in the biosphere could potentially cause major shifts in for example the genetic composition of species on Earth, which could be a tipping point in terms of life conditions on Earth. So overall therefore nine planetary boundaries: three of which have evidence of large scale tipping points; climate, stratospheric ozone layer, and ocean acidification; four boundaries which operate a little bit more at the smaller scale but regulating the Earth system: biodiversity, land, water, nutrients, and fresh water; and two boundaries which are very heavily anthropogenically caused: both air pollution, which we call aerosol loading, and chemical pollution. Now are there tipping points among these that operate below planetary scale? And the answer is yes, so that's the second criterion why even those that do not have planetary scale tipping points qualify as planetary boundaries.

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For example, biodiversity loss is increasingly shown to be involved in tipping points at ecosystem scale. And in the Anthropocene we see the risk that we can have tipping points occurring in so many places in the world that they aggregate into becoming a planetary concern. So it's not necessarily so that a system has to have one tipping point at the planetary scale, you can have multiple tipping points, and if they occur in enough places simultaneously they actually add up to a potential influence and impact factor at the Earth system as a whole. So there you have it in a nutshell where the planetary boundaries originate from.

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4.3 - Quantification of the nine planetary boundaries Now that we've identified the nine planetary boundary processes, the large scale processes of climate change, stratospheric ozone depletion, ocean acidification, the slow variables of rate of biodiversity loss, interference with the nitrogen and phosphorous cycle, land use change, freshwater use, and the two heavily human-induced risks around chemical pollution, aerosol loading, the challenge arises of defining quantitatively the boundary position for each one of these processes which distinguishes between a safe operating space and entering a danger zone where we have a higher probability of crossing tipping points which would take us away from a safe Holocene state. Now in exploring that work, we look at the vast evidence in the latest science and try to identify first of all a control variable, an indicator or a parameter that regulates each process. So for climate change, for example, it falls naturally to choose the concentration of greenhouse gases, and for each boundary we do the same. And once we've identified a control variable, we try with the best of our knowledge to identify the point at which science indicates that we approach and are at risk of crossing a tipping point. And that's the way we pursue for each of the boundaries the exploration of positioning the quantifications of a safe operating space for humanity within the Holocene state. And the theory here is relatively simple but fundamentally important. And it's shown in this graph of our - where we distinguish between the safe operating space in green, an uncertainty zone or a danger zone in yellow, and entering a zone of danger in red. So what we're doing for each boundary process is one, trying to identify a control variable which is a good indicator or proxy for the stability of a system. So for example for the climate system we've identified climate forcing in - defined in the number of watts per square meter of increased heat in the atmosphere, and also carbon dioxide concentration as two good control variables for the climate system. And then we scan off all the scientific literature to try and - and explore what does science say today about the point beyond which, in terms in this case concentration of carbon dioxide, we may risk abrupt and irreversible tipping points which could push the Earth system outside of an Holocene-like state. But the trick is that science of course is associated with large uncertainties, and will always continue to be associated with uncertainty, not necessarily only because we don't understand the Revista de Praticas de Museologia Informal nº 8 Spring 2016

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climate system in exact system but because all planetary boundaries interact to a point where it's extremely complicated to put an exact point at which you cross a tipping point.

That causes and generates what we've called a zone of uncertainty, essentially a standard deviation in science. And that zone of uncertainty is the zone of uncertainty within science defined here as the yellow range. And somewhere in that yellow range we, with a very high probability, have the threshold, the point where the system crosses a tipping point. Now here the planetary boundary theory takes its first and only normative stance. We have decided as a proposition in the planetary boundary framework to position the boundary at the lower end of the scientific uncertainty. This is applying a precautionary principle. I mean you could, theoretically at least, place your boundary at the upper end of the uncertainty zone and - and rather have a more optimization-based approach. But we feel that it's a very risky approach to take because we fear that somewhere in that yellow zone science indicates that we have thresholds that - with a very high likelihood will occur. So the boundary position is at the lower end, and that gives us the green space below, so to say, when we stay below the control variable position we're in a safe operating space. The upper end of the uncertainty zone then performs the threshold between the zone of uncertainty and a clear zone of high danger. And that gives you the three positions in this graph, a safe operating space, an uncertainty zone, and a point beyond which we are a very high risk of crossing tipping points. The reason why we have shown two graphs here is that for the systems where we have large scale tipping points we do try to explore exactly the point at which we had evidence of thresholds. But for those processes such as land system change or fresh water use where there's no evidence of planetary scale tipping points the change when we, for example, start overusing water or degrading land is that the system gradually becomes more and more degraded. The response of the system is not associated, at least not as we know, with an abrupt threshold. What we try to identify then is the point at which evidence suggests that if we push the system even further, if we cut down even more forest, the feedback into for example the climate system

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is such that it could push the climate system across a tipping point. And that then becomes the point where we put the boundary. So we have one set of boundaries defined on the point along a control variable beyond which the feedbacks can damage other systems, and for those systems which have thresholds we put the boundary at the point beyond which we actually can have a threshold. So that is the fundamental thinking around planetary boundary theory, and I would very much encourage everyone to look at the literature around this which explains this very clearly. Now what's then the result? Well the result is in the following graph showing the nine planetary boundaries which when quantified, and in the original publication we made attempts of quantifying seven of the nine boundaries, we felt that we did not have evidence enough to quantify either the aerosol loading boundary nor the chemical pollutions or novel entities boundary. But for this-- the remaining seven we proposed quantitative boundary levels which they creates the safe operating space you see here on the graph.

And our original analysis showed that for three of these boundaries, which is indicated in the in the red areas here which define our current state for each boundary, that we have transgressed and entered the danger zone for climate change, the rate of biodiversity loss, and the human interference with the global nitrogen and - for the global nitrogen cycle. In fact for phosphorus we estimate that we're still within the safe operating space. So this is to illustrate the way we can apply planetary boundary thinking, that if we can use science to define the boundary levels beyond which we can push the system outside of a stability domain we can actually monitor and keep track of where we are with regards to all the boundaries.

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Now I really want to emphasize finally that because we are beyond a safe operating space for, for example, climate does not mean that have crossed the tipping point, it just means that we're in a zone where we can potentially see tipping points occurring. And unfortunately the observations we're making, for example, both on biodiversity, climate and certainly on nitrogen, is in fact that we are inducing tipping points and potentially also have the start of irreversible change at the larger scale. Now these estimates are all summarized scientifically in quite substantive scientific tables which are provided in the literature which is associated with the course we're giving. So I would very much encourage anyone to, say, following this lecture to also explore in more detail the contents and the quantifications as presented in the original table that we have in the 2009 publication, and I'd also like to flag that we're right now currently, in August 2014, working on an update of a planetary boundary 2.0 which will provide the scientific update on the quantifications of the boundaries, a certain amount of refinement of the boundary definitions, and even attempts to quantify those unquantified boundaries which we had in the 2009 analysis.

Now in the final graph here you see the numbers that we had in the original publication. And you see here the - the boundary position, but also the uncertainty range which is then the uncertainty range in science. And what you see here is, for example, estimates which for climate change is actually quite robust, or very robust, in terms of scientific evidence, that when we pass a concentration of carbon dioxide of 350 ppm - we are today at 398-99 - we enter a danger zone and we're starting to see evidence of abrupt changes in both Greenland, inland glaciers, ocean acidification related to climate forcing, and changes in Antarctica. Then we have a few boundary definitions which are more tentative. For example on nitrogen the definition we took at the original analysis was set at maximum amount of uptake of nitrogen from the atmosphere for fertilizer of thirty-five million tons of nitrogen per year.

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That is roughly one-fifth of our current uptake from the atmosphere. Humans are the largest interference of the global nitrogen cycle, all categories. In fact our modern agriculture takes out more nitrogen in the atmosphere than the entire biosphere does naturally. This number is based on a first best guess, and we're working very actively to update this, but it shows at least that we're able to take the first stab at identifying what are the safe boundary levels even for such complicated processes, which clearly are key for the resilience of the Earth system, in terms of defining quantitative safe levels. And the science is - is advancing as we speak. In fact since the 2009 publication there's a very, very broad set of fantastic, uh, groups of scientists who have critically assessed these first numbers and improved them, and in almost all instances come up with even better, um, proposals of quantifications, and that synthesis is - is something that we're building on to continue [to] develop this framework, which increasingly has a very strong resonance out in both science, policy and business, and therefore also in its application in different sectors of society.

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4.4 - Climate change In this lecture we provide scientific evidence why climate change is a planetary boundary, and the basis for defining the boundary for climate change. It originates, not surprisingly, from the fantastic scientific explorations of our recent paleoclimatic conditions on Earth, again the stable climatic state we've had in the Holocene, shown here over the past 2000 years of reconstruction of temperature which varies at a maximum of +/- 1 degree or 2 degrees Celsius. And as you see at the end the extraordinarily rapid pace of temperature rise in the world over just the past 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution, and our initial large scale emission of greenhouse gases from our industrial development. This is the basis for the fundamental evidence that builds up the arguments around climate change. It becomes even more dramatic if you connect the past with the future, which is shown in the next graph showing the IPCC projections up until the end of this century. And it's absolutely extraordinary to see the Holocene stability which is again this churning up and down with a +/- 1 degree Celsius, and the fact that we are today heading on average along a pathway that will take us to in the order of 4 degrees Celsius warming during this century. And I think it's absolutely clear just from this graph that we are at risk of pushing ourselves very rapidly outside of the Holocene stability. Now up until today we have already increased global average temperature levels within the order of 0.8-0.9 degrees Celsius over the past 100 years. What you see here is the distribution of that heat across the planet based on modeling and observations, and what you see is that in fact many regions in the northern hemisphere have actually even more warming already today, which is for example affecting one of the regulating systems, namely the polar regions in terms of its feedbacks in the stability of the Earth system.

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The next insight building up the evidence for a climate boundary is that sea level rise is occurring at the pace of the projections we have or even faster. In fact much of the evidence today points at the risk of us underestimating the pace of sea level rise, particularly because we've underestimated the rate of melting which potentially could be irreversible in parts of Antarctica. We're also seeing unfortunately increasing robust analysis looking into the future that we're following what I would actually call a disastrous pathway that leads us on average to three, four, potentially even higher, warming in this century. And that is coming out of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) last, the most recent 5th assessment.

And here you see the synthesis graph showing the different scenarios to the future. The red line is the pathway that takes the world towards a totally undesired not Holocene-like state of 4 degrees C warming, and we know unfortunately that we're following this path. So this is again increasingly showing that we need to do something very rapidly in putting a boundary on climate change to avoid moving outside of a desired state. The next piece of analysis is related to the risk of tipping points and risk. And here science is advancing in a very profound way. We're understanding the climate system much, much more in detail, and particularly how the climate system interacts with the other planetary boundary processes such as land, water, oceans, and biodiversity. And this graph may seem a little bit complex, but it's a really important insight that is coming out of the three last IPCC assessments. So what you see here is a risk assessment shown in red ambers, which has become a seminal and very famous set of graphs, of the risk analysis of the 3rd assessment to the left, the 4th assessment in the middle, and the most recent 5th assessment to the right. And what I want you to look particularly to is the column furthest to the right in each assessment which has a small darkened little block attached to it, which is the assessed risk from science of large scale discontinuities.

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To put it in simple language, the risk of human-induced catastrophic tipping points. So this is the risk of us destabilizing the entire monsoon system, or irreversibly melting the Greenland ice sheet. And if you look carefully in the third assessment the risk of such large-scale discontinuities was assessed to occur at a point where the warming reached in the order of 4 degrees C. So on the Y-axis you have average temperature at which we risk these kind of catastrophic tipping points. But as knowledge advances, as our understanding of [how] the complex Earth has evolved, just a few years later in 2007 with the fourth assessment, as you'd see if you look carefully the threshold at which catastrophic tipping points can occur is down in the range of 2-3 degrees C. And now in the most recent 2013 fifth assessment you see that the assessment from science is that these kind of large-scale discontinuities could actually occur even lower - in the order of 2 degrees C warming. And the reason why this is occurring is that we're understanding more and more about resilience, about the risks that we have surprise and thresholds in the Earth system. And this to me is the most fundamental piece of evidence showing that a planetary boundary approach on climate is absolutely necessary because for one, at already very low temperature rises we today have evidence enough to say that the likelihood of large scale catastrophic changes is highly probable. And secondly, it's highly uncertain. It's so complex that we need to apply a precautionary principle where a boundary position is a position of safety beyond which we enter this area of uncertainty. And just to really hammer that point home, when you translate the latest assessment of the IPCC, our 5th assessment in terms of risk, something absolutely astonishing falls out. We are today, in 2014, at a concentration of greenhouse gases for all gases, so carbon dioxide plus the other gases including methane, nitrous oxide, chlorofluorocarbons, and the short-lived climate forcers, including soot and sulfates and organic carbon, we are at 450 ppm.

Now we have taken the data in the IPCC and just translated them in probability of reaching different degrees at 450 ppm, and that is shown in this graph. So on the X-axis you have temperatures and on the Y-axis you have the probability of reaching that degree of temperature at 450 ppm, at our current concentration of greenhouse gases. And look at the point which I've put on this graph which is 6 degrees C. I've taken an extreme warming, 6 degrees C is something totally outside of anything we can imagine, it's an

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uninhabitable planet, it's a degree of warming which any person, even a climate skeptic, would agree is totally unacceptable for humanity. What's the probability at 450 ppm according to the latest IPCC that we reach 6 degrees C Well on the Y-axis you see that the probability is a staggering 1.6%. Now what does a percentage, a probability of 1.6% mean? Well to give you and equivalent it would be the same as accepting that we have 1,500 aircrafts crashing every day. So it's a probability level for catastrophic events, which in in any other sector of society would never, ever accept. In fact, some of the large reinsurance companies after the IPCC released its report, clearly pointed out that we're reaching a point of risk which goes beyond the point where they potentially can no longer issue, insurances because they can not be liable for the large scale costs that would be incurred if these kind of catastrophic events would be allowed to happen. So we're entering truly a danger zone with regards to climate.

This is shown clearly in the next slide here on our analysis of how much forcing we are loading on the climate system. So what you see here is the last half million years how we are able to reconstruct in a very, very adequate way how much greenhouse gases we have in the atmosphere, how much forcing that includes. Forcing is the amount of watts, the energy that is trapped per square meter because of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. And look at the future. What you see here is how we are rapidly moving out of the Holocene, moving out into a forcing and temperature rise which is way, way outside of the Holocene equilibrium. Now when we all take all this science together and synthesize it to define the boundary, we then apply our theory of a safe operating space, an uncertainty zone, and a danger zone, and we find that the science indicates that at the range of between 350 ppm and 450 ppm the science is well in agreement that here we have a risk of crossing catastrophic thresholds. And therefore we apply the boundary at the safe lower end of that uncertainty which is 350 ppm for carbon dioxide. And there you have it, that's the way we place the boundary for climate change.

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4.5 Ocean acidification My name is Kevin Noone. I'm Professor at the Department of Applied Environmental Science at Stockholm University. And for the next seven minutes or so we'll be talking about ocean acidification. What I'd like to do is touch on three things, first the chemistry of ocean acidification, the consequences of ocean acidification, and some of the connections, not just in the planetary boundaries framework but outside that as well. So let's start off with chemistry. The first slide here shows the carbon dioxide budget globally, and it comes from the Global Carbon Project based in Australia.

And towards the left you can see the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by human activities like fossil fuel burning or cement production. That's the arrow, the big arrow, going upwards. There's another upward going arrow and that comes from the carbon dioxide emitted from land use change. Of all of the carbon dioxide we emit to the atmosphere about half of it stays there, and that's why carbon dioxide concentrations are increasing. But what happens to the other half? Well, about 25% or so goes into terrestrial ecosystems, that's the downward going arrow to the trees, and the other 25% ends up going into the oceans. So what happens when you dissolve carbon dioxide in the oceans? Well the carbon dioxide forms a compound with water called carbonic acid, which then dissociates - that means it splits up and forms two ions - a proton H+ and a bicarbonate ion HCO3-. That can dissociate again, giving off another proton and a carbonate ion. And each time a proton is added to water it becomes a little bit more acidic. So, is that a global issue? Well, yes it is. This particular image shows three different plots of ocean pH as a function of time.

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The one on the far left is a pre-industrial case. And the color coding is proportional to the ocean pH, so you can see that the red colors are about 8.2, green colors are 8, the purplish-blue colors are 7.8-7.9. And you can see in the pre-industrial case most of the oceans were 8 or above in terms of pH. Present day it's still around 8, but there are fewer areas which are above that. Predicted for the end of the century you can't see any places at all with pH of 8. Now that doesn't sound like much, right? But keep in mind that a tenth, the 0.1 pH unit, is about a 26% increase in acidity of the oceans. So we're talking about a lot. What are some of the consequences, uh, of ocean acidification?

Well this plot shows a lot of different kinds of marine organisms, and it's not so important, you can take a pause and look at more detail, but what you want to - to concentrate on first is increasing ocean acidity is going to the left in these plots, and calcification rate, that's how rapidly organ-- organisms in the ocean turn carbonate into a - into a shell is on the vertical axis going up.

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And most of these plots either have a little bit of a - an inverse U-shape or it's just going down, which means that most organisms in the oceans don't like it when it becomes more acidic, they slow down the rate at which they make a hard shell out of the carbonate in the oceans. What does that mean really? Well if you're a coral reef you're under stress from ocean acidification and other things like ocean warming and different kinds of pollutants. And you can go from the kind of beautiful, vibrant, very bio-diverse reef you see on the right to the kind of bleached reef you see on the left as a result of those changes in the ocean, including ocean acidification. What are the implications and how rapidly can this happen? Well the graph on the top shows predicted increases, in carbon dioxide concentration for the atmosphere under a number of different scenarios into the future. The bottom shows the aragonite saturation, that's the point at which the equilibrium shifts from making aragonite, a kind of calcium carbonate, a soluble or an insoluble compound in the ocean, and that you can see will happen by the early mid-century for the southern ocean under most all of these scenarios into the future. So the point at which aragonite becomes soluble, or coral reefs might have a very, very difficult time, uh, existing at all, will be about mid-century or so, not too long from now. Now that's not the only stressor that marine organisms are facing. It's one of the more important ones, but if you look at some of the other ones, like ocean warming, and other kinds of pollution you can see that the oceans are facing multiple stressors.

And in particular, on this plot, if you looked at the hatched areas, much of the southern ocean and much of the north Pacific and Atlantic oceans, will be faced by a number of stressors

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including, uh, ocean acidification. And all of the organisms that live there will be in a much more stressed environment. You can get more detail about this, and other issues as well, in a book, Managing Ocean Environments in a Changing Climate. It tries to put all of these different stressors together and tells you how they fit with each other. Which moves us into the connections part of the presentation. So you've seen this picture before, or at least some version of the picture. This is the image of planetary boundaries. It's not by chance, that ocean acidification and climate boundaries are right next to each other, because the driver for both is the same, how much carbon dioxide we emit to the atmosphere. So this next to the last slide shows some of the connections between planetary boundaries, ocean acidification and the couple of other things, like food production. So you can see on the top we can produce food from terrestrial sources or on the bottom we can produce food from marine sources.

And the things that connect them are our planetary boundaries. So you see chemical pollution, for instance, from production of food on land might negatively influence coastal areas where we farm or fish, uh, for food. And nitrogen and phosphorus cycling, and what we've been talking about so far in terms of ocean acidification, the amount of carbon dioxide that we emit into the atmosphere. And the important thing with this slide is to realize that all of these processes are fundamentally connected with each other.

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You can't really pull one apart and look it all by itself. Having said that though we'll like to do a little bit of a reminder of what the ocean acidification boundary actually is.

It's written in terms of aragonite saturation, that is, it's a chemical equilibrium, and this might be a poster child for planetary boundaries in the fact that that's a very, very easy boundary to define, because it is a chemical equilibrium. If you add a little bit more carbon dioxide to the oceans aragonite becomes saturated, or unsaturated, so this is probably the easiest to define of all the planetary boundaries, and you can see on this slide exactly what it is. Thank you very much.

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4.6. Stratospheric ozone depletion All life on Earth depends on the extraordinarily thin layer of livable atmosphere which envelopes the biosphere in our Earth system. But above the atmosphere in the high atmosphere, roughly ten to fifty kilometers above ground, we have the stratospheric ozone layer. And the stratospheric ozone layer is a protective shield that enables life on Earth by reflecting back harmful ultraviolet radiation from the Sun. So clearly the ozone layer is a planetary boundary enabling human prosperity and development on Earth. The stratospheric ozone layer has for a long time been understood as being absolutely essential for living conditions on Earth. And in the early '80s scientists started to observe something absolutely extraordinary namely a rapid, abrupt drop in the thickness of the ozone layer. This was a huge surprise, in fact scientists even thought it was an error in the scientific observations. But through fantastic research by top scientists in the interface between atmospheric research and chemistry soon it was proven that the reason for this depletion was that certain chemicals that we used as refrigerants, as solvents, propellants, the whole family of chlorofluorocarbons were moving up the atmosphere through high winds and reacting with ozone and - and breaking these molecules apart and thereby depleting the stratospheric ozone layer, threatening life on Earth, and particularly health for humans, by risks of rising skin cancer, cataracts and damage also on vegetation, food production systems on Earth. This led in the mid-1980s to the extraordinary step where the world gathered around a protocol, the famous Montreal Protocol, to ban chlorofluorocarbons from use in refrigerators. And this in turn has led to a success story where a boundary of ozone depletion was transgressed in the early '90s and now we're actually moving into a safe operating space, showing that humanity in fact can collectively as all nations on Earth work together to operate within a safe operating space. So we are moving in the right direction on ozone, but what is very important to recognize is that we're still observing an ozone hole, particularly over the polar regions, and the classic ozone hole is in Antarctica, which is due to the combination of ozone depleting substances, continued emissions of chemicals, but also the fact that the sins of the 1980s are still haunting us because of the delay time in much of these

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chemical reactions, which is also a reminder that, uh, we need to apply the core thinking of planetary boundary theory which is a precautionary principle, because what we do today, which we sometimes do not even understand, can have a harmful effect on the Earth system, can actually come back and hit us many, many decades later. I'll give you a small example that comes from the Nobel Laureate Paul Crutzen, who was one of the three scientists observing the depletion of the ozone layer in the early 1980s. The industry at the time had a choice of two molecules to develop the refrigerating chemicals that were used worldwide, either chlorine or bromine. And just so happened by pure coincidence that the industry chose chlorine. That was very lucky for humanity because it just so happens that chlorine has several magnitudes lower harmful effect on ozone. If the industry in the early '80s instead has chosen, or rather in the early '60s all the way up to the '80s when we banned the chemicals, had chosen bromine as the carrier of refrigerating systems across the world we most likely would have had a catastrophic tipping point that would have undermined human development on Earth. So that's an example of how close we were of what we can call a planetary scale disaster, and why thinking in terms of defining planetary boundaries is so essential. Science has come to a point where we are at a position where we can define a control variable, which we have chosen as the thickness of the column of ozone across the planet. And this gives us a very good, robust, science-based definition of how much we must maintain in terms of ozone, and thereby also translating that to avoiding chemicals that can destroy the ozone layer. Is the problem finally resolved? Well the answer is unfortunately no. The most damaging chemicals used in the early '80s are not on the market any longer, but we're using other types of refrigerants, and methane is a compound that also poses a threat to the stratospheric ozone layer, and we see other emerging novel entities that could actually threaten the ozone layer, reminding us that planetary boundary processes do interact, and one very strategic way of protecting the ozone layer is also to have a strong boundary on chemical pollution.

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5. The four "slow" boundaries Dear friends, I know we're not in the same room but I feel that we are getting to know each other and congratulations for keeping up so well so far and being so engaged on the forum and sharing your insights. We're now in the midst of the second cluster. We've gone through the big planetary boundaries of climate change, ocean acidification, and stratospheric ozone depletion and this next module will be covering the remaining six planetary boundaries. This is a really exciting module where we will be exploring the boundaries on biodiversity loss, freshwater use, land use change, our interference with the global nitrogen and phosphorous cycle, aerosol loading, and novel entities of chemical pollution. To help us in this, Dr. Sarah Cornell coordinator of our planetary boundary research here at the Stockholm Resilience Centre will be joining us for these lectures. And please do remember to share you personal insights as part of your portfolio and connect that to others on the forum. And don't be afraid to get involved in the discussions and debates and please do challenge and throw out your wildest ideas. Let's try to push the boundaries.

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5.1. Biodiversity loss It may surprise you that biodiversity is one of the planetary boundaries. But when one sits down and reflects a bit it becomes very obvious that biodiversity must be one of our planetary boundaries. Think of it, without the living species everything from vegetation, trees to animals and small insects, pollinators, we would have no biomass, there would be no carbon sequestration, there would be no rainfall because a large portion of our fluxes of water originate from the canopy, from vegetation transpiring and evaporating water back to the atmosphere. It regulates the flows of fresh water, regulates the flows of carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus. The living biosphere is a fundamental component in regulating the stability of the entire Earth system. And this relates to two components. One is the genetic diversity; the treasure of genetic code, which forms the adaptive capacity of the entire Earth system. But it's also the diversity of functions that we know today that in order to develop, for example, food for a world population of 7 billion people we need the functions and landscapes for pollination, the function of microorganisms in the soil to develop organic matter which in turn delivers nutrients for plants, without which we would have no food. So we need to explore the functional diversity and the genetic diversity in the rich treasure of living species on Earth. And this forms part of a core fundamental part of a living planet. The drama is that we're really mismanaging biodiversity in the world. In fact we are today, based on the observations we have, in the sixth mass extinction of species in the world, the first extinction to be caused by another species, and one of these six, for example, being when we lost the dinosaurs 65 million years back on Earth. So these are big, dramatic changes, illustrated here for example when it comes to how we're dealing with global fisheries. Just over the past sixty years from the 1950s and the onset of the great acceleration when we started the exponential rise in pressures on planet Earth, you see here the extraordinary social-ecological journey of not only increased landings of fish, but also that fish efforts are changing dramatically from small scale fisheries to large scale industrial fisheries where we are basically vacuum cleaning large tracts of oceans, not only in shallow waters but also in deep ocean regions. We have the classic examples of collapse of fisheries; like the cod fisheries off the shores of Newfoundland, where we're learning unfortunately that once we cross a tipping point with regards to loss of fisheries we can actually lock the system in a situation where the fish does not even come back.

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So these are big, dramatic changes that we need to incorporate in our understanding of the resilience of the Earth system. We also have interactions between species. This is an example of how delicate the system works in terms of relationships between seabirds and fisheries. A large synthesis across essentially all marine systems across the world shows that when we overfish and lose more than 30% of fish stocks that has an abrupt impact on seabird populations which go through, and cross a threshold leading to abrupt changes in populations. So loss of one species in this case over-fishing, has a propelling effect on seabird populations which risk collapse, in fact, in many parts of the world. So again the risk of not connecting diversity in species and thereby not understanding that this can lead to propelling effects across the world. A fundamental, very essential part of our own future is of course the ability to produce food. And there's another example of how a function in ecosystems simply provides us with a free service, namely pollinating insects. And here's one example of a global concern among farmers, scientists, citizens in general, that we're losing pollinating bees at a very rapid pace, to the extent in fact that some agricultural regions are collapsing. We have human beings have to step in and function as human insects to pollinate apple orchards in China. We have examples of collapse of pollination in some parts of the UK, United Kingdom, because of overuse of pesticides which led scientists to pop over to neighboring countries in Scandinavia and try to borrow bumble bees to be used as pollinators in their own agricultural systems. So again, understanding that biodiversity - without biodiversity we cannot have modern agricultural systems, and therefore we get locked in an undesired state in terms of delivering human well-being. So in summary, what occurs is the recognition that biodiversity is fundamental for the regulation of the Earth system, it's fundamental for human well-being. We tried based on this

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evidence to identify what could be a good control variable, an indicator for a planetary boundary on biodiversity? We took as a first starting point an indicator that maps out the rate of extinction, how many species we're losing, over time. And this indicator called the extinction rate per million species per year, which is a good indicator of the pace of loss of biodiversity.

The natural background rate of loss is roughly one species per million species per year, that's the normal background rate. We estimate as a first guess that a boundary lies somewhere between ten and hundred lost species per million species each year. So the boundary was placed at ten species lost per million species per year. Now today we're losing species at roughly ten to hundred times faster that rate. That's why we can today say with quite a high degree of confidence that we've actually transgressed and are in a danger zone on biodiversity. But we're also exploring to understand an even better indicator for biodiversity because extinction rate only gives us a measure of diversity, it doesn't give us any measure of the functions biodiversity plays. And here I've just given one example of how the science it is advancing in terms of mapping out the functions that biodiversity plays for humanity. This is illustrated from another index that is called the mean species abundance, which is an average measure of not only the number of species in each ecosystem in the world, but also how many in each species group we have grouped in terms of functions.

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And here you have a map of the world of the situation, the state for biodiversity in terms of species abundance in the year 2000. And you can see in red the hotspot regions where we are truly in a very risky zone in terms of losing too much of species abundance. But in green you have regions that are still in a safe operating space.

And here you have the projections into the future, up until 2050, of the risks if we do not transgress ourselves, or if we do not move ourselves, into a safe operating space in terms of safeguarding biodiversity. We're right now working very actively in improving this analysis even further to say that extinction rate is a good measure of the diversity and richness of species in the world, but we'd like to have a better measure to measure and to determine the functions that biodiversity plays for human well being. And one of these indices is a very exciting new advancement on something called the biodiversity intactness index, which is an even better measure on functional groups for the role played by ecosystems for human well-being. And this is something that will be hopefully developed further and much more broadly in the world because so far it's used in just a few ecosystems in the world. But overall, in summary, biodiversity as a key for human well-being, biodiversity as a key for regulating the stability in the Earth system. Science shows clearly that biodiversity is key to regulate a world that remains in our desired Holocene-like state, and science can now put the first quantitative estimates of a safe boundary within which we have a high likelihood of being able to rely on biodiversity, the richness of all species on Earth, as a support for human development.

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5.2. Land and water use change In this lecture we'll go through two of the slow variables constituting critical planetary boundaries that regulate under the hood of the Earth system the big climate system and the large operation of the global hydrological cycle and how biodiversity can operate in our living biosphere, in land and water. And we'll start with land. Can you imagine? Over just the last 150 years we have rapidly moved into a situation where we've transformed almost 40% of the world's land area into urban regions and predominantly agriculture. And this enormous transition is illustrated through this series of maps showing the development over the last decades. Now for land use the absolute critical issue to recognize is that what determines the ability of land areas to regulate fresh water, regulate flows of different nutrients, be habitats for biodiversity, and regulate fresh water flows, is what kind of ecosystems we have. And what we're finding is that the number one biome system to regulate the stability of the Earth system is our forest systems. And in the original planetary boundary analysis we used a proxy to define and safeguard the critical forest areas in the world, namely what was the maximum amount of cropland that we could allow ourselves, because cropland is the largest human-caused land use change on Earth. And we used it because we have good data on cropland extent and cropland change. Now in the updates that we're doing we're focusing much more on what you see on this slide, namely directly analyzing how much of the different critical forest systems do we need to regulate the Holocene stability on planet Earth. And we're finding from science that the rainforests in the world, the temperate forests, and the boreal forests are the most critical ones in regulating Earth resilience. Now we are so rapidly changing forest systems in the world. One very dramatic example is shown here from Borneo, where almost, or a bit more than fifty percent of rainforests have been cut down so far in order to transform land use to large scale palm oil plantations. And you see in this graph the transition of the growth of palm oil and the reduction in rainforest. And this has dramatic effects for local biodiversity, devastating effect for local indigenous communities, but it also directly affects the entire regulation of the climate system and the regional patterns of rainfall across vast areas. So these are truly regulating functions at the planetary scale. And we only have three remaining rainforest areas: the

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Indonesian, southeast Asian, the Congo Basin in Africa, and the Amazon rainforest in Latin America. Now the question one asks is do these shifts associate themselves with tipping points? And evidence suggests that the answer to this question is yes. Very rarely or ever in isolation, but land use change can together with changes in fresh water use trigger large scale abrupt and even irreversible shifts; what we call tipping points. When you change land use we can have so large [a] shift in fresh water flows that it could actually induce tipping points, meaning for example when we cut down forests, take out fresh water in river basins, that we could have permanent tipping points where large tracts of land get locked into desertified states, as one example. So there are examples of how we can induce tipping points when pushing land and water systems too far. Now nothing is static, and if you load climate change on top of this we see projections into the future that would put even more strain on particularly fresh water systems. Here you see a very recent analysis by Jacob Schewea and colleagues at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research trying to analyze what would happen with fresh water resources in the world at 2 degrees C warming, so a point at which we most likely will be quite soon already within this century. Now if you look carefully at this map you'll see the red areas in the world where the projections show, when we gather all the knowledge that we have today, regions that will lose 25 or more percent of average annual runoff. And losing so large [a] portion of fresh water resources is truly a risk of crossing tipping points for both ecosystems and food supply will be jeopardized. So these are examples of moving and the risks we would take if several boundaries move out of their safe operating space, in this case climate, land and fresh water. So if we move into fresh water and the diagnostic of what makes water a planetary boundary it's in its fundamental diagnostic the role water plays as the bloodstream of the biosphere. Water regulates everything we know in the biosphere, all vegetation growth, all biodiversity depends on fresh water.

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Humans depend on fresh water, and this map shows just the degree of water scarcity in the world as projected until 2025, taking into consideration fresh water considerations in ecosystems and human needs. So what we're recognizing increasingly that the global hydrological cycle, which is finite, is fundamentally a prerequisite for the stability of the Earth system: it regulates climate, it regulates biodiversity, and it's fundamentally important for social and economic development. Now what makes water so interesting from a planetary boundary perspective is that it flows yearly in its hydrological cycle, evaporating from land and oceans, creating clouds, falling down as rainfall, infiltrating into the soil into what we call green water, the portion of rainfall that forms soil moisture and then flows back into the atmosphere as evaporation and transpiration, totally constituting vapor flows, and one portion flowing off on land and as groundwater flow, what we call blue water, the liquid water that fills up our lakes, rivers, wetlands, and dams. Now what we're learning increasingly is that we have to have sustainable management of landscapes at large scale to safeguard rainfall, what we call precipitation sheds, which is what's the area that we depend upon as a source of our rainfall? And this is an illustration not only why water is a planetary boundary, because it's safeguarding the management of the fresh water cycle, from the local watershed scale to the base of the global scale, regulates the entire flow of fresh water which, again, regulates climate and biomass, but also how intimately coupled fresh water is to land management and deforestation. So these are key justifications from science making water and land so important as planetary boundaries. Now the question is how much water do we need to safeguard in order to stay in a Holocene-like state? In our original analysis we did this from a global perspective, we looked at the global hydrological cycle, we looked at how much water can we take out in the large basins And biomes of the world before we start seeing evidence of tipping points, and calculated a global number of the maximum amount of water that we can consume in our rivers before we end up with a situation where we could see evidence of tipping points. But we did this from a very global analysis, synthesizing literature. Now we're adding a very important piece to the evidence, namely digging ourselves much more down into detail in all the river basins in the world, exploring based on vast amounts of knowledge that is out in the field on how much water do we need to sustain in our rivers to keep ecosystems functioning, what professionals call environmental water flows. And what you see here in this graph is the latest update of a bottom-up estimate of the global fresh water boundary based on this analysis for every basin in the world, what's the minimum amount of fresh water we need to sustain in order to keep basins resilient? And the exciting thing is that we're now combining these two analyses of a top-down global estimate of the planetary boundary for maximum amount of fresh water use with a bottom-up Revista de Praticas de Museologia Informal nº 8 Spring 2016

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analysis of how much fresh water must stay in the basins to keep basins, large landscapes operational. And this leads to our estimate of the final planetary boundary. But before coming to the numbers around where the boundaries land, let me just close with a kind of summary statement with regards to the importance of land and water for the human future on Earth. We are soon nine billion people on our planet. Everyone with a right to development and the basis for development will be access to food and fresh water. Recent estimates shows [show] that just to feed humanity in a world in 2050 with nine billion people will require potentially an increase of fresh water use from our current 7000 cubic kilometers of fresh water per year, both in irrigation and rain for that culture, to in the order of 9000-10 000 cubic kilometers per year. This in a planet where already 25% of our large rivers no longer reach the ocean because we're taking out so much water to produce food. Now the question is can we transition the world on fresh water land within a safe operating space? And John Foley and colleagues here at the Resilience Centre recently did a very significant synthesis asking this question: can we feed the world within a safe operating space? And the answer is that yes, in fact we have so many innovations and so much untapped potential to improve the efficiency and productivity of fresh water use that we can in fact attempt to achieve this grand challenge of feeding humanity within a safe operating space. Yes, we are in a very challenging position in terms of sustaining fresh water and land within a safe space. On the other hand we can, within a safe space, also meet demands for a growing population. In terms of definitions of the boundaries then what we're done is that the original estimate was to say: what's the maximum amount of cropland that we can expropriate beyond which we risk tipping risks induced by land use change? That estimate was set at a maximum cropland extent of 15%, and we have today transformed 12% of the world's land surface into cropland. It's 12% for cropland, but it's forty percent if we include also grazing lands. But we took cropland because that's a set of data that we have quite a good handle on. In the updates that we're doing we are, as I mentioned, reversing this to rather say how much forest do we need to maintain in order to sustain Earth resilience? And our estimates show that we need to keep in the order of 75% on average for all the big forest systems, and we are today actually at a situation where we have cut down more Than 25%, we

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actually only have 62% of forests left on Earth. So we're already in a danger zone with regard to the planetary boundary on forests. But importantly we're actually able today to make the first estimates for how much rainforest we need to keep, and our estimate shows we need to keep 85% of rainforest systems, that we need to keep 50% percent of our temperate forests which play a lesser important role in terms of its total coverage to maintain Earth resilience, and that we need to keep in the order of 85% of our boreal forests to stay within a safe operating space. And this is a signal or a way of showing that the planetary boundary at the global scale can actually be translated to the operational scale of forest management in large parts of the world. But it does, and I really want to remind ourselves of this, forests do not respect national borders. It shows that it's a global concern to safeguard the remaining forests on Earth. Similarly for fresh water we maintain. The original analysis that we need to keep consumptive fresh water at the global scale 4000 cubic kilometers of fresh water per year. That is the boundary that we feel we still have evidence to support. But then we've done this bottom-up analysis of the amount of environmental water flow in all the basins in the world, which ends up with an aggregate boundary corresponding to in the order of the same magnitude as our estimates top-down, but it gives us percentages of maximum allowable withdrawable fresh water at each river basin in the world, which ends up in the order of 25 to 50% of fresh water must be kept in the rivers, and that there's a large variation here is that it depends for each basin on how much fresh water there is, if these are permanent basins, if these are intermediate basins, if these are only infermeral basins, the flux intensity, etc. So there's a lot of intricacy here but it just shows that we can operationalize this at the level of management. So overall land and water as fundamental boundaries regulating Earth resilience and our desired Holocene state. They operate at the local level but aggregate into impacts at the global scale, interact very closely with particularly biodiversity and the climate system, and are fundamentally part of the operational management for a sustained prosperous future on planet Earth.

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5.3 Interference with global n and p cycles Hello, I'm Sarah Cornell and I'm a coordinator of the International Planetary Boundaries Research Network at Stockholm Resilience Centre. My own research is about human changes to global environmental processes. I'm going to talk with you about human impacts on the global nitrogen and phosphorus cycles. The global biogeochemical cycles link the living and the non-living parts of the Earth system.

Chemical relationships control the general patterns of interaction between geological and biological processes. It's the way that the nutrient elements flow through land, ocean and atmosphere that ultimately regulate all of life on the planet. And human activities are changing all of these basic cycles. As we explore this topic, I'll make reference to very simplified diagrams like this one, that show the present day cycles and the human changes. The arrows just show the overall annual flows of the elements between the Earth's crust, atmosphere, oceans and the biosphere, that is all the living organisms on Earth. It's important to keep in mind that these flows are the result of many different Earth system processes, and at the same time it's also important to remember that in the boxes, atmosphere, ocean, biosphere, and so on, we see many processes and feedbacks happening all the time. The Earth system is a very dynamic system, and the simple diagram is a very simple representation. Because all of these boxes are connected to each other through these different processes, human activities in one will play out in all of the others. It's these consequences that mean that we need a planetary boundary for nutrient elements. Piecing together the global budgets, in other words putting the numbers on the up and down arrows in those diagrams, is one of the major achievements of the last 50 years. It takes international and interdisciplinary research, and it involves scientists working in all kinds of environments around the world.

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People are most familiar with the global carbon cycle because changes in carbon are so tightly linked to the climate system. The figure shows some of the processes that are happening at the moment. And here is the first of the simple flow diagrams I talked about. The numbers show the annual flows between the different stocks of carbon in the Earth system, and the red arrow shows the human disturbance. Every year the biggest single change that we make to the carbon cycle is that we're moving carbon from underground fossil fuel stocks into the atmosphere. We also contribute carbon dioxide into the atmosphere through deforestation and agriculture. But our main concern is that this carbon dioxide is accumulating in the atmosphere where it acts as a greenhouse gas. Climate is changing as the concentration increases. But carbon isn't the only element that we're changing. People are much less familiar with the other elemental cycles, but they're just as important, and actually they're tightly linked to carbon and the climate system too. In this picture you can see the main changes in the nitrogen cycle. Nitrogen is one of the essential elements that sustains all of life on Earth. We use it in our proteins that make up our muscles, for example. The flow diagram shows the natural changes in white and the red arrows show the major changes that humans are causing in the system. The biggest change is the transformation of atmospheric nitrogen into reactive forms, like nitrate and ammonia. We do this because we need that nitrogen as fertilizer for the food production. We also fix nitrogen from the atmosphere through many other processes, industrial processes and transport as well. Right now the red arrow of nitrogen fixation is bigger than the natural arrow of natural biogenic fixation of nitrogen. We are currently more than doubling the natural rate of drawing down of nitrogen from the atmosphere into the biosphere, but you can see that that isn't all that we're doing. This nitrogen is not all taken up by crops. A large amount is being released back into the

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atmosphere where it causes air pollution problems and acid rain, and is a climate greenhouse gas, and the rest is released into rivers and oceans where we have problems of nitrogen enrichment and eutrophication. I'll explain what that is in a little while. This is happening all around the world. When rivers, lakes, and coastal zones have very high concentrations of nitrogen, and other nutrient elements, the most responsive organisms draw up this nutrient most quickly. We end up with algal blooms, microorganisms are thriving in these water conditions. The image shows areas where there are very large amounts of marine algae, reflecting the highest concentrations of nutrient elements. In the nitrogen cycle we have another particular challenge, which is that a large amount of the nitrogen is transported all around the world, very large distances, in the atmosphere. We see biogeochemical and ecological tipping points in area far away from the most intense sources. The densely populated areas have the most intense nitrogen pollution problems, but you can see from the figure that in this century of industrial activity, nitrogen really has become a global problem. The issue is not just a regional one. And nitrogen is not the only element that's causing us concern at the moment. The phosphorus cycle is also being changed very substantially by human activity, and phosphorus is another one of these essential nutrient elements. The figure again shows the processes that are happening in the Earth system, and the simple diagram shows the natural flows in white and the major human perturbation in red. Unlike nitrogen and carbon, phosphorus isn't really affecting the atmosphere. The biggest change is that human activities are mining it from the ground and applying it to land surfaces for agriculture, 25 million tons a year. But a large amount of this phosphorus is being mobilized in the Earth system through the watercourses. It goes into our rivers and receiving oceans. It also contributes to nutrient enrichment. Nutrient enrichment doesn't really sound like a problem, but it is a very serious one. Locally it's a major problem for public health and environment, and it's an economic issue as well. In nutrient-enriched water systems biodiversity typically decreases. And when the algal blooms die and rot away they starve the water of oxygen. We end up with dead zones, and this is another example of tipping points that we see in the environment. It's the risk of large and irreversible dead zones in the oceans that really calls for a planetary boundary for phosphorus.

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The changes in both the nitrogen and phosphorus cycles are largely driven by the same human activity. In other words, fertilizer application for food production. The global impact arises from regional activities, so a really major area for research and policy at the moment is to improve the global assessment of both these nutrient elements. The planetary boundaries for human interference in the global nutrient cycles now reflect these regional differences. The ecological impacts of the eutrophication of surface waters, and increasingly we're working on trying to improve the links between the elemental cycles because they're linked in nature.

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5.4. Aerosol loading Hello, I'm Sarah Cornell from the Stockholm Resilience Centre. And I'm going to explain why we're concerned about the global human impact on atmospheric aerosols. Aerosol is a rather technical term to describe the phenomenon of liquid droplets or particles, very small particles, that are held suspended in the atmosphere. Aerosols play many very important roles in the atmosphere and in the Earth system. They can both absorb and reflect light, so they're important in Earth's heat balance, and in the climate system. They provide condensation nucleus points; water condenses on aerosol particles and affects where clouds are formed and where rainfall happens. And they also provide microsurfaces for chemical reactions in the atmosphere. So, they influence atmospheric chemistry. For example, the reactions leading to stratospheric ozone depletion, or the ozone hole, happened on polar clouds that formed on stratospheric aerosols in the upper atmosphere. To understand atmospheric aerosols, and the additional loading that humans are creating, we take physical and chemical measurements of gases, of particles, and of rainfall. A lot of this work is done in particular locations in different ecosystems, especially in urban ecosystems where the particulate loading is highest. But we can also measure aerosols from space. Aerosols can be emitted directly into the atmosphere and they can also be formed through chemical processes in the atmosphere. That's what we call secondary aerosol. One of the main natural sources of aerosol is actually the world's oceans, waves and bubble bursting eject saltwater directly into the air and the water evaporates and leaves little microcrystals of salt. Other natural primary sources include fire, volcanoes, and air-blown dust. There are natural sources for secondary aerosol too. For example, plankton and land vegetation emit organic compounds that react in the atmosphere to make very small particles. These reactions that create aerosols that affect the distribution of clouds over forests and coastal zones. We also see human impacts in both direct and secondary aerosols. Land use change and combustion processes change the global patterns of dust and smoke emission. And together with transport and industrial processes we are currently changing the emissions of a very large number of chemical precursor gases that become aerosols in the atmosphere. You're probably familiar with some aerosol systems already. Smoke is a suspension of carbon particles in the air; fog is a suspension of water droplets; and the gas emissions associated with human activities, interact with each other and with these natural systems, creating really much more complex aerosol systems like smog and photochemical haze. Revista de Praticas de Museologia Informal nº 8 Spring 2016

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In the last century killer smogs, or pea soupers, were a severe environmental problem, so industrial smoke emissions are very tightly controlled in many cities of the world. But however industrial and urban emissions are still the cause of many problem aerosols in other parts of the world. Photochemical haze plagues cities like Shanghai and Los Angeles and many other mega-cities in the world. These aerosol systems are complex. They involve both natural and anthropogenic sources, they involve many different kinds of chemical substances, they involve direct emissions and reactions that happen in the atmosphere, and these reactions involve solids, and liquids, and gases. In other words, the composition and the ultimate fate of aerosols depend on many different geographic and meteorological conditions. This presents a major challenge to us when we're trying to find a global measure for what is acceptable or not acceptable in terms of aerosol changes in the Earth system. On top of that the world's ecosystems on land and in the oceans have evolved and adapted to the biogeochemical flows that aerosols provide. The human impact isn't just as simple as an increase in aerosol loading. In some instances human activities are removing or relocating aerosols. We risk setting off physical and ecological tipping points when we change atmospheric chemistry in this way. This animation shows the global patterns and total aerosol loading of the atmosphere. It's clear that aerosols are a vital part of the Earth system, and a dynamic part, and also that there's a huge amount of variability in their local and regional patterns.

This figure is from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and it shows the complex effect of atmospheric precursor gases in the top of the red box, and aerosols in the lower part of the red box. It shows the effects of aerosols and gases on Earth's radiative balance. Some have a positive effect on radiative forcing, leading to warming of the atmosphere; and others have a negative forcing, in other words they lead to cooling. The net global effect is a cooling, at the moment.

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The climate planetary boundary already addresses the radiative forcing effect of aerosols. But there are good reasons to address anthropogenic aerosol directly in the planetary boundaries concept, in ways that address their physical and biogeochemical impacts, not just their effects on the global energy balance. In this context it's really important to recognize the regional complexity of aerosols. One example where humans are causing regime shifts that might affect the whole Earth system is the change to the Asian monsoon system caused by the intense brown cloud of atmospheric pollution over south Asia and the Indian Ocean. Another is the change in tropical rainfall patterns caused when deforestation reduces the natural aerosol emissions from trees and its interaction with the water cycle. This change can trigger climatic and water cycle feedbacks that would accelerate regime shifts or tipping points from forest to grasslands. And yet another example that can trigger climate and ecosystem feedbacks is the deposition of dark aerosol particles, soot, or black carbon, on ice sheets and glaciers, accelerating their melting. These kinds of pollution changes affect the regional albedo, and result in shifts in weather patterns, and biogeochemical flows, and ecosystems and the biodiversity within them. In summary, although there is no single value for a planetary boundary that incorporates all kinds of aerosols all around the world, there's a very strong case for specific sub-boundaries to be defined for particular aerosol systems in order to maintain the functioning of global earth system processes.

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5.5. Novel entities Hello, my name is Sarah Cornell and I'm an environmental researcher at the Stockholm Resilience Centre. The first thing I need to do right now is explain what I mean by the term novel entities. Back in 2009, Johan Rockstrom and colleagues argued that there should be a planetary boundary for chemical pollution. But they weren't able to define a quantitative value for that boundary.

In recent years this challenge has been a topic of a lot of conversation between Earth system scientists, my own field of research, and ecotoxicologists, people who deal with the problems of chemical pollution. We now refer to the process as the release of novel entities into the environment. Why did we change the name? Well, first of all it signals that we're focused on the role of human-caused changes in the Earth system that can fundamentally alter the way that biogeochemical, ecological and physical processes happen at the global level. The changes we're concerned about are the ones where human technological capability lets us bypass the normal ecological and physical self-correcting, co-evolutionary behavior of living organisms interacting with the physical processes of the planet. When I talk about self-correcting behavior I simply mean that the toxic substances that exist in nature generally break down in nature. To give a really blunt example, an organism will die if it's exposed to natural toxic substances, but natural processes will also tend to break down and disperse the toxin in question. And there are many chemicals that have toxic effects, some of them like salt, or alcohol, or kerosene, or snake venom can be very toxic indeed, but they are dissipated in the environment because living organisms have co-evolved with the processes, the chemical processes, that produce them. Our human technical capability lets us put together chemical substances in combinations that did not exist before, and that no ecosystem has been adapted to, or can adapt to, on the time scales that we see for technological change. Chemical toxicity on its own isn't necessarily the problem, it isn't a systemic or planetary problem. Life can and does adapt to toxic substances. And we don't need a planetary boundary for issues that are local and temporary. Revista de Praticas de Museologia Informal nº 8 Spring 2016

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We're concerned about Earth system processes. So for that reason the term chemical pollution was too general for our purposes. But we do need to be aware of the planetary risks of creating these fundamentally novel substances that can't be metabolized, that don't break down easily in the environment, and that interfere with the physical and ecological processes on which all of the other Earth system functioning depends. We're concerned about humanity's capacity to mobilize some natural toxic substances in new ways, in new forms, and in an ever-accelerating rate. The most obvious category of novel pollutants is the completely new synthetic substances. We can't say that there's a Holocene background level for these kinds of compounds. Compounds like persistent organic pollutants for instance, often called POPs. Another Earth system problem is the production and the environmental release of highly reactive molecules that contain some of the toxic or radioactive heavy metals. These organic compounds can be transported through water and the atmosphere to some of the most remote parts of the Earth system. Mercury is one very concrete example. Volatile organomercury compounds are emitted into the atmosphere and they can be transported and they expose ecosystems, and human populations, to very high levels of pollution very far away from their original sources. Here we have a few other examples where Earth system functioning has already been impacted by human technological capability to produce new chemical substances. They've all had serious, if not necessarily catastrophic yet, impacts. You're probably familiar with the problem of the chlorofluorocarbons, the CFCs, that led to the depletion of atmospheric ozone in the upper layers of the atmosphere. They're also powerful long-lived greenhouse gases, so in that sense they're chemical substances that interfere with the physical functioning of the Earth system. Another very well known example is the problem of DDT, a synthetic pesticide that kills agricultural pests and mosquitoes, but many other organisms too. DDT accumulates in fatty tissues and so it can be carried through the food chain. It persists for years in soils and sediments. It has now become a globally distributed problem and it has fundamentally changed the way that ecological processes happen in the Earth system. As a result of planetary experiments like these we know that particular traits make novel entities a problem in the Earth system. Toxicity is important but we must take a big picture view that goes beyond just the effects on individual organisms through to ecosystems and actually the whole planet. Problem substances persist in the environment. This means that they can be transported large distances around the world, either in living organisms or through water in the atmosphere. We see systemic effects when these substances accumulate in living tissue. For instance, the problem of bioaccumulation makes substances become more concentrated as you

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work up the food chain. So, some of our keystone species in ecosystems are the ones that are most vulnerable. Another important trait in this is the very high risk of irreversibility. Sometimes this is just because a problem has become globally distributed and we can't deal with it directly, but in other ways it's because we have passed a physical or an ecological tipping point in the way that the Earth system functions. All of this means that we are still no closer practically to achieving a single quantitative boundary value for chemical pollution or these other novel entities. A major practical obstacle is the sheer variety of chemical substances, of radioactive substances, and of the many forms that these substances take once they've been released into the environment and are subject to chemical and biological changes. Because of this colleagues at Stockholm University, and many places around the world, are working on defining principles that will let us identify planetary risks associated with the creation of these novel entities and their release into the environment. We really want to improve the way that we screen for hazards, and the way that we manage and monitor environmental changes caused by novel and synthetic substances in the environment. One of the big implications of this is that we simply must halt the environmental release of the most problematic substances. The big challenge is we don't know which those substances are usually until it's too late and the impacts are already seen in the environment. So this also means that we must apply the precautionary principle much better. The risks of environmental change are not known very often with some of the compounds that we're creating, and certainly with many of the compounds and technologies that we're capable of creating. We, here at SRC, and in many of our global change partner organizations, [are] encouraging dialogue about this new area of research. It requires new interactions between science, and policy, and business, and actually between everybody in society, because we're all exposed to these new global risks and we need to deal with them together.

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5.6. Synthesis and progress on planetary boundaries The science on planetary boundaries builds on the remarkable advancements in Earth system science over the past 20 to 30 years. It's an integration in the natural next step in scientific advancement between our understanding of the pressures of the Earth system, how the Earth system is a complex self-regulating biogeochemical physical system, and the recognition that if we push environmental systems too far, we risk crossing tipping point that can fundamentally, abruptly, and irreversibly push ourselves away of the stable desired state of planet Earth. What may surprise you is that the approach of finding planetary boundaries is illustrated very nicely in this first slide here where a Moon lander is looking at our wonderful, small, little marble Earth planet from a distance. In fact, that's how the analysis starts. We step out as humanity and try to understand the Earth system and ask ourselves to question what are the Earth system processes that regulate the stability and the resilience of the Earth system? And for each such process we ask ourselves what is the boundary beyond which the system could be pushed outside of a desired state? And science shows very clearly that we know what this desired state is. And in this slide as a synthesis of that shows the ice core data from Greenland indicating the enormously jumpy ride that humanity has had throughout his entire period on Earth as modern human beings. This graph shows our last 100 000 years journey on Earth, until we enter the final, last interglacial period, which we learned in school to call the Holocene, which I would call the Eden's Garden, the perfect paradise, desired conditions for us to build our civilizations and the modern world as we know it. So the planetary boundary framework is about safeguarding the desired Holocene-like state on Earth by recognizing this state as the only state we know that can support the modern world as we know it, and from science determining the Earth system processes that regulate this state. And that is what led us to defining the nine Earth system processes that we know, with the best science at hand, regulates the stability of the Earth system. And here we have of course the big systems with large scale tipping points, such as: climate change, ocean acidification, stratospheric ozone depletion. We have the four slow variables that operate under the hood of the Earth system regulating the ability of the large systems to be stable: land system change, fresh water use, the rate of biodiversity loss, and the way we interfere with the large nutrient cycles of nitrogen and Revista de Praticas de Museologia Informal nº 8 Spring 2016

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phosphorus. And then we have the two processes that are so highly manmade: namely aerosol loading, which is all the soot and the particles in the atmosphere that cause large health challenges but also influences, for example, rainfall patterns and weather conditions; but finally of course the novel entities, the exponential growth of chemical compounds that aggregate themselves in the Earth system. By tapping on the best science we can put quantitative boundaries that gives us in green a safe operating place. This is where we can put humanity back, to prosper, develop, evolve, and thrive within this safe operating space. That's why planetary boundaries is a truly integrated analysis. It's about a safe space, and by biophysical terms, but it's about recognizing equity, fairness, and a just distribution of the remaining ecological space on Earth to enable a world of soon 9 billion people to develop and prosper.

In my mind this is the new definition of sustainable development. It's recognizing that global sustainability and development within a safe operating space is the new endeavor and the new goal for human development on Earth. We're very excited by the fact that science can now step up to, I would argue, the responsibility of providing quantitative global environmental goals of this kind. It shows in our analysis that we're already in a danger zone on climate change, biodiversity loss, and interference with the nutrient cycles. This work was released the first time in 2009, and has since then led to a very large, vast set of scientific efforts of critically analyzing the quantifications, critically asking the questions whether we've got the nine boundaries right, and based on all the science we are working continuously updating this concept to get the absolutely best quantifications. And a few exciting updates have occurred based on scientific colleagues around the world publishing updated work in this area. The first one is the recognition that the nine boundaries are not entirely, so to say, even in the role of regulating Earth resilience.

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In fact we do identify now that three of the boundaries are what we call core boundaries. They operate and regulate the entire Earth system, and they are the endpoint depending upon how the other boundaries operate. So the best example of these three core boundaries is climate change. Climate change is the end result of how we manage fresh water, nitrogen, phosphorus, land, biodiversity, oceans. It all aggregates up into the functioning of the climate system. So when we use climate forcing as a good control variable for the climate system, the level of that forcing, whether or not we stay within the boundary, depends intimately whether we're able to stay within a safe operating space for the other boundaries, to the extent, in fact, that among us scientific colleagues we talk of the boundaries as being like three musketeers, "One for all, all for one." It seems we need to stay within a safe operating space for every boundary in order to avoid that one boundary flips over across the threshold. The other core boundary is biodiversity. We now recognize increasingly that the genetic diversity on Earth, and the functions they play to sustain resilience and to build human well being, is a high level aggregate result of how we manage fresh water, land, oceans, nutrients, and even the climate system. And the third core boundary we believe is novel entities. The reason for this is that chemicals, such as everything from endocrine disruptors, persistent organic polluters, all the way to nuclear waste and loading of heavy metals, is so totally lien to the operations of the Earth system, in fact the Earth system has never seen, at least not in millions of years, the kind of human-induced artificial loading of new totally artificial compounds into the Earth system. We're learning as we speak what the aggregate effect of these can be on our own health, on the genetic composition of species, from birds to humans. But this is an entity of its own core right. And these three we call core boundaries. The second development is that we've refined the biodiversity boundary. We call it now biosphere integrity, because we recognize that genetic diversity is one thing which we captured in the first analysis. Basically what's the number of species on Earth, which we can measure quite well with extinction rate, which you used in the original analysis. Now we're much more, let's say, sophisticated in using a new index called the biosphere integrity index, which measures not only number of species but also their functions and how many species within each function. So we can secure, for example, that we do have the minimum amount of pollinators in an agricultural landscape. And this is truly exciting giving the tools for sustainable development in the Anthropocene.

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We've also refined some of the quantifications. And I would just like to share a few of the key developments here. And the number one is on phosphorus. In the original analysis, we were preoccupied with how much phosphorus can we load into the oceans before we risk a large scale tipping point in the oceans into anoxic, oxygen-free dead states in the ocean? We were criticized for this. Scientists pointed out that way before you've pumped in so much phosphorus in the ocean that you could tip the ocean you've destroyed so many fresh water systems along the way of the journey of phosphorus from where it's loaded, often in an agricultural field, to the ocean that we have tipping points occurring in fresh water systems. So now we actually have a twin definition of the phosphorus boundary. One, which we maintained from the original analysis, which is the amount of phosphorus that we can load in the oceans. It emains in fact eleven million tons of phosphorus per year. We're today loading eight, nine so we're approaching the boundary. But can you imagine? The analysis shows that already at averaging at 4 million tons of phosphorus per year on what we call erodible soil, which is essentially how much phosphorus we can load on productive agricultural land, when we go beyond that number we risk large scale tipping points in fresh water systems. These twin boundaries need to be considered for phosphorus. For nitrogen finally we took, which was a very wise decision, the valve of how much inactive nitrogen we can maximum take out of the atmosphere, and transform into reactive nitrogen which would plug into the biosphere. You may be aware that the fantastic invention of the Haber Bosch process, which produces reactive nitrogen fertilizers is the vehicle for our modern agriculture, without which we probably could not feed ourselves in the modern world. But it loads reactive nitrogen into the biosphere at an extent, which is so large that we humans are now a much larger force than the entire global natural nitrogen cycle. We estimated in the first analysis that the maximum loading of nitrogen in order to avoid that nitrogen triggers tipping points in ecosystems was 35 million tons of nitrogen per year. It was a first best guess. Roughly one-fifth of the amount of nitrogen that we're taking out of the atmosphere, so a dramatic decrease, and therefore indicating that we're way out in a danger zone on nitrogen. However, we did, you could argue, a simplification in the first analysis, because you see there's another way that we humans take out nitrogen from the atmosphere, which is by cultivating nitrogen-fixating crops. So, we have also biological fixation nitrogen actively induced by us humans in modern agriculture. Now we have included that, so now we have a boundary that includes both the industrial uptake of nitrogen from the atmosphere in the industrial production of fertilizers, and the additional human-induced nitrogen fixation by, for example, legumes in modern agriculture. And together that forms a much more robust boundary, which ends up being an estimated 44 million tons of nitrogen as a maximum boundary per year. I won't go through the rest of the boundaries. I really urge you to look at the analysis and the materials that come with this lecture. But I really want to close by emphasizing that every boundary has an uncertainty range. And the uncertainty range is often quite large. It's the Revista de Praticas de Museologia Informal nº 8 Spring 2016

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humble reminder that science continuously adds new knowledge, and that the boundary position is proposed at the lower, more precautious end of that uncertainty range, because we now, as for ozone, that we always are facing surprise when it comes to the large changes we're seeing in the Anthropocene. Overall it's also important to recognize that even though we have attempted to quantify boundaries for the nine boundary processes at the global level, they do operate across scales, and they do interact across scales. We've done some very significant updates in terms of downscaling those boundaries that are relevant to downscale, and these include, for example, the coupling of a global boundary, on fresh water with the river basin definition of minimum amounts of environmental water flows.

The coupling of the phosphorus boundary for fresh water, with a maximum amount of phosphorus per hectare of land that we can allow ourselves to apply. Same for nitrogen, taking it down to the hectare level. These are really exciting developments which enable the planetary boundary concept to be operational also at the local level, for a business, of a community, or of a nation's policies in terms of how to contribute to stay within a safe operating space. And that is in my mind one of the biggest advancements in the work we've done in the planetary boundary analysis over the past five years.

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6. Resources and interactions Hello everyone. Now we've really made some advancements. You've covered the Anthropocene, all the thinking around resilience and tipping points, the great acceleration, and now we've also covered all the nine planetary boundaries. Again I'd really like to encourage you to dig deeper in the materials and background literature around all the boundaries. But through the lectures we now have a nice, up-to-date feel of where we are with regards to the Planetary Boundary Framework. We saw that three of them have already been transgressed we are in a danger zone - and even though many of the remaining still have a certain degree of freedom, we're approaching the ceiling for several of them, which means that humanity really is in a very dire situation of a rapid transition to global sustainability. That's why it is exciting that we are now moving into our next cluster. We'll be looking at how planetary boundaries interact and also introducing the concepts around peak resources and what does planetary boundaries translate to in terms of the budgets and the remaining space for human development. And this means that we will now be coupling the biophysical analysis with the human dimensions. It is not enough to think only in terms of the safe operating space but also a just and fair operating space for humanity. The social boundaries, the floor for development, will now be linked into and broadening the whole framework on planetary boundaries. We'll also be discussing how to reconnect human development to the biosphere, to ecosystems all over the planet. You got to know Sarah Cornell in the previous module as an expert on biogeochemical flows. She will be coming back in this module thanks to her deep engagement in the social and human dimensions of planetary boundaries. We're now going to also have our third hangout. And let's make that a really thriving, lively hangout for this week. Good luck.

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6.1. Interactions between planetary boundaries Hello. My name is Sarah Cornell and I'm an Environmental Scientist working at the Stockholm Resilience Centre. I'm going to talk about the interactions between the planetary boundary processes. The planetary boundaries framework brings together the best of our current scientific understanding about a very large number of complex interactions in the Earth system. The boundaries are the precautionary limits that we think society should set about how to deal with biological, chemical, and physical regime shifts and thresholds that may happen in the Earth system. The science is progressing on all of the different boundary processes. Since 2009 when the original framework was published we've been working, as a scientific community, on all of the individual aspects.

The image that you see in front of you is a representation of the boundaries for the current regime of the Earth system with our best available knowledge for each of the processes. But in this figure we're still treating the processes really as if they acted independently.

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One of the major areas for research at the moment is to better understand the interactions between the physical and the ecological processes that are happening on planet Earth. Earth system interactions are complex and dynamic. If you change one dimension the others will change in response. In this figure we're trying to represent the fact that if you approach any one of the other boundaries, you increase the pressure on the ecosystems that make up biosphere integrity. So for instance, as we approach the climate change boundary it's likely that there will be more pressure on the world's ecosystems, and that reduces the safe operating space for ecological change. The same is true, although the strength of the arrows might be different, for all of the other processes. If you interfere with one of the planetary boundaries you will see the consequences in the others, because the Earth system connects these processes in complex ways. If you exceed one boundary it's likely to have cascading effects on the other boundaries. And at the same time if you remain within one boundary it does not remove the pressure on the others either. The mechanism for these cascading effects is really the fact that we've got complex feedbacks that link the different components of the Earth system. In other words, the feedbacks between land, atmosphere, oceans, and the living organisms that make up the biosphere. Some of these feedbacks are also relatively well understood. Here we have an example of a positive feedback that links land use and the water cycle. This is a feedback that's been very well understood. It was first proposed nearly forty years ago, where processes, like deforestation and decreased vegetation cover, changed the reflectivity of the Earth's surface. That changes the way that the climate system works, it changes the temperature of the atmosphere, changes the distribution of clouds, and you tend to have less rainfall, which

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reinforces the original problem. This is a positive feedback because it reinforces the original driver of change. If you decrease vegetation cover you tend to get less rain that leads to an even stronger decrease in vegetation. We also have negative feedbacks that tend to damp down the initial pressure on the system. We are beginning to understand the interactions between climate and biosphere, and here again we have an example. If we cause deforestation we remove the capacity of living organisms to take up CO2 through photosynthesis. That weaker CO2 uptake leaves more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, because CO2 is a increase the warming of the atmosphere. Most vegetation responds to a warmer temperature by increasing its growth. So in this case by reducing vegetation in the first place ecosystems will tend to respond by increasing their biomass production. Now obviously this kind of feedback is really important in balancing environmental changes. Negative feedbacks help to keep the Earth in balance in a particular regime. But they don't go on forever. Vegetation has an upper limit to its temperature tolerance, and so as we increase temperatures we will also see an increased risk for abrupt changes when these negative feedbacks break down. This research on feedbacks, especially the feedbacks with climate change, [is] a major research interest all around the world at the moment. This figure shows a summary of some of the work that's happening around the world that was published in the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and its assessment report. You can see that these feedbacks are highly complex. And again they link atmospheric processes, land cover processes, the water cycle, and of course the climate change itself. Analyzing the interconnections between boundaries is an enormous challenge because it requires scientists to work across what have normally been disciplinary boundaries. The people

who've got real expertise in atmospheric chemistry and physics tend not to have such deep understanding of the biological and ecological processes that are happening at the ground surface. We use different language, we use different models and tools, and so this is probably the main global collaborative adventure for research at the moment.

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It isn't just a question of understanding the physics and chemistry and biology of the planet, however. Because these processes all have human drivers it's also requiring us to have new interactions with researchers from across all disciplines, and with policymakers, with businesses, and with people in civil society. You may already know about some of the movements for community science. If you see any we really recommend that you engage with them, because a major challenge to understand the interconnections is to move from the global abstract picture that we have of the boundary processes to the rich understanding that we need in order to be able to understand and represent in models and to respond to the issues that play out at local level. In many of the

discussions about the planetary boundaries we are dealing with a very abstract global picture, but the consequences and the causes, the human causes, almost all play out very locally. So we have a spatial challenge to deal with as we deal with the interconnections as well. One approach that we're taking to this, because it is enormously difficult to connect everything with everything else, we're focusing on what we call nexus approaches that let us look in depth at some of the interactions. So for instance, nexus where we have very good analytical tools and a substantial amount of data on changes at the global and the local level, is the interaction between the energy system, physical climate system, and the water cycle. Again, this nexus work isn't just science happening in isolation, it's science happening in direct dialogue with policy and the decision makers that affect these different contexts. Another important example of our nexus approach is in our understanding of the interactions between food production systems, biodiversity and ecosystem change, and many aspects of pollution. Nutrient enrichment is one example, but also the chemical pollution associated with industrialization, agricultural production, and urbanization.

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You can see that these are very complex problems, many people call them wicked problems. The challenge is that it's not just a scientific issue, although we have an enormous need still for basic data on all of these various dimensions. It's about how science interacts with wider society. We need to have better dialogue between scientists and the decision makers all across society that deal with the different sectors that are contributing to the problem. Another challenge is that we can't treat it as if we were outside of the system. We are in the system that we ourselves are changing. We're responsible for the causes and we will feel the consequences. We aren't just changing the variability of the processes, we're changing the whole risk spectrum because we're altering the feedbacks themselves. And so this requires us to treat the problem with more urgency than any we've ever seen before. And although these are global problems we can only deal with them in our own place, in our location, in our academic discipline, or our profession, whatever that may be.

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6.2. Issues of access and distribution: peak everything In the Anthropocene with rising exponential pressures on our finite Earth system one very obvious issue arises, which is whether or not we're running into resource constraints to the extent that we can talk of passing the peak of resource availability for humanity. But if we add to that the recognition that we have to operate within a safe operating space of a stable Earth system an additional elements adds even to the peak, namely the need for a fair distribution of the remaining budgets with regards to each of the planetary boundaries. Irrespective of whether the resources are coming to an end, we need to recognize that there's just a finite, absolute amount of carbon left to be emitted into the atmosphere; nitrogen left to be used on our land to produce food; fresh water to be consumed without avoiding or trying to avoid that we cross tipping points with regards to ecosystem functions in basins. And in this lecture we're going to combine the analysis of the risk of us passing peak levels of resource availability, and the fair distribution and downscaling of planetary space within the analysis of our safe operating space of planetary boundaries. Now this has very, very strong links to sustainable development because as soon as we recognize the risk of running out of resources, and as soon as we recognize we need to stay within global budgets of fundamental resources that determine our ability for social and economic development, we are in the realm of equity and just distribution of space, particularly in a world with 1 billion absolute poor and in a world that will soon have more than two new billion co-citizens on Earth predominantly born in what today is developing countries. So this truly entering the realm of connecting the biophysical analysis with the issues of development. Now the journey we've made is absolutely extraordinary in terms of recognizing that we are in a situation where we need to consider resource constraints very seriously. To the left-hand here, you have an illustration of the past 100 years of use of resources in the world. It is analyzed by combining the classical parameters that add up to human impacts on Earth, the so-called IPAT equation, impact equally population multiplied by affluence, multiplied by technology. And here you see these entities expressed in terms of population numbers, technology is expressed in the number of patents registered, and affluence simply as world GDP. And if you look at that small, little graph on the lower left-hand corner that is the world in 1900, that is the Revista de Praticas de Museologia Informal nº 8 Spring 2016

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turn of the century a little bit more than 100 years back, with a very small imprint in the world. In fact we had essentially no influence on the Earth system as a whole and we did not have any risks of hitting the ceiling in terms of resource constraints. Up until 1950, the second box, there's a very slow change in terms of human pressures. In fact we're just moving linearly and slowly along the path of growing resource use. And then: bang! We move into the great acceleration with 3.5 billion people and we put into high gear of industrial development in the world and suddenly choof! We're in the final huge box in the upper right-hand corner. And that's the world of today, the world filled up with the junk originating from the over-consumption and the propelling of the modern industrial systems; societies that we all know. What is so remarkable with this journey which you have to recognize is that we often blame population growth for causing this. In fact that's not the predominant number. If you look at this analysis carefully you see that the largest influence is affluence, which is the number one driver of increased resource use. So it is absolutely essential to recognize that when we operate the world, and try to transition into a safe operating space, we must address the fair sharing among all citizens on Earth of the affluence and the wealth that we are generating. On the right-hand side you have a New Scientist summary of where we are on one element of resource constraints, which is particularly rare Earth metals, everything from aluminum and uranium, all the way to lysium, and different key metals that are used to get our mobile phones to work, and computers, and video systems, and cars. And what is remarkable with this analysis is it shows that at our current pace of resource exploitation we will run into, or pass, the peak of resource availability within this century. In fact, for some metals even within decades. And this is a reminder that the discourse around peak of resources is a real one. And it's not only about metals, it's about phosphorus, it's about oil, it is increasingly about everything that is the fundamental base from the Earth system building up our well being. Now how does this translate into the economy? Well it starts to have an indent. In the lower left-hand corner here you see what is known to all of us, the fact that we're leaving behind the era of cheap oil. In fact we see today the rising volatility of global oil prices is occurring at a very high level, between 75 and over a 100 in fact, sometimes a 110, a 120 US dollars per barrel of oil. This is a signal that we are at or approaching peak oil in terms of cheap oil availability. In the upper left-hand corner you have the worrying graph of trend with regards to yield levels of key cereals, our staple food crops in the world, which shows as you see a slow but sure stagnation in terms of growth rates, not really keeping pace in the red line with population growth. A reminder that we do not know whether we're running into a kind of peak when it comes to land and water resources related to food production. And the large graph shows, and is the reminder, of what's happening with commodity prices? Well over the past 100 years we've had shocks in the system. We had a shocking rise of commodity prices in the world with the big wars in the world, the oil shock in the '70s. But look at the current world of the Anthropocene.

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We enter the fundamentally globalized world of today, and we are stuck it seems in a permanent level of high commodity prices. All of this adds up to the conclusion that we need to consider resource constraints as a fundamental part of navigating the Anthropocene. Now how does this relate to planetary boundaries? Well in some parts it does so one-to-one, but in other parts it doesn't. And that distinction is really important to make. Take phosphorus, for example. Clearly evidence indicates that we may be running out of cheap phosphorus. Phosphorus, one should remember, is like oil; it's a finite and mined resource. Are we transgressing phosphorus? Well yes, the evidence shows we are in a danger zone irrespective of whether or not we're running out of phosphorus. For nitrogen we're certainly not at peak. There is an endless amount of unreactive nitrogen in the atmosphere, but we are clearly loading reactive nitrogen at a level, which is taking us into a danger zone of tipping points. Biodiversity we can clearly say we are at a peak with regards to collapse of many ecosystems, and we are transgressing, so there you have a one-to-one relationship. Climate change, the same. We are seeing evidence of peak, particularly on oil, but we're also in a danger zone with regards to climate change. So this is an example of how the comparison of the two concepts can be done to guide also sustainable development. Therefore it falls naturally to then ask the question: how does the planetary boundary analysis address the issue of distribution among nations and citizens in the world? And what we've done for this analysis is to try for those boundaries that do operate truly across scale to try and spatially distribute the analysis at the appropriate level where each boundary operates.

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And this falls naturally, for example, the land boundary, which of course land use change occurs locally and adds up to the global level. Nitrogen is applied at the local scale of a farmer's field, or wasted in a waste water treatment plant in an urban region, but adds up to problems at the larger scale. Same for fresh water; same for biodiversity loss; same in fact for aerosol loading, which operates entirely at the regional scale where soot, and black carbon, and emission of pollutants changes rainfall patterns not at the global scale, but at the regional scale. So it's clear that planetary boundaries have direct relevance across scales, and we're increasingly exploring how to downscale the relevant boundaries to the level where they operate at their local ecosystem level. And several initiatives are taking along these lines. Interestingly, for example, an effort of downscaling the responsibility for the global boundaries at the national scale illustrated here by one report trying to translate boundaries to the context of a nation, in this case Sweden. There's also scientific efforts of trying to advance the theory on how can you in fact translate the global boundaries into the regional scale of large biomes? And finally even efforts at the larger policy level of bringing forward what does global boundaries mean in this case for the European Union in terms of operationalizing environmental policy? So all examples of trying to connect the scales from global to regional. What we've done is actually tried to do it within the analysis of how do the boundaries operate in maintaining resilience at different scales? And here are just a few examples of the advancements in this area. So the global boundary on

biodiversity loss and biosphere integrity was originally set as the maximum allowed amount of number of extinctions we can allow ourselves on Earth. But now we're able to downscale this to look at the maximum Amount of biodiversity loss in different ecosystems, and do that in a way that can increasingly address both the number of species, but also the ecological functions they represent, and project that across time, and thereby be able to identify the hotspot regions in the world where we need to very, very rapidly transition into a sustainable management of

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ecosystems, but we can also see the areas where in fact we're doing progress already on staying within a safe operating space. Importantly we can do this also for the interference with the nitrogen and phosphorus cycle. And if you map out the global boundary of phosphorus, the global boundary of nitrogen, and apply it to where it is actually originating from, which is predominantly in the applications on agriculture land, what appears that is not surprisingly an overuse of boundary, in fact a transgression into a danger zone, in the richest nations in the world, where we have the hotspots in terms of overuse of nitrogen and phosphorus, while you see the parts of the world that so far stay very clearly within a safe operating space. And this addresses heads-on the distributional issue of the boundaryes. It shows for example in this case that poor developing nations in Africa have a right and a need to increase their use of nitrogen and phosphorus to be able to raise food production, and can still do so within a safe operating space. While the rich nations in the world actually need to drastically reduce the use of nitrogen and phosphorus, and particularly phosphorus because it's also one of these resources that are [is] hitting peaks. Same with fresh water. Here we can analyze basin by basin where are we taking out too much fresh water? Here it's no longer a clear cut issue of north, south division in terms of overuse. Here's rather recognizing that the interface between social well being, nations being more or less poor or rich, but also those regions that are more or less endowed with high degree and good access to fresh water. So what you're seeing here is, for example, that the well developed parts of [the] western United States are in fact transgressing the regional basin-scale boundary for fresh water, but similarly parts of India where overuse of water is related very, very closely to inherent water scarcity. Finally on land use we then can explore much more in detail how much of our current temperate, boreal and rainforests do we still have standing? How much of this do we need to have standing to enable a resilient Earth system? And where are we in terms of hotspot regions

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in the world? Showing, for example, that we need to very rapidly address sustainable management of temperate forests, boreal forests, and the real hotspots about safeguarding that we have remaining, thriving, and resilient rainforests in the world. So in conclusion, our analysis of planetary boundaries defining a safe operating space shows we need to be really precautious. In fact the analysis indicates that way before we reach a peak level of overuse, we may have to seriously consider boundaries beyond which we risk crossing tipping points that can undermine our abilities to thrive in the future. But my conclusion is we need to put these analyses together, recognizing both peak resources and the global budgets that we now need to distribute in a fair way among all citizens in the world to truly have not only a safe sustainable development but also a just sustainable development.

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6.3. Social foundations for planetary boundaries Hello, my name is Sarah Cornell and I'm a Researcher at the Stockholm Resilience Centre. I'm going to talk about the social foundations for planetary boundaries. Back in 1987 the Brundtland Report defined sustainability as how many between humans and nature and how many among people? In other words, environmental processes and social processes have to be working together for us to achieve global sustainability. In 2009 Rockström and his colleagues defined planetary boundaries globally for biophysical processes. And what many people see is a rather abstract

conceptualization of the Earth system. But human factors are really important. They weren't dealt with explicitly in the global planetary boundaries framework, but human processes are the causes of many of these changes, and human communities and societies will feel the consequences of the changes. We're an important part of the Earth system, and we need a framework that helps us to deal with the biophysical changes and the social changes at the same time. A couple of years ago at the Rio+20 conference this challenge of global sustainability was the main topic that brought the world's nations together. We recognize that we're increasingly pushing the world into biophysical unsustainability, but we've also got major social unsustainability problems too.

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If we want to apply the planetary boundaries framework in practice, which really means applying it at sub-global levels, we have to address the human dimensions, the human drivers and impacts of environmental change. Back in 2012, for the Rio+20 conference, Oxfam proposed what we now call the Oxfam Donut. Oxfam is a campaigning group for relieving problems of poverty. And they recognize the importance of the planetary boundaries as setting out the environmental ceiling for the safe operating space for humanity. But they also argued that for a fair and just world we need to recognize the social foundations of that safe operating space too. They argued that any framework or vision of sustainable development for the world that we now live in needs to recognize that eradicating poverty and increasing justice all around the world is intimately tied to the biophysical processes of ecological sustainability too. This focus on really linking people with planetary sustainability is an active area of research and conversation between science and policy at the moment. This figure shows some work that was done recently by the global change science community really emphasizing, that our social processes and above all our economic processes need to happen within the constraints that are presented by the functioning of the Earth system. We have some practical experience in linking social activities and these global environmental changes. For example at the global level, the International Convention on Biological Diversity recognizes the importance of local and traditional knowledge as an important part of protecting ecosystems and preventing the loss of biodiversity. We have many community level initiatives for sustainability. You may be familiar with the

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Transition Towns, for instance. That starts to recognize the importance of everybody's action at the local level to contribute to global sustainability as well. In Transition Towns people are working together to see how their everyday activities can reduce their carbon emissions and reduce the pressure on climate change. Businesses are also engaging in ways of reducing their environment impact, and they need our encouragement at every step. Fairtrade products are one example and certification systems that reduce the impact on ecosystems, fisheries, forests, and so on. These are very practical approaches where we're trying to see how our local social activities reduce the pressures on global environmental dynamics. We need many more of these activities, and we need many more to engage in them all around the world. But these show us that we're moving in the right direction. Global sustainability fundamentally means recognizing Earth's biophysical processes and, that they set the conditions for our human and social activities on Earth. We need to be constantly aware of the consequences of our choices and activities on the ecosystems on which all of humanity depends. And we need to bear in mind that the choices we make can either harm or safeguard the human values of fairness and global justice.

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6.4. Reconnecting human development to the biosphere Reconnecting human development to the biosphere. This is really fundamental for the future of humanity. The biosphere, as you all know, is this thin layer around the Earth that is the only place in the huge universe that we as know have hosts life. So we live on this small, little round ball in this immense universe and have the chance to be alive for up to eight, nine, ten decades. We're part of this biosphere, we're imbedded in it. That's what I'm going to talk about today and try to connect you, and your not only thoughts, but also your bodies and hopefully emotions to being part of this planet and feel humble about it. And old model which is still used a lot is to look at the economy as the center of the universe. And if we listen to news and television programs there's a lot of focus on what's going inside the economy and our financial systems. And they operate and run our daily activities. But in that model we had three factors of production for the economy; it was land, labor, and capital. And land basically was agricultural land in those days when Adam Smith developed those theories. But during the mid and late 1900s land was removed basically from the economic model because it was no longer a limiting factor for economic and social development. Basically it was labor and capital that were the limiting factors. So basically the whole biosphere was lost from the way we think about operating the economy in our models. So in the late '80s we started something called ecological economics to try to reconnect land, which we later called natural capital, into the model of economic development. So we extended land, labor, and capital to natural capital, cultural capital, and humanmade capital as three critical factors of production for how the economy is operating. And today when you hear a lot of talks about the green economy, you hear a lot about efforts to value nature and ecosystem services. It's about making the natural capital visible in the way we operate the economy. From the level of big companies in their books and all the way to how we measure GDP in economic development. But the real model we should strive for is a model where we look at the economy as a part of society, and society as part of the planet. Quite obvious model but it's sort of forgotten in our contemporary society.

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So I believe that we in two, three generations have created mindsets on Earth that pretend as we are not living on the planet, that pretend as if we are independent on the Earth that we're living on. That's why we are using this model, where the economy is part of society and part of the overall planet; part of the Earth's life support systems, or the biosphere. And to us that's a fundamental conceptual figure. It's almost like an icon for how society should relate to the little round ball we're living on. And it's become very obvious now in the Anthropocene that that's the case. So humanity now, as you all know, we're living in this biosphere in the Anthropocene where we are a global force in shaping the planet, not just in terms of how many we are. In the early 1800s we were about 1 billion. When I was born around 3, 4 billion, and now about 7.5 billion people. So that's the scale and how we operate those things. Then the connectivity we are totally intertwined through global society. All over the planet, and through information technology, we have been able to speed up our activities in an enormous way. So we're living on this little round ball and shaping it fast and have forgotten about it, which is not very smart for a species that calls herself, himself homo sapiens, the smart monkey actually. So we're a wise band. So I think it's really high time to reconnect our value systems and worldviews, and the way we operate to the little round ball, and this thin layer of life that we are part of. We are now moving a new terrain. We have gone through the great acceleration of expanding our actions, and now are moving into a new terrain of new dynamics where issues that have been treated separately; like climate, human health, and economy; are very much intertwined, they are really tied together. And they are also connected through new types of shocks. So if we get an oil crisis together with, food crisis for example, together with the financial crisis, there are no types of patterns playing out on Earth that we have not seen before.

So these domains that are often thought about as separate are actually completely intertwined already. And now we're moving into another phase where we're going through a next great acceleration where people in countries that have not been fairly poor are moving out of poverty moving into a middle class situation. We also have developments in information technology and

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microbiology and genetics that are moving really, really fast, that it's hard to envision what it will look like in the decades to come. And those are fantastic opportunities, fantastic possibilities for humanity. But my point here is that if those possibilities and those actions are not connected to the planet we live on, they may not be opportunities, they may be things will increase the risk for something not very pleasant for humanity. So the challenge is really to use our innovative capacities, our fantastic gift that we have of thinking, and reflecting, and developing innovations, in line with the biosphere that we're part of and depend on. So the reconnecting idea or the reconnecting path is not a simplistic one, it's a very profound one of increasing the opportunities for well being of people anywhere on Earth and increasing the pathways for good human life. And that's why we need to probably transform our paths today into new pathways to be able to do that. But there's a lot of hope and a lot of science in that direction already going on on Earth. If you just go back the last ten years and see how businesses are waking up; how the climate issue have opened up space for these type of redirections and transformations; and how green technology and different lifestyles; and the way we eat things, and go back to more safety and healthy foods; and these type of paths are actually moving fast now. And that's very hopeful in that sense. So the whole idea of reconnecting is really about doing something very obvious; to appreciate being life on this little round ball, to reflect on it, and reconnect ourselves. A big challenge when we are living in urban areas. About 50, 60% of people are in urban areas today and are not always connected to the broader planet on a daily basis. I will illustrate what I mean also by changing these pathways for reconnection, reconnecting to the biosphere by a picture where you see a lot of details, but a lot of areas in between where you have no idea what they say. So this may illustrate where we are today in society when it comes to knowledge generation and understanding that we are very good at understanding details, but have a harder time with seeing the bigger pictures because of the enormous amount of information, the enormous amount of activities that we are operating with. So when we aim at looking at the bigger picture, it may sometimes become quite blurry and unclear. And in knowledge generation and science that's often a very explorative, but also very exciting phase when you think you're onto something but you don't really know what it will look like. But hopefully when the picture becomes clearer you will most likely be quite surprised. The world may not look like what you actually think it looks like. And this whole idea of reconnecting to the biosphere is about that actually. It's about basic, very simple truths about part of a planet that we have forgotten part, that are not part of our conceptions and reality today but are profoundly important for our future. We tried to develop new ways of reconnecting people to the biosphere. And a recent project that was just launched in June this year is an art science book called Reflections on People and the

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Biosphere, where we match some of those texts of being part of the biosphere with photographs taken from the same spot on an island in the Baltic Sea in Europe. And it's quite amazing how one single place can provide such a palette of impressions. And that's something to think about when we are running around hectically and efficiently on Earth to look outside the window, to see the different nuances going on there, a rainy day, sunny day, sunset, dawn, beautiful light, the birds flying, and let it move into your body and fill you up, and reconnect yourself to the planet in that way. And in that book actually we've been using some music lyrics also from classic music writers. And here's one from the Beatles that I thought was breathtaking when I read it again actually, from a tune called "Because." It goes like this: Because the world is round it turns me on. Because the wind is high it blows my mind. Because the sky is blue it makes me cry." Thank you very much.

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7. Global Governance Dear friends. We’re doing great. You’ve done our sixth module, moving into our seventh and second last module. In this sixth, we probed how planetary boundaries interact, learning for example that the stability of the climate system depends entirely on the way we manage land, water, and oceans, proving that in fact the planetary boundaries seem to be like three musketeers - all for one, one for all. We need to simply be sustainable stewards of all the components of the earth system. But we also discussed in depth that biophysical boundaries cannot guide us toward sustainability alone. We need to stay within a just and fair safe operating space, connecting the human dimension with the biophysical challenges of global sustainability. We’ve been pulling in the latest thinking from very, very important experts in their areas, such as Kate Raworth, who developed the doughnut economy model of connecting a social floor to the biophysical ceiling of planetary boundaries. We’ve been discussing a bit more in detail of how to reconnect human development to the biosphere and staying within a safe budget on all of the planetary boundaries. We’ve also introduced the concept of peak everything and how resource constraints couple to the boundaries provided by tipping point analysis related to planetary boundaries. Now we’ll move into a module focusing on governance, focusing on pathways to success and also the grand transitions we face in energy, food systems, technology, and urban areas. So three final members of our team are joining us this week for this purpose. 

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Associate Professor Victor Galaz, who is a co-leader of the Stockholm Resilience Centre Research Initiative on Changing Planet, looking at global dynamics and earth system governance and connecting that across scales. Profess Thomas Elmqvist at the Resilience Centre as well and science editor at the Citizen Biodiversity Outlook will be coaching us through the challenge of urban resilience in the world. And senior lecturer Lisa Deutsch, director of studies at the Centre and researcher on global food systems and studies on a transition to sustainable agricultural systems in the world.

The governance topic brings up a lot of interesting discussion items. I’m sure you have many many ideas of what planetary boundary thinking means for governance, for democracy, for equity, for transparency. So please do share your ideas, opinions on the forum to keep a lively discussion forward.

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7.1. Existing structures of global governance My name is Victor Galaz. I'm a Researcher at the Stockholm Resilience Centre and my research interest is in global governance of the Earth system. This talk will be about global governance and structures to deal with complex global environmental problems. Normally when we think about the Earth system and planetary boundaries we start to think about: so how do we cope with these problems at the global level? And normally people would assume that you would need a world government, which is I believe an incorrect assumption for what governance is. We talk about governance in terms of different set of partnerships, international agreements, the way state and non-state actors interact with each other, the involvement of scientific communities, NGOs, etc., etc. So essentially governance in this setting is a much more messy and complex interaction between state and non-state actors at the global level. And it's not about creating a one static body on decision making in a world government. I think that's one very critical, important thing to keep in mind when we talk about these sort of issues. What are some critical developments in global environmental governance? I would say there are several trends that we look at. I mean, this is a simplification that one thing that we normally discuss in this community is the rapid increase of international environmental agreements. So normally people would think that one of the key challenges at the global level is that we don't have proper international environmental agreements, but in fact if you look over time there's been quite a rapid increase of the number of agreements. So in 1857, there was one multilateral environmental agreement and in 2012, the last count that I have, we had 747. So it's quite a rapid increase of international environmental agreements, and that's one important trend to keep in mind. Another thing that we also know in global environmental governance is that it's not only do we have more international agreements, we also have more actors involved. There are more nation-states that have ratified agreements of this sort over time, and there are also more nonstate actors getting involved in these arenas where global environmental issues are being discussed. So more international environmental agreements and more actors, those are two critical trends. One of the biggest debates within my community is what the impacts of these trends are. And one general conclusion from my community is that this sort of increased density of agreements and actors have created fragmentation and segmentation. So essentially you get different layers of decision making that become practically decoupled from each other; you lack coordination, and you lack a system's overview to tackle the sort of challenges we're facing. So that's another important trend. So more agreements, more actors, fragmentation, and segmentation. There's an interesting development though over time if you look at it. And you can see that in this short video by Rak Kim is that you also see increasing inter-linkages between international environmental agreements.

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So that short video shows the number of international environmental agreements, and how they start to link to each other by referencing. So it starts in the end of the 1800 and then moves rapidly into today. And you see that massive increase of inter-linkages and notes linking to each other, so it also implies complexity, it's becoming more complex, the landscape of institutions at the international level. This creates something that people also explore called gridlock. And gridlock is a phenomena where you have an increasing number of global challenges but where nation-states are not able to agree on something tangible to address these stresses. So essentially you get more actors involved in more roles, but each of these actors also have veto power, so essentially they are not able to get to a point where they manage to create effective institutions to address critical challenges. So the transaction costs to get to collective action increase over time, because of more actors, more complexity. So here's an example that we've been working on for the last years dealing with ocean acidification, and marine biodiversity, and climate change. And these are three so-called planetary boundaries. The interesting thing with these three phenomena is that these are not separate global problems they interact in different ways. So climate change contributes to ocean acidification; ocean acidification affects marine biodiversity at the same time as these two changes modify the carbon uptake capacity of oceans, hence contributing to climate change. So these are three interacting processes. The question we asked in our research is: who's responsible to cope with not only the isolated problems but their interactions? And again if you look into the institutional landscape, if you look at what are the relevant international rules that affect these three interacting areas, you'll see a long list of different international agreements. You see Agenda 21; the CBD, which is the Conventional Biological Diversity; the Millennium Development Goals; the UNFCCC, which is the international climate agreement, etc., etc. So it's a long list of international rules that somehow are related to this problem complex. And again if you look, what are the relevant international organizations somehow partly being responsible to address this issue? It's also a big - essentially a big soup of acronyms moving around and trying to one or the other address this issue. So you have the World Bank, UNESCO, UNEP, the World Fish Centre, Human Ocean, the Food and Agricultural Organization, etc., etc. One of the things that we find interesting though is that it's not only chaos and anarchy at the international arena with all these messy institutions. Actually what we see are emerging patterns of collaboration, information sharing, experimentation, of attempts to navigate this combination of complexity in the problem, essentially in the Earth system, and complexity in the social institutional system. So we see this pattern of networks emerging. That's something that we've been studying for one particular case that we call PaCFA, the Partnership on Climate Change and Fisheries. And this we believe are interesting networks to keep an eye on if you want to understand the challenges facing global environmental governance to cope with sustainability challenges in the future. So there are three key messages from this in terms of how global environmental governance has evolved and its capacities to deal with sustainability issues at the global level. One is that

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you see increased fragmentation over time, but also complexity in terms of institutions and actors linking to each other in very complex ways. And sometimes these create processes of gridlock, essentially the number of challenges are increasing over time and becoming more severe, but the landscape of actors and institutions is so complex that actors are not able to come to robust agreements on how to deal with those challenges. So those are the three key messages from this first lecture.

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7.2. New and emerging perspectives on global governance So speaking of global environmental governance, how should we reform it? So we know we're facing fragmentation, we know we're facing complexity, we know we're facing gridlock. So what are some ways by which we can modify global environmental governance to better cope with the challenges of the future? And of course there's no clear, simple answer to that. And I would say there are different schools and different approaches to address that issue. So I'm just going to present a couple of these different approaches. One of them, and I would say the most popular one in my community, I would call deep institutional reform. And deep institutional reform builds on the idea that if you manage to reform critical pillars of global environmental governance then you would create an architecture that's better able to deal with these challenges. So there are different ways to look at that reform and there are some very tangible reform proposals in that. So for example, one would be that you need to reform the United Nations Environmental Programme. So you would reform and upgrade the UNEP, as it's called, and give it a bigger mandate, better resources, and better capacities to coordinate the fragmented setting up of international institutions. Another idea or another very tangible proposal would be that you would look into economic institutions at the international level and put a much stronger sustainability focus into these. You would design and put into place mechanisms that would guide economic development at the international level, taking sustainability into consideration. Another reform proposal that has been discussed is to modify the voting rules in international bodies. You would move from decision making that's unanimous into where you just need majority, or a qualified majority. And the idea would be that if you change the voting rules in these bodies then you would get faster decision making and it would become more ambitious. So that's just a few examples of that way of thinking, that the way to reform the environmental governance is through deep institutional reform. Another school of thought or another stream within this community would be to focus less on institutional reform but more to strengthen networks. And that mode of thinking I would call network revolution. So essentially you would say no, it's impossible to move ahead with institutional reform, it's very difficult to get all these countries to agree on something tangible, so let's focus on strengthening partnerships that exist between states, or between public and private actors. Let's invest more in building global partnerships and networks across state and non-state actors. Let's focus on allowing fewer number of countries to create more ambitious goals, for example within climate policy, and have them create benefits for themselves and then hoping that that club will expand over time. So that's the club approach. Another way to look at this is to talk about polycentricity. So polycentricity essentially means that you have several independent bodies of decision making that collaborate and create rules through that collaboration. And the idea is that these modes of more network polycentric

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governance are more flexible, they're more apt to changing circumstances, they're better able to cope with complexity, and they can expand over time essentially. So that second approach focused on networks where it's less about institutions but more about creating a network revolution at the international level. There's a third stream that I find interesting that focuses more on law. And that stream I would call legal transformation. And the idea there would be that you would create different interpretations of existing law in ways that would push us towards sustainability, essentially redefining international human rights law, for example, or creating some sort of planetary boundaries declaration. That's one example, so you would create a planetary boundaries declaration between nation-states. And that sort of development would trigger changes in international law to better address sustainability. And one interesting observation within this community is that these sort of norms, for example, to protect the environment, or a norm around stay within planetary boundaries, can evolve nonlinearly, meaning that you will have actors lobbying for that sort of change for a long time but nothing happens, but then suddenly you see a nonlinear change, so suddenly it becomes from something being discussed just amongst a small group of people to something that suddenly becomes a global institutional norm. So that has more focus on legal issues. And then the fourth stream in this focuses more on citizen and participation, global democracy, cosmopolitan democracy. And the idea here, and the assumption here is that we're getting into these processes of gridlock, we're not able to agree at the international level, because people are not being part of decision making. Decision making is happening behind the scenes, in small groups, in small clubs, with limited insights from citizens. And the idea would be here to reform international organizations in a way that allowed for wider participation from citizens, civil societies, and NGOs. And the idea would be that these sort of reforms would open up decision making and create more ambitious environmental decision making at the international level. So those would be four different streams in the debate that I would pick out, so:    

deep institutional reform, network revolution, legal transformation, and global citizenship.

One thing to keep in mind though, and I think that's one of the interesting things, is that these are ideas that might start out as something different, but that actually start to become recombined. So you see interesting combinations of these ideas out there emerging; combining legal transformations with network revolution, or combining deep institutional reforms with global citizenship. And this nice visualization by one of my colleagues, Diego, shows how actors or authors start referencing to each other over time and start to combine these ideas into different proposals on how to reform global environmental governance. So how are these related to planetary boundaries? I think that's a critical issue. I think what we're interested in is not only dealing with incremental global change, or separated problems by themselves, not just only climate change, biodiversity and ocean acidification in parallel. We need to start to look at: how do these reforms try to address very complex interactions between

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these problems? How do these proposed reforms in institutions, how well are they able to address the nonlinear properties of these problems? Do we need additional institutions to, for example, pick up early warnings and respond to early warnings that we're moving towards bad tipping points in the Earth system or in regional ecosystems, how do we look at that? So it's also a matter of function in these governance structures. So just to summarize the key message in this very complex issue, I would say the takeaway message is there are multiple approaches to governance. There's no simple, quick fix solution through reformed governmental governance, there are different traditions, there are different streams, they all have different flavors in a sense. But there are also interesting combinations emerging between these different streams. And we also need to take a step back and look at these proposals, and look at the dimensions. What are the distributional implications of these proposals in terms of risks, or resources, or power? And how well do they function, not only to deal with incremental environmental stresses, but also very complex interactions between global environmental problems, some of which might be linear and some of which might be nonlinear and lead to rapid unexpected shifts?

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7.3. A Shifting Development Paradigm We're in the Anthropocene. Our environmental challenges are now global and we face environmental risks that could actually lead to catastrophic consequences if we cross tipping points. What does all this mean for the global development agenda? Well, it truly puts into question some of our fundamental ideas of our relationship between environment and development. The first is the belief in the environmental Kuznets Curve, which so much dominates the way we deal with environmental policy and environmental impact reduction strategies. The belief that in the early days of development in the pre-industrial economies environmental impacts are large because of inefficiencies and poor capital availability, and that industrial economies somehow in the early days peak in terms of negative environmental emissions which comes from the empirical or the experiences, particularly from air pollution, from industrial activities, and the richer we get the better we are in improving our environmental conditions. This is profoundly wrong. All empirical evidence shows that in the hyper-connected and globalized world in Anthropocene what has happened is potentially, or in fact in reality that we're improving local environmental conditions often but we're pushing environmental impacts across Earth system components in the entire planetary system. So we might have clean air where we live locally, but we're ruining the planet system at the larger scale. So this is the first issue that is put into question. In fact it's so important that also fundamentally reshapes the way we think of sustainable development. You've all seen the three pillars of social, environmental, and economic development which forms the basis of our modern thinking on sustainable development, but that has translated, as we all know, into a strategy of advancing economic growth as one sector and trying to reduce environmental impact as far as we can. In the Anthropocene this will not be enough. It was okay when we were a small world on a large planet where we could always so to say find free environmental space in the atmosphere, and the biosphere, and the cryosphere. Now we're in [at] a saturation point. We're hitting the ceiling where we need to, all citizens of the world, all nations in the world, operate within the same space. And we must be honest. This three pillar approach has after all become what we could call a Mickey Mouse economy, where economy is occurring and developing at the expense of natural capital, the environment, and human capital; cheap labor and subsidized labor forces enabling hyper-consumption across the world. So let's simply agree it's time to scrap this obsolete model of separating social, environmental and economics. We need to transition into a paradigm which looks like this, namely use our economy as a vehicle to serve and meet societal needs, and have societies that operate within the stable confines of a resilient Earth system. Or, as we've been talking so much across the science that we're now advancing, development within a safe operating space of planetary boundaries. This changes profoundly economy, it changes profoundly governance, and it changes profoundly relations between nations, because suddenly planet goes first. We need to set global environmental goals within which we can have economic growth and development. It also addresses, which is shown in the now famous donut model for economic growth, that if we have a biophysical ceiling defined by planetary boundaries there must be a social floor, a floor of how Revista de Praticas de Museologia Informal nº 8 Spring 2016

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we distribute the absolute amounts of remaining environmental space in a fair and just way among all citizens on Earth. So in summary, the change in the paradigm includes number one, once and for all reconnecting world development with Earth resilience. We simply have to recognize that Earth is the basis for our well being and that development occurs in an integrated fashion. We must therefore accept that economic growth and economic development must occur within a safe operating space of absolutely set boundaries for the Earth system. This means that we're moving from the current realm of relatives where we normally assume that if we just put the right price on the environment we'll be so efficient that it will actually take us to sustainable development. The problem is that when we rush towards an economy that will grow three times, the world economy will grow three times over the next 30 years and the world population 9 billion people, even if we become relatively better and more efficient if that all adds up to us transgressing planetary boundaries we're still going to cross tipping points. So we're moving from that reality, relatives, to the reality of absolutes. Now we simply need to respect an absolute amount of carbon remaining to emit. We need to respect an absolute maximum amount of fresh water to use, land to use, phosphorus to use. This is a profoundly different approach because it puts a cap on the playing field within which we can develop. It might seem very utopian, but you know we're applying this kind of thinking very often in many, many other areas. In fact the history of how we have developed policies around chemicals is largely applying this kind of absolute planetary boundary thinking. Think of the Montreal Protocol when we in the mid-'80s recognized that emissions of chlorofluorocarbons were destroying our protective ozone layer. We did not take a relative policy of percentage reductions of these, uh, damaging ozone-depleting substances, we forbid them, we put a cap and we operated within a boundary. And this is often the way we operate in many areas where we forbid toxic substances and we operate within a safe space. Now we need to do that for all components in the Earth system. But is this then going to be a paradigm that only operates at the global level where we have some kind of steering committee running the planet? Of course not. It is absolutely clear that in the Anthropocene we need to strengthen Earth governance, we need to collaborate all nations in the world to set planetary boundaries, but we also need to recognize that all action occurs from below, individuals, communities, businesses, nations, and that as the famous Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom pointed out that one of the most exciting opportunities we have is to invest in stronger polycentric governance systems where we connect local informal institutions and collective action among engaged citizens with formal institutions across different levels of society to work from local to global, and that this actually works. We show it for water management, we show it for agriculture management, that in many parts of the world this actually can function. So it's not a contradiction between the global and the local, it's actually an integration between the different scales. But what does all this mean for the economy? And I'll just give you one example of how this changes our thinking. Often the question is raised well, if you apply a planetary boundary thinking isn't that actually saying that we're limiting growth, we're limiting economic growth? And what we've argued as the scientists behind this is: not at all. In fact what the planetary

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boundary analysis shows is that we need to stay within a safe operating space. But what happens within that operating space is up to us; it's our choice. The economy should be able to grow within a planetary boundary safe operating space, what we have a bit jokingly called a planetary souffle, meaning that the economy should be able to grow within this space. A souffle also alludes to the fact that this is quite a challenging and innovative pathway because, you know, if we don't manage this in a sustainable way it may in fact abruptly collapse, which we sometimes see in the financial crisis. Now can we actually envisage an economy growing within a safe operating space? Absolutely. In fact in our innovations, technology breakthroughs and advancements of business models that are not only resource-efficient but even circular, mean that we can produce value and generate well being within the confines of a safe, resilient Earth system. And just to give you a few examples of how this could translate, even in conventional economics. Conventional economics had developed macroeconomic analysis of how expensive or beneficial It will be to solve the climate challenge. One of the most famous of these models is called DICE and here is just one example of how this looks like for climate. This is a graph from 2010 until end of the century, 2100, in terms of what it will cost to the world economy, so it's GDP on the Y axis, if we continue as business as usual and move towards a very risky 4 degrees C future, or if we reduce emissions to a 2 degrees C, 450 ppm future. And this is the classical graph showing that GDP would only go down with a few percent if we stay with our business as usual, which we scientists criticize very, very fiercely because we say these economic models are not considering the devastating costs to the economy if we cross dangerous temperature levels. But let's for a moment assume this is correct, that in fact it is such a small difference in terms of cost whether or not we reduce emissions. Exactly this data can actually be plotted in a different way, and this is shown in this graph where we've just taking [taken] the growth of the economy on the X axis, so this is global GDP, but on the Y axis we show the difference in concentration of greenhouse gases, the planetary boundary. And what you see here is of course the blue line which goes up all the way to 800 ppm in the business as usual, the 4 degrees C pathway, and as you see it reaches year 2100 a world economy of 500 trillion US dollars. But look at the 2 degrees C future, which bends at 550 ppm and actually is projected to also reach 500 trillion US dollars slightly later, a few years later. And then you have the 450 ppm which stays at 450 ppm, but actually reaches a very high degree of economic growth as well. But let's not put in a boundary here. So we've taken not the planetary boundary that we have so strong, robust support for of 350 ppm. We're taking the climate skeptics' boundary, we're taking a boundary that everyone will agree upon, because nobody wants a 6 degrees C future, a totally catastrophic future that will not support human civilizations on Earth. So we've taken the 5% risk of reaching 6 degrees C and put that on this graph, and that is shown by the upper horizontal line here which is at 550 ppm. So if we accept moving towards a boundary of 550 ppm, the world moves into the realm of a 5% risk of reaching 6 degrees Celsius, which is a probability that nobody, no reinsurance company, no bank, no government, ever, ever would accept. Well what is this? Well actually that is a hard boundary. It means that the business as usual trajectory hits the ceiling at already 200 trillion US dollars. The world economy can not go beyond this point, which shows that the only pathway to its prosperous future for humanity is in Revista de Praticas de Museologia Informal nº 8 Spring 2016

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fact that we bend the emission curve within a safe operating space, because it's the only trajectory that can allow us to reach 500 trillion US dollars which is required to actually support a world of 9 billion people. Everything above this level is not acceptable, it's actually outside of the realm of economics. It's the realm of ethics, it's the realm of political leadership, it's the realm of a new development paradigm where we accept that there are certain ceilings that we can not transgress. And this ceiling is not even a planetary boundary, this is the ceiling of ultimate unacceptable movement beyond anything that anyone ever would accept. So this is quite an interesting way of illustrating, I think, that we need to reconsider the way we operate in terms of future development. (energia, Segurança alimentar, Urbanismo sustentável, Gestão da Biodiversidade) Now these transitions are dramatic of course, and can they actually be achieved? Well so many analysts are showing that yes, a global energy transformation inside a safe operating space is possible. We can envisage a low carbon world economy by mid-century, a food security transformation where we feed the world with sustainable food is possible. Yes, we need to increase food production 50% by mid-century, but through sustainable agricultural innovations a lot of evidence indicates we can feed humanity in a safe operating space. An urban sustainability transformation is necessary but also increasingly possible. Two-thirds of the cities we need by mid-century are not even built yet. Let's build them in a sustainable, resilient way. Biodiversity management is increasingly shown to be both effective, economically beneficial, and builds resilience that's shown by many, many studies, for example, on the economics of ecosystems and biodiversity team. So it's not as if a transition to a safe operating space is the dark story of doom and gloom, it seems increasingly to be the desirable, more attractive story of innovation, transformation and human prosperity. Now it won't be an incremental journey. Together with colleagues at the Tellus Institute we recently tried to ask ourselves the question well how deep is this transformation into a safe operating space? And that tentative analysis using a model called PoleStar indicates that it won't be enough with only taxes and measures in terms of policies and technological breakthroughs, we will need to change lifestyles. It appears that we need to reconnect our own values with the biosphere, we need a much stronger emphasis on well being rather than just consumption, and that it actually is a shift also in our lifestyles. So it is a social, technological, and political journey we are embarking on if we truly want to endorse and kind of take in the latest science of the realities in the Anthropocene. But to summarize, that recognition which we are the first generation to be knowledgeable about should not be used as a big, black blanket, putting a stop on development, it should rather be used as an encouragement for a new type of development, a new type of economic growth where we can meet the needs of both the poorest in the world and the aspirations ostrom

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7.4.- Promising pathways to success 7.4. 1-Energy - a promising pathway For the world to develop within a safe operating space of planetary boundaries one of the grand challenges is a global transition to a renewable world energy system. This is a double challenge because it's not only about biophysically operating within a safe operating space, it's the recognition, shown in this graph, of the tight connection between energy use in the world and economic growth. In fact there's a linear relationship so far between growing economies and growing energy use. And that is projected to continue, even though in [at] a slightly lower pace, up until mid this century. There's also the recognition of how our past looks like. And just check out this development of the extraordinarily rise in energy use since the great acceleration started in the mid-1950s. And what you see here is the growth of coal, and particularly oil and gas, as the predominant sources of energy. So one simply has to recognize that if we're seriously talking about sustainable development we can not escape the fact that we need not only energy, we will need more energy in the future if we take an ethical responsibility for the wealth of a world of 9 billion people. The challenge, thus, is a transition into a zero coal or non-fossil fuel-based economy in the future. What may help us here is in fact not only technology advancements in renewable energy, which is remarkable, it's also the fact that we are approaching or are at peak of many of the most cheap fossil fuel energy sources. And in this graph you see that already from the mid-'80s, 1980s, and onwards we have actually bypassed the point of access to cheap sources of oil. This has a risk of course of a transition to other cheap but even more polluting sources, such as coal, and the transition we're seeing today in terms of fracking for natural gas, which is methane, which is a very powerful greenhouse gas. But overall it shows that however you twist and turn the analysis the era of cheap oil is behind us, which may help us also as an incentive to a transition to renewable energy systems. But a very important challenge in terms of this transition is to recognize that not only is there a linear relationship between economic growth and energy use, what has enabled our quick economic growth is that energy has been cheap. And if you look at a key parameter in this regard called energy return on investment, meaning how much value do you get out for each input of investment into your extraction of energy. We have been privileged, in fact enormously privileged, of having a very large return on investments on oil over the oil era, since the early 1930s and '40s with energy returns on investment often exceeding hundred in the early days of the oil bonanza, and today moving down quickly to levels of 30 to 15. But look at what happens with, for example, nuclear energy, biomass, photovoltaics, oil sands, with energy returns on investment being very low. And in fact this really worries scientists and analysts because we're not even sure how to operate a world economy with energy returns on investments going below 10 to 15, so another reason to really explore innovative solutions in the space of renewable energy systems.

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And just look at this trajectory into the future indicating that we're moving increasingly towards a point where we bypass this magical level of energy returns of investments below 10, which again means that energy becomes so expensive that it may no longer contribute to the economic growth we've seen in the past. So these are sharp reminders that the planetary boundary analysis showing the necessity to stay within a sustainable global carbon budget is coupled to the recognition also that the polluting, dirty and climate-destroying energy systems we have today are also becoming less attractive because they're becoming more and more expensive, and less and less efficient in delivering to the human endeavor of economic growth. Now if you look into the future the drama is equally stark. This is an analysis from the Global Energy Assessment showing that even in a transition to a sustainable energy future, here illustrated by the label Global Energy Assessment efficiency, or the Global Energy Assessment mix, which if you look carefully shows a very rapid rise in renewable energy systems and a contraction in the use of particularly oil and coal, but still the overall picture is growth of energy demand in the world. So in 2050 the estimate, as you see even if we have very high optimistic projections on energy efficiency, we're still seeing a future where we're moving from our current use of roughly 500 exajoules of energy to a future of 600, 700, 800 exajoules of energy in the future. So a reminder again of the enormous challenge. Now what's the solution to this? Well, most analysts would agree today that the long-term future is a future world basically or predominantly supplied from solar energy systems. We're not there yet, but look at these graphs, which originate from fantastic work among energy researchers at Chalmers University in Sweden, showing the exponential rise in photovoltaics and wind power in key countries in the world. And what you see here is that up until 2002-2003, we had a very slow rise in technology and uptake of these renewable energy systems. And then we have a takeoff and exponential rise where for example today countries like Germany, after all the world's fourth largest economy in the world, if you wake up a Saturday morning in Germany you're likely to get in the order of 30-40% percent of your electricity from wind and sun. So we're starting to see solar and wind systems coming to scale also in the large economies of the world. So there's promise that this transition is not only necessary, but in fact possible to achieve at economically competitive rates, but also desirable. because they provide clean energy systems with very high benefits for health and also interestingly in a much more democratic way. Many of these energy systems are provided from small-scale distributed households, farms, small businesses, that produce their own energy and buy and sell energy to a flexible energy market. That's why, to close, I believe that journals like The Economist even put at the front page of one of their recent issues a dinosaur and an oil pump in their hands, making the analysis that in fact those who invest and keep investing in dirty, risky, undemocratic fossil energy sources are the dinosaurs in terms of meeting the demands and needs and opportunities in the future. While a transition in terms of energy in a safe operating space can be, should be, and must be the opportunity for a much more clean, modern energy system for a world that of course will demand more energy to truly achieve sustainable development, but which needs to be sustainable.

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7.4.2.. The role and risks of technology in the anthropocene This will be about technology, and this is one of my favorite topics. When we talk about the Anthropocene, I think we seldom miss the point that so much of what happens in the Anthropocene, and the fact that we might be in the Anthropocene, happens through technology; it's been through technology. And one of the favorite examples that I take up with some of my students and some of my talks is this example. A couple of years ago an NGO and a couple of researchers discovered a new monkey type in the Amazon called the Titi Monkey, a new type of Titi Monkey. And they needed money to promote conservation efforts for the monkey. So they decided to make an option, an online option to sell the naming rights of that monkey. So they did that, and it was quite successful. They managed to get $650,000, and the company that won that auction was an online casino called GoldenPalace.com. So GoldenPalace.com officially gets to name the monkey, so the official name of this Titi monkey is actually GoldenPalace.com Titi Monkey. And it has a Latin name called Callicebus aureipalatii, which I believe means golden palace. And it's quite a bizarre example, of course, but I find it quite intriguing that we're modifying we're affecting nature at such a deep level that we're even auctioning out the naming rights of a monkey species to an online casino. I think the three interesting topics in here that are more general that this quite bizarre example. One deals of course with biodiversity and how we protect biodiversity. And there's another issue related to politics of course. I mean where are we, is this a good idea should we really pull in private funding in this way? And giving – selling out naming rights in this way? And of course the third topic [is] about technology. Who would have thought 10 years ago that an online casino would have bought the rights to name this particular monkey? Now I think this really brings us to an illustration of the next generation of environmental challenges in the Anthropocene, and new governance challenges facing us. This is a quote from a New York Times article from one of the researchers a paper showing that the west Antarctica ice sheet was collapsing irreversibly, risking to create very large increases in sea level rise. And the quote from the scientist of course is, "This is really happening. It has passed the point of no return." So it brings us back to the issue of tipping points and new risks. Once these news were out there of course you hear discussions about trying to stop this from happening through technology, so essentially geo-engineering interventions. Sending out ships to spray out salt particles in ways that would make clouds whiter and then cool down the area, and hopefully, ideally, theoretically, cool the area down so much that you could stop the glaciers from collapsing. And of course this is just one example of many, many of these tipping point elements. This is a famous image from Tim Lenton's work on tipping points in the Earth system. And the issue here is of course if there are tipping points, and some of these might be a very, very large scales, and affect the Earth system as a whole, are there ways by which we can use technology to stay away from these, or mitigate these, or adapt to these in smart ways? And of course that triggers a lot of controversy and political conflict. And geo-engineering is a brilliant

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example of the interplay between risky tipping points, technology, and technological interventions and the political conflicts and debates those sort of discussions trigger. And it's not just about climate. I mean I just gave you a climate example. Some scientists propose that you would need to promote a new generation of conservation efforts that are more active to cope with climate change in ways to protect coral reefs. So one example of tangible interventions were to create artificial coral reefs, or create big umbrellas, or to protect and cool down coral reefs, to create gene banks, etc., etc. Another interesting observation is from a workshop that was a few years ago in the UK where researchers and NGOs got together to discuss whether we can use synthetic biology to promote conservation and to maintain biodiversity. And there's an emerging discussion about something called the extinction, so essentially using DNA from extinct species and use that DNA to bring these species back, and would that be a way to maintain and protect biodiversity? Highly, highly controversial of course, and quite intriguing. I think one of the general reflections and reactions to this from the public and other scientists would be, but are we allowed to do this? Doesn't this inflict on the precautionary principle? Now the precautionary principle that states that we shouldn't do anything that might create harm. I mean that would be the popular perception of that. But in fact if you look into international agreements, such as the Commission on Biological Diversity, it states something different. It says that, and I'm goint to quote here, "Where there is a threat of significant reduction or loss of biological diversity, lack of full scientific certainty should not be used as a reason for postponing measures to avoid or minimize such a threat." So essentially actors, NGOs, a few researchers, used the precautionary principle as support for these sort of intervention[s]. And is that the proper framing of the precautionary principle, or should we have a more moderate interpretation of that? And what would that look like? So I think that's just a simple illustration of the sort of challenges that tipping points, emerging technologies, get mixed up in a way that create[s] new political controversies and new governance challenges.

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7.4.3. - Cities: challenges and opportunities Hi, I'm Thomas Elmqvist, and I'm a Professor in Natural Resource Management at Stockholm Resilience Centre. And my training is in ecology, and I've been working in tropical forests and in rural areas. But for the last 15 years, I've been so intrigued and excited in exploring more what's actually happening in the city, because we're used [to], when talking about the Anthropocene and about the future challenges, there are so many challenges and negative things we have to deal with. But I discovered when actually coming to the urban and the city there are also fantastic opportunities to solve these problems, and that is what really excites me. For the next couple of minutes we're going to go through both some of the challenges because they are there, but also we're going to particularly look at what are the opportunities here to solve some of these big problems we have had? So talking about the challenges of course. Urban areas are expanding; more people live in cities than in rural areas in the world. And we also know that urban areas are expanding actually much faster than the urban population, and this is called urban sprawl. So we're consuming a lot of land. And this is particularly worrisome because we're also consuming a lot of prime agricultural land, which would then would have knockout effects on forests and savannahs and biodiversity in other areas. So this is something we need to deal with. But urbanization is diverse. So we have on the one hand megacities we have by now around 30 megacities in the world with a population of more than 10 million. By 2030 we will have maybe fifty. So there is a huge expansion of these really large cities. But there is also another pattern that we need to think of, and that is the most of population growth in the world the next 20 years will happen in small and medium size cities. And there's a lot of land that's going to be consumed when these cities expand and grow. And that we should also not forget that in this diversity of urbanization we also have shrinking cities, and particularly in eastern Europe, parts of Japan, eastern North America, we can cities that actually are shrinking, they are losing population, and we have a city-to-city migration, which also opens up opportunities when it comes to biodiversity, ecosystem services and managing land. So some of the key challenges are looking ahead with organization is that we will need more resources for a growing population, and also that when people move into cities they become more affluent, and they will increase their consumption of red meat, for example. So the dependence on land is going to increase. And just as an example, London today is requiring an area a 125 times the size of the city. And that's the size of the UK's entire productive land surface. And this dependence on land is going to increase and that's why we need to understand and manage this is a way that we could actually have a sustainable production. So the first point I want to make is that local governments need to address this land consumption and land management in a very active way in the future. And that's one of the keys for sustainable development. And examples of what will happen when land is consumed is that urban areas will infringe into biodiversity hotspot areas, for example. And just to take an example, 25% of the world's protected area today are within 17 kilometers of a city. In 10 years it will be less than 15 kilometers. Data around this [has] been developed in a large global study called the Cities of Biodiversity Outlook, which was requested by the UN and looking at the challenges but also the opportunities. And Ban Ki-Moon writes in the preface

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of this study that as he viewed it the principal message is that urban areas must offer better stewardship of the ecosystems on which they rely. And this is actually what we're going to explore for the rest of this lecture on what are these opportunities and what does this stewardship actually mean? Because there are opportunities. Looking ahead until 2030 we could see that all the urban land we expect to have in 2030, 60% has yet to be built. There's an enormous investment ahead of us for the next two decades in all types of infrastructure. And we need to get that investment right to get on a sustainable pathway for the planet. And I would argue that this is the key for a sustainable planet, that we actually get urban development into a greening path. These investments are going to be made anyway. If we turn them into a green, more sustainable direction that's the key. And we will show you some examples. Humans living in urban areas are dependent on clean air, on clean water, food, and many resources. And urban ecosystems, the living world of urban area could actually promote and provide some of these benefits. These are called ecosystem services that could clean the air, help clean the water, and integrating living systems with a built environment in these ways I think open up fantastic opportunities to create urban areas that are livable, healthy, and prosperous, and would actually - are providing an environment for people that they enjoy and create a rich life, but also in a sustainable way. So giving an example. One of the challenges we have ahead of us is of course climate change. And one of the most likely effects of climate change that would affect people is urban heat waves. We're going to see a lot of these examples in the future where very hot temperature will prevail in cities. And just as an example the consequences of these are immense. In Europe we had a huge heat wave in 2003 and it's estimated we had 70,000 excess deaths. So how are we going to deal with urban heat waves? One way of doing it is actually to start planting trees in the city, because there is a very clear effect - cooling effect of trees. If you increase the canopy cover from 10 to 20% you would decrease the ambient temperature with anything between 3 and 8 degrees C, which is substantial. And while you're planting a tree in the city, you're planting many, you would also get a lot of other benefits that are related to culture, to air cleaning, to reducing peak and precipitation, all other benefits. Which we just started to value and started to understand. So here are lots of opportunities that combining the built environment with a living environment to actually address and solve a lot of these challenges we have ahead. And just as an example where this is actually taking into action and implementation, Mexico City has launched a huge program where they will build 10 000 square meters of green roof to provide cooling, and regulate humidity, and also provide sites for biodiversity in Mexico City. And they also have a program for conserving land with the similar purpose of contribute to cooling the city and contribute to maintaining some of the very rich biodiversity in the city area. And another important challenge when we look ahead is that we will have a growth of cities and a growth of population, but the average age, or the age of this growing urban population will be there will be young people. So the majority of people living in the world and in the cities in the future will be below the age of 20. Revista de Praticas de Museologia Informal nº 8 Spring 2016

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And there is a huge educational challenge here, but also opportunities. If we could find ways of engaging young people in managing, and restoring, and enjoying the living world in the urban area I think that's one of the most fundamental keys for a sustainable pathway. So just as an example of hundreds and hundreds of exciting projects going on around the world in cities, here's one from New York City, in [the] Bronx where a group call themselves Rocking the Boat have engaged with disadvantaged kids in [the] Bronx and engaged them in restoring oyster banks and learning about the river, and how to clean up the river, how to create an environment in [the] Bronx that is actually beautiful which people would enjoy, and also learning about how nature actually could be an asset and something you could actually use in a very constructive, positive way to create a livable environment. So my final message here is that cities have the unique potential to generate the innovation and governance tools that we need, and can and must take the lead in sustainable development. Most action in the world happens at the local scale. So if we could bring citizen NGOs, local governments together, with support from national governments, with support from regional government structures, like the European Union and others, and with support from the UN, I think there is so many things, so many exciting things, we could do at the local scale, where we could bring in already knowledge we have, and bring in new creativity and new thinking, new ideas to solve these problems. And I think it's absolutely possible. It's just that we have to come together, sit down and say we've got to do it. Thank you.

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7.5. Feeding humanity in an urban world´ Hello. I'm Lisa Deutsch and I'm a Senior Lecturer here at the Stockholm Resilience Center. I look at how trade enables movement of food and feed anywhere on our planet. And I'm also the Director of Studies, so I like to teach about all the things that we do here, in an inspiring way hopefully. More than half of the population today lives in cities. And although we are no longer an agrarian societies we are still utterly dependent on agriculture for our food. And those of us who live in cities I think are disconnected from where our food comes from and how it's made. I think we're actually disconnected from the entire process of agriculture. And part of this is because of global trade. Global trade lets us urban citizens consume foods from anywhere on the globe, produced far outside the city borders. And it also enables us to never actually see what's going on in agriculture production. So urban consumers are different. Right now we need to deal with this balancing act too when it comes to feeding cities and feeding us to potentially feed the future estimated 9 billion people. We need to have more food, we need to maintain livelihoods of farmers, and we need to remain within the Earth's capacity. So we need to produce maybe 60% more calories of food. And we need to at the same time safeguard the livelihoods of the poorest 900 million people, 70% of which are very closely tied to livestock production. We already see a 20% decline in the number of farmers on this planet in the last 50 years. Somebody's got to grow our food. And we can't continue doing farming and fishing in a way that degrades the natural basis for production. So there's some unique challenges in the nexus of cities and food and sustainability. Urban dwellers do not understand agriculture production. That's the first main challenge. Second is that urban populations are wealthier. We consume more - because I'm an urban person too - and mostly though we consume differently. That 60% of new calories that we need to get, it's not just because there's going be 2 billion more people on the planet, it's because we want to eat things like meat. We eat things - we eat fruit, we eat vegetables in city. That's different than the traditional more grains-based diet. The third kind of unique challenge is that there's no longer going be just local production feeding the local population. The vast majority of food production is coming from far outside the city areas. Fourth, we see changing values, cultural values, in the urban areas. With this highly networked kind of place that we live in in cities, this globalized world, has become more westernized. And these type of western diets are very different and they're resource-demanding too. And last, fifth, is that urban cities, urban areas, are engine rooms of people that drive the free market system. So when we change our diets, when we urban dwellers choose different diets, we transfer that into the market system, we're demanding different things. And that's a challenge.

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So I looked with my colleagues at three different food systems, and I mapped these developing country kind of capital regions in Australia, in Denmark and in Japan, and to see how they had different approaches to achieving their own food security systems. So Canberra in Australia, Canberra can provide more food for itself, but it's chosen - since 1965 it produces less food in its own areas. And that's because, partially because, urban dwellers in the Canberra area, they prefer - and they're the ones with the political power - they are the ones that prefer smaller, more pristine ecosystem-like areas, and they're pushing actually for less agriculture production inside the Canberra area. And that means that they're - the Canberra is having to import more food. In Copenhagen, Copenhagen could be self-sufficient but they've chosen instead to not be, they've chosen instead to import feed inputs, to value add it, and export pork. Japan, Tokyo, can not provide for the whole 40 million people in the city. They have really high yields, they have a very productive production system, but they can't provide for 40 million people in the land area. But you can see that because they place a very high cultural value on the food that you can see that they actually manage to maintain very high production levels of the traditional types of pork, rice, and cabbage. So these are three different approaches that these cities have taken, and you can see that this is how they've solved their food systems. So this kind of study is useful I think because cities are going to need to manage food security by learning where in the world - what agricultural ecosystems they need to support their consumption. And I think Japan is a good example, the example of how many cities are going to feed themselves now. They're going to depend on very large area outside of the city limits for their food provision. But there's another reason that you want to make sure that you know where your food is coming from. And for example in 2010 when there was a large drought you could see that the willingness of certain countries to export food, for example Australia was not as willing, and partly because they didn't have the amount of production of milk and butter, Japan had to look elsewhere to find these sources. In 2010 during the droughts Russia decided not to export grains to the EU and the big cities in the EU. So you need to know where your food is coming from if you're going to manage your food security. And thinking about planetary boundaries, food actually is affecting every single one, it plays a role in all of the nine planetary boundaries. And people talk about deforestation, tropical deforestation, and land use change, but there's another kind of deforestation that I haven't heard as much about, which I've looked at, and that is related to aquaculture. And it's related to mangrove deforestation. For example, more than half of the mangrove areas along Thailand's coasts have been deforested to produce jumbo shrimp aquaculture. And that consumption is driven by rich consumers in the United States and Europe. Another specific example, which is actually maybe a good success story, where we're seeing the ozone depletion reduced is the fact that the CFCs, the chlorofluorocarbons, were originally used for refrigeration, for food. So we were able to ship and store food, and that's why we were using so much chlorofluorocarbons. So these are, yeah, two just specific examples of how food is tied. And there's many examples of how food is tied to all the planetary boundaries.

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I'd like to finish talking with you today and leave you on a good note. There are many good examples of some fun innovations that come from cities. Urban gardening, even though it may not be able to feed the vast majority of us, but there are some really good examples. For example is Dar es Salaam it's estimated that maybe 90% of the vegetables are actually produced in the urban area. And that in Hanoi they've maybe managed to produce up to 60% of their rice, right there in the urban area. So there are some places where they are managing to produce quite a bit of food right in the urban areas. But I'd like to finish with my own close to home example where I have a Masters student who has started a company, Bee Urban, in Stockholm, and she and her friends are putting beehives out on urban roofs all over Stockholm, and by increasing the habitat for the bees we now have pollination services throughout Stockholm, and we can maybe even say that this is improving our capability here to do urban gardening in Stockholm. So these are just a few examples of some really exciting and fun things that are happening in cities when it comes to food production and food innovations. There are many, many different fun things going on, there are many different ideas, many different things that should be happening. We shouldn't have one solution. There are many different ways, and many different things that we should be doing. I encourage you to find out what's important for you, and think about what you ate for lunch, and where it came from. Thank you.

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8. Science, Policy and Individual Action in the Anthropocene Congratulations for coming this far. You’ve done seven modules. We are now entering the eighth and final module on this lecture series on Planetary Boundaries and Human Opportunities. Keep it up. We’ll have a fantastic last week together. In the previous module, we dug ourselves into the challenges of translating our Planetary Boundaries science and challenges in the Anthropocene into global governance, the role of technology, the transitions humanity face in terms of energy, food, urban, pathways towards a future of growth and development within a safe operating space. We looked into the challenges related to sustainable and resilient urban development and trying to position our new thinking on global sustainability within the realm of opportunity and development for humanity in the future. Now in this eighth and final module, we’d like to integrate and synthesize and summarize all the insights across the entire set of lectures. We’d like to do that in the context of the big global policy agenda on transforming the Millennium Development Goals to Sustainable Development Goals. We’d like to do it also by sharing the latest thinking in how science is organizing itself and also opening opportunities for young scientists and bright minds to engage in the new opportunities around not only interdisciplinary research but also research for solutions and exploring avenues towards a future within a safe operating space. In doing so and inspired by all your inputs into the forum and personal insights, we’ve also gathered the entire team of lecturers to share with you their personal reflections and insights, originating and being inspired by the contents of the entire course and engagement with all of you during these weeks. We’d also like to remind you that even this week, please do keep the discussions and connections and ideas lively on the forum. We still hope that we together can take this course as a starting point to engage further in the future on exploring solutions for global sustainability. So see this week as an opportunity and a Launchpad to start a dialogue that will go way beyond the weeks that we’ve had together over the past two months. So congratulations again, keep it up, and we’ll soon cross the finish line.

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8.1. Development of the sustainable development goals Is the world of policy and science responding to the latest advancements in science that we've entered the Anthropocene; that we can no longer exclude catastrophic tipping points; that we need a transition to a world within the safe operating space of planetary boundaries? That's the core question in this lecture, focusing first of all on the major global policy development within the United Nations of transforming the current Millennium Development Goals into the Sustainable Development Goals, which emerges out of the latest Earth summit in 2012. The big question is, what's happening across the world in terms of how we address this? And I'd like to start first, unfortunately just reminding us, of how are the current discussions on this area predominantly flavoured. Well, there seems to be three conventional choices to our future, which is debated in all the negotiation; from climate change, to biodiversity, desertification, chemicals, trade; and the first perception is that the rich nations, the rich minority in the world, largely the industrial countries, have had this fantastic journey of wealth and economic growth occurring at the expense of the Earth system. And now we're waking up to the science, and the rich world is telling the poor world that, "Sorry guys, the party is over. You came too late. We're pushing you off the ladder, and now we all have to chew the sour pill, and simply lock ourselves into a much, much less attractive future in terms of economic growth." This is clearly causing a lot of the friction in many of the negotiations in, for example, on climate change. The second approach seems to be that, "Well, things are going really bad. We all need to contract and converge, and this will be painful. It's a burden-sharing pathway. Even the language in the negotiations uses this term." Moving towards sustainability is a burden. In fact to the extent that many politicians say that, "Well, now that we have economic problems, we can not afford to take on this burden of taking care of the environment or the climate system," which clearly violates everything that science is telling us. And the third one is to say, "Well, let's simply put the head in the sand, cross our fingers. Tipping points, probably something that hopefully cannot be correct," and just move along and hope for the best. So these seem to be the current conventional options, and I would argue, and many of my colleagues, and certainly Jeff Sachs at the Earth Institute, that this is, neither of these, are nor attractive, nor the pathway for the future. Instead the future lies in redefining sustainable development as a trajectory for growth and human well-being within a stable Earth system. And this is profoundly new opportunity, and a new way to address the pathways to the future.

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Now, are we seeing anything like this fourth realm in the area of policy, and I would argue that yes, we are. Science is increasingly connecting between the Earth system science and the policy domain by putting forward analyses, such as this one, which indicates clearly how we could envisage a transition towards a sustainable development paradigm where the economy serves society within a safe operating space, where we can even define global sustainable development goals. Here suggesting six broad goals on livelihoods, on sustainable food security, on sustainable water, on universal access to clean energy, on healthy and productive ecosystems, and on transparent and efficient governance on urban societies, and that we can actually today, from science in dialogue with different stakeholders of society, define science-based global planetary boundaries, which would be the outer component of this circle. Inside we can have very, very aspirational social goals, such as ending poverty. And inside that we can put in place the economic instruments that will provide the incentives to steer markets, innovations towards these goals. What you see here is a big change. It means that the planet defines the boundaries within which we can develop. Now the Sustainable Development Solutions Network, the knowledge platform in the world set up by UN Secretary-General Ban-Ki Moon to support the implementation of the SDGs, has suggested a set of Sustainable Development Goals entirely in line with planetary boundary thinking. Yes, ending poverty. Yes, securing economic growth. But look at goal two: achieving development within planetary boundaries. Truly setting humanity on a pace where people and planet operate together. Now, this has been fed in to the open working group of the United Nations, the general assembly collation of nations working on designing the new Sustainable Development Goals. And this is the latest outcome of that work, which has been shared with all nations in July 2014. And so far the general assembly is suggesting 17 Sustainable Development Goals. A large number one could argue, and lets not dwell whether these are too few or too many, but just to single them out in terms of different categories. And what you see here is that of those 17, 13 in fact are social-economic aspirational goals to secure a world where all citizens have a good development and lifestyle for the future. So you have, for example, goals of ending poverty; ending hunger; ensuring health; inclusive and equitable educational access, etc. They are aspirational, and very ambitious, and very concrete. Four of the goals define planetary boundaries. There's one on water, one on oceans, one on ecosystems, and one biodiversity. And this is actually a great, great advancement compared to the Millennium Development Goals, which had only social goals, and quite abstract rhetoric statement on environmental sustainability on its seventh goal.

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So this is an example of how the world is gradually moving towards a paradigm of development within planetary boundaries. Now the question is: are though, these 17 goals matching up to the science? And here unfortunately I would argue that the answer is so far no. And just to give you a stark example of how this looks like. Here I've just taken a few examples of the social goals and the targets that are set up. And look at these targets: ending poverty, the target is for example, very concrete; by 2030 to eradicate extreme poverty for all people in the world living less, or eradicate all people living less than $1.25 US per day. For hunger, very concrete goals on exact number of people that will be lifted out of hunger by 2030. And so it goes for essentially all the social goals. Very quantified, aspirational targets that can be monitored, that can be evaluated, and that the world can be kept accountable to. Let's now look at the sister goals on planetary boundaries. Here we have all four of them, and I've taken the most concrete targets under these goals. And if you read carefully, you'll see there's nothing like a quantification. There's no attempt to set quantified science-based targets. Good language, but not putting us on a trajectory that we need, because we all know that what we measure is actually what gets operationalized and taken seriously. So this is one of the gaps where science has an opportunity, and where we need to truly need to put more effort in terms of matching the targets on planetary boundaries type goals with quantifications, just as the social goals. Another challenging issue is actually the narrative. To recognize, and this is illustrated in this graph, that among the 17 goals for Sustainable Development Goals, they're not playing the same role in terms of serving humanity. I believe that now is the time to take the planetary boundary thinking seriously and acknowledge that the goals setting global and environmental resilience in place, shown here as the floor for human development, forms actually a prerequisite, the basic conditions on oceans, ecosystems, climate, nitrogen, phosphorous, to enable us to achieve the social goals. So to put it very simple, there is no possibility for us to eradicate poverty, to eradicate hunger, unless we meet the global sustainability goals on climate, oceans, and ecosystems. And this hierarchy, where the Earth system is a prerequisite to reach our social goals, is something that has to be recognized, because today the discussion is still on the pillars that there is trade-offs and contradictions between environment and development. Of course there are challenges, but we need to seek the synergies and realize that there is no negotiation with the Earth system. The planet cannot be negotiated with. Efforts have been made and this illustration is from a recent analysis by Kate Raworth, who development the Doughnut Model of social-equity within planetary boundaries, trying to see: are the current Sustainable Development Goals meeting up with the planetary boundaries framework? And that analysis shows quite neatly that yes, in fact, there are basically opportunities to match up all the boundaries. So even though there are only goals stated for oceans, water, ecosystems, and climate, there is text under the food security goal regarding nitrogen and phosphorous, there is text under the industrial development with regards

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to chemical and aerosols, so we have an opportunity now to set quantifications for all the goals within the UN framework that we are today seeing being developed. The challenge is to get science-based quantifications right. And as shown by Kate's analysis here on the social floor, essentially we have everything we need in place with regards to equity, with regards to education, hunger, poverty, etc. So this quite an exciting opportunity to take the analysis to a new level.

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8.2. Science in the Anthropocene Now the question is science stepping up to this challenge? Because I would argue and many colleagues with me that the policy domain is making enormous advancement based to a very significant extent on the knowledge provided by science, but that's been largely diagnostics. Is science now prepared to also step up in contributing solutions? And the exciting answer is yes. There's a lot happening in science to now step into much more interdisciplinary approaches where natural science and social sciences work together for solutions, and to engage much more in what we call co-design and co-development of knowledge, together with businesses, together with community stakeholders, together with policymakers. Now where does this arise from? Well it arises from science reacting on the nervousness of its own evidence. The diagnostic is now so dire that we can truly talk of a planetary crisis. And science is getting nervous sitting on this enormous amount of evidence that humanity is putting its own future at risk. This has led to very significant movements towards engaging more from science in exploring solutions. There's also a deep emerging recognition that the science, policy, business, particularly partnership, is beneficial also for academic research, what we call co-design and co-development. So this is quite interesting and these are key features of the moving and advancements in what I call sustainability science; the emerging field of an integrated research for sustainable development. Out of this comes, for example, a new initiative, the world's largest initiative on global sustainability research where Earth system science is moving towards solutions for global sustainability. It's called Future Earth, it is an integration and a merger of the large global environmental change programs that have been around for 30 years and that actually are the source of the bulk of insights that, for example, led us to the conclusion that we are now in the Anthropocene. In a very important large conference a few years back called Planet Under Pressure the scientific community came together and launched the idea of Future Earth, which is now becoming a reality in 2014-2015. So this is a large endeavor of thousands of scientists working together across social and natural sciences to not only focus increasingly on solutions, but also to learn more about the risks we're facing, of how the Earth system operates, improve the definitions of planetary boundaries, and work much, much more together with different stakeholders in society. Now what will then Future Earth do? And what is science increasingly excited about doing in general? And in a very simple way to illustrate that we can say that of course this is not true for all science, but you know, the large, large thrust after all has been that the science on global environmental change has largely focused in the past on understanding how the Earth system works as a self-regulating complex system, so we're starting to understand more and more how climate interacts with the biosphere, that tipping points occur, etc., and also how we humans impact the system, which has been tremendously important to understand the pressures Revista de Praticas de Museologia Informal nº 8 Spring 2016

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we're posing. Future Earth is about adding two social dimensions. One is how does it impact on our own well being and what are the implications for livelihoods and development? And of course, perhaps the most exciting, what's the response? How can we as scientists engage in finding the pathways towards a transformation to global sustainability? Another very important advancement that we all are so well aware of is the bridge between science and let's say the most accessible form of knowledge for decision making, namely assessments. So we have a very, very long engagement in climate with United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which has recently released its fifth assessment, the basis upon which decisions are made on climate change. But I'd just like to remind us all that we also have the sister of the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, IPBES, which is now in place to do the same type of knowledge synthesis on ecosystems and biodiversity as a support for decision making. And Finding Sustainable Development Solutions Network, which is a broad global platform of knowledge for change. So these are very profound large examples of how science is stepping up to the challenges in the Anthropocene. So to conclude, initiatives like Future Earth and alliances such as the Earth League, which is another coalition of top, top knowledge institutions gathering together to serve society with better risk analysis, better understanding and solutions, is in my mind a very, very strong signal that science sees not only the risks in the trajectory and the paths we're following today but also enormous opportunities in a transformation to a world within a safe operating space.

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8.3. Interviews. Reflections on taking action in the Anthropocene

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8.4. Key messages and final remarks This course on planetary boundaries and human opportunities is in fact the first time we summarize the latest science on our understanding of our human impacts on the Earth system, and combine it with the story of redefining sustainable development and a future where humanity prospers within a safe, just and resilient Earth system. And I'd really like to congratulate you for taking yourself through all the scientific updates, the insights, and all the work that we have been sharing, myself and my colleagues, during this intensive period. And I really hope that you feel that you have received a broad, comprehensive overview that also gives you the confidence that you're standing on huge amounts of knowledge to move forward towards sustainable development I this very challenging era of the Anthropocene. In this lecture I'd just like to give you a little bit of a wrap-up of what we've covered during these weeks. And the first part is clearly the evidence that today there's no virgin spot of untouched nature anywhere. So even though the Holocene interglacial era over the past ten thousand years that has enabled civilizational development as we know it, our modern world, has been an Eden's Garden of stability, of beauty, of nature enabling economic growth and development, there's no doubt that today we are in the driving seat. This is a biosphere shaped by humanity, for good or for bad. We often portray ourselves as the big culprits of environmental change. I would like to argue that let's rather see ourselves as not those who consumed the planet, we're now those who are stewards of the planet. We're in the driving seat, we have a choice, if we want to thrive in the future it's now time to recognize that the Anthropocene is the story of great risk, but it's the story of the privilege of having this knowledge. And I hope you really feel that you've received all the evidence that we've tried to really load on you, that this is the case and therefore we need to act accordingly. To summarize that in a very simple way, which we've tried to convey based on the science, is that just up until 20-25 years back you could actually argue that we were a relatively small world on a big planet. In fact conventional economic growth worked quite well, subsidized by the planet, meaning at we could have good economic growth, which could occur at the expense of biodiversity loss, eutrophication, fresh water pollution, air pollution, and destruction of the climate system, but the Earth system was not sending any invoices back. In fact, Mother Earth was very forgiving thanks to her remarkable resilience. So the model worked, in fact it worked remarkably well for a minority of the world that actually have been thriving tremendously well on this unsustainable growth model. But now, over just the last 20 years, we've shifted into having a large world on a relatively small planet. It means we are in [at] saturation point; we're hitting the ceiling of ecological capacity of the Earth system to support human development. And of course when Mother Earth starts sending her invoices it is time to react, and that's the Revista de Praticas de Museologia Informal nº 8 Spring 2016

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shift in paradigm. And often it's said that well, you know, but environmental scientists have been warning for 50 years that this is something that will occur. And I argue, and I hope you've received the knowledge to convince you, that yes, the warnings came early but they came well, well before we had empirical evidence that we really were facing problems. In fact, Rachel Carson was a tremendously insightful person who well before the dangers warned humanity. That was a proactive warning to help humanity. Now we're reacting to the evidence we're standing on. And that's a very different situation. Now why are we in this situation? Well we have mapped out the fact that it's not only population growth, it is certainly affluence and well being in unsustainable lifestyles. We have a climate crisis that you wish would occur on a resilient planet, but unfortunately we're undermining the ecosystem services and functions that build the resilience and the capacity of the Earth system to deal with a shock such as the energy disturbance we're causing through climate change. So we have this multiple, complex interactions of global scale changes not only in the climate system, but essentially all the components of the Earth system. And upon, on top of, all this we need to recognize that nature's not behaving as we always thought, in an incremental and predictable way. No, nature has long periods of huge ability to dampen and even hide change, and then suddenly it can irreversibly shift abruptly when crossing tipping points when we push ecosystems too far. And this quadruple squeeze creates the reality of the challenges we're facing. Moreover it's not as if the big, big changes occurred in the past. No, I would argue what we've seen so far may just be the aperitif, the first course. We're entering the main course now because it is now, right now, that two giants collide. The first giant being the fact that so far it's a rich minority that has caused the major environmental problems we see, but we're now having a future where we will most likely have not one but four, five, six billion co-inhabitants on Earth with an average income equivalent to the rich nations of today. This is a tremendously positive story, the right to development among all is now at reach. We can eradicate poverty in the world. But if we follow an unsustainable pathway this will take us much, much more rapidly and accelerate even further a journey in the wrong direction. The second giant is that so far nature actually has responded relatively in incremental and predictable ways. But it is now we start seeing the first signs of abrupt tipping points. It is now we see the first evidence of potentially irreversible melting in parts of Antarctica, irreversible and accelerated melting in Greenland, the real risk of collapse of large parts of tropical coral reefs, the real risk of a flip in tipping point from rainforests to savannahs. This was not in the past. It's a giant wakening up right now. So this is the juncture where we need to urgently move towards a safe operating space. That's why scientists Revista de Praticas de Museologia Informal nº 8 Spring 2016

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stepped forward and gathered all the knowledge we have to ask this biggest of all questions, what is our desired state for the planet? And if we can answer that question what are the environmental processes that regulate that stability? What are the planetary boundaries that can enable us to stay safe? And that led to the planetary boundary framework. And as you've seen in the lectures we've given here, science can answer the first question, what's our desired state, which is defined by the Holocene equilibrium that is the interglacial period we've had over the past ten thousand years which has enabled civilizational development and our modern world as we know it. This is the period where all the nature, all the ecosystems, the climate system, rainfall systems, everything that we nurture, love and depend upon from nature for human wellbeing, settles in in the Holocene. This leads to a very simple but very dramatic conclusion, that the Holocene is the only state of the planet we know that can support the modern world as we know It. That is the basis upon which this transition to a new sustainable development paradigm evolves. But it's so helpful because we know the Holocene. We have a lot of knowledge on the carbon cycle, the nitrogen cycle, the phosphorus cycle, hydrological cycle, how the biosphere, the cryosphere, the atmosphere, the stratosphere, and the hydrosphere all interact and processes that help regulate the resilience of the Holocene, so we can use that knowledge to define boundaries. Planetary boundaries, though, I want to emphasize in this summary also is different to earlier historic concepts of how we deal with rising environmental risks. We have talked through the lectures, of the concepts around limits to growth, carrying capacities, different analyses of tipping elements, tipping points, which are all tremendously important. In fact, so important that the planetary boundary work stands upon the shoulders of these advancements. But the difference is distinct and very important to move forward on seeing the usefulness of planetary boundaries. Because most of these concepts in the past were based on efforts of trying to not only assess the resources and ecosystem capacity of the planet, but also made assumptions on human innovation capacity, basically our ability to develop technologies and practices to develop and exploit nature, but also on human needs. And the analysis of limits basically based on an assessment of when human needs exceed the capacity of the planet to supply those needs, we are in a situation of overshoot, and thereby a situation of great, great risk. The planetary boundary analysis changes that profoundly by simply taking away humanity for a little while, not making any assumptions on our ability to be more efficient, more clever, and have technological breakthroughs, we even avoid making an assumption on human needs. We simply try to answer the question for the planet to stay

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stable what will it take? And once we've defined those biophysical boundaries we put humanity back into the safe operating space. A quite simple way of understanding this is that it's equivalent to playing football or soccer. You know, that game you would never, ever think of playing if you wouldn't have a line that shows exactly what the playing field is. You put a line and then you have a referee that says very clearly when the ball transgresses the boundary and the ball is out of game. You're not allowed to play outside of the boundary. But inside the playing field, inside the safe operating space, you can actually play like Zlatan, you can play fantastic economic growth or football. Or you can play as lousily as I would do in that safe operating space. Nothing hinders you to prosper inside the playing field. And that is the challenge and opportunity with a framework like planetary boundaries. It means we're shaping sustainable development, it means moving towards a paradigm where the economy serves society, which evolves within planetary boundaries. It means recognizing that the biophysical ceiling actually has a social floor where we need to now, for the first time ever, recognize that we're in the wrong of sharing absolute global budgets with carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, fresh water, biodiversity, which means a true equity dimension to the planetary boundary analysis in terms of distributing in a fair way the remaining ecological space on Earth. So this is an enormous challenge for humanity, but also provides large opportunities. And we've been discussing quite profoundly in the course whether this is in contradiction with economic growth. Our conclusion is that that is certainly not the case. Rather it's an opportunity to now explore economic growth within the safe operating space of our planetary boundaries. And we've been illustrating that in form of this planetary soufflé where the growth of the economy can occur within a space, and we have to be careful to avoid collapses in that economy. So all this knowledge, all the different, new concepts we've been discussing during this course; from planetary boundaries, to resilience, and tipping points; can actually be condensed down to one very nice statement put forward by my dear friend and colleague Carl Folke who's been lecturing on the course, and our Science Director at the Stockholm Resilience Centre that "people are embedded parts of the biosphere, and now shape it in the Anthropocene, from the local to global scale, today and in the future, and at the same time, we need to now recognize, that people, we are fundamentally dependent on the capacity of the biosphere to sustain human development in the future."

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And this to me is an operational strategy for our economy, for our businesses, and for our policy, and for communities in the future. It also has a very profound philosophical dimension, ethical dimension. The ethical dimension we've have been discussing so profoundly, that we're now one interdependent connected world, community that needs to share the ecological space on earth. But the philosophical side, to me, is that is all boils down to they very, very simple recognition that if we can become truly successful stewards of the remaining beauty on Earth, we will be very successful also in being able to secure economic growth and development. Because everything that matters for the economy resides in the nature around ourselves. Outside our window, locally where we live, to the large systems that regulate Earth resilience. So when we say that a fundamental strategy is to reconnect our selves, reconnect our societies, reconnect our economies to the biosphere. That's not just rhetoric. That is truly the core and the new paradigm of development within a safe operating space on Earth. And I really hope that you feel that during this course you not only received the tools to go out there and act towards this endeavor, but that you have also been able to get the knowledge where you feel that, yes, science now tells us a profoundly important story based on empirical evidence, which gives us the confidence to move forward along these lines. Of course, it is tremendously challenging, it's an enormous project to start changing the course of world development, but I will also end by reminding us that the situation is urgent. We just have 5-10 years to transition towards a safe operating space if we want to avoid the unacceptable risks that science is now showing clearly that we face. So the knowledge that this course provides needs to be shared and discussed, so that we can all as a global community start the pathway towards a safe future for humanity.

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