Planetary Boundaries

There are 9 planetary boundaries including: climate change, biosphere integrity (e.g. biodiversity loss), land-system change (e.g. deforestation), freshwater use (blue water= humanity’s use of lakes, rivers and groundwater; green water= rainfall, evaporation, soil moisture), biogeochemical flows (nitrogen and phosphorous pollution), ocean acidification, atmospheric aerosol loading, stratospheric ozone depletion, and novel entities (e.g. synthetic organic pollutants, radioactive materials, micro-plastics). Planetary boundaries provide a scientific guide for humanity that informs what is the sustainable scale that our global socio-economic systems need stay within to provide wellbeing for all. However, as of 2025, we have crossed 7 of the 9 planetary boundaries which requires us to rethink our economic goals as soon as humanly possible to shift us towards the safe operating space of planetary boundaries.

Source: Stockholm Resilience Centre, based on Steffen et al. (2015), Wang-Erlandsson et al. (2022), Persson et al. (2022), and Richardson et al. (2023) and Sakschewski and Caesar et al. (2025).

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Persson, L., Carney Almroth, B.M., Collins, C.D., Cornell, S., de Wit, C.A., Diamond, M.L., Fantke, P., Hassellöv, M., MacLeod, M., Ryberg, M.W. and Søgaard Jørgensen, P., 2022. Outside the safe operating space of the planetary boundary for novel entities. Environmental science & technology, 56(3), pp.1510-1521.

Richardson, J., Steffen W., Lucht, W., Bendtsen, J., Cornell, S.E., Donges, J.F., Fetzer, I. et al. 2023. Earth beyond six of nine Planetary Boundaries. Science Advances, 9, 37.

Steffen, W., Richardson, K., Rockström, J., Cornell, S.E., Fetzer, I., Bennett, E.M., Biggs, R., Carpenter, S.R., De Vries, W., De Wit, C.A. and Folke, C., 2015. Planetary boundaries: Guiding human development on a changing planet. Science, 347(6223).

Wang-Erlandsson, L., Tobian, A., van der Ent, R. J., Fetzer, I., te Wierik, S., Porkka, M., ... & Rockström, J. 2022. A planetary boundary for green water. Nature Reviews Earth & Environment, 3(6), 380-392.

Planetary Boundaries

Planetary Boundaries

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