Abstract
Background: The Planetary Boundaries concept (PBc) has emerged as a key global sustainability concept in international sustainable development arenas. Initially presented as an agenda for global sustainability research, it now shows potential for sustainability governance. We use the fact that it is widely cited in scientific literature (>3500 citations) and an extensively studied concept to analyse how it has been used and developed since its first publication. Design: From the literature that cites the PBc, we select those articles that have the terms ‘planetary boundaries’ or ‘safe operating space’ in either title, abstract or keywords. We assume that this literature substantively engages with and develops the PBc. Results: We find that 6% of the citing literature engages with the concept. Within this fraction of the literature we distinguish commentaries—that discuss the context and challenges to implementing the PBc, articles that develop the core biogeophysical concept and articles that apply the concept by translating to sub-global scales and by adding a human component to it. Applied literature adds to the concept by explicitly including society through perspectives of impacts, needs, aspirations and behaviours. Discussion: Literature applying the concept does not yet include the more complex, diverse, cultural and behavioural facet of humanity that is implied in commentary literature. We suggest there is need for a positive framing of sustainability goals—as a Safe Operating Space rather than boundaries. Key scientific challenges include distinguishing generalised from context-specific knowledge, clarifying which processes are generalizable and which are scalable, and explicitly applying complex systems’ knowledge in the application and development of the PBc. We envisage that opportunities to address these challenges will arise when more human social dimensions are integrated, as we learn to feed the global sustainability vision with a plurality of bottom-up realisations of sustainability.
Highlights
Achieving sustainability is a global concern because many environmental processes that shape and influence humanity, such as climate change, operate globally and connect across multiple temporal and spatial scales (Liu et al 2013, 2007)
We discuss mismatches in the mandate, scope and applications of Planetary Boundaries concept (PBc) science along three topics that emerge from the literature reviewed here: Who is the human? What is the goal? And Where is the action? We propose a plan for the development of PBc science with a framework for the integration and implementation of resilience thinking, acknowledging that different fields of study must connect and inform each other in order to make the messages of global sustainability science more useable
These dimensions are dynamic and evolving and complement biological and political human facets. They cannot be described by biological growth models or rulebooks and laws—and imply fundamental diversity in human aspirations, psychologies, needs, behaviours and impacts. We argue that it is primarily the absence of such human dimensions that prevents the effective realisation of global sustainability concepts at sub-global scales, as scaling the current global sustainability vision translates to top-down—and oftentimes North-South, wealthy-poor, industrialisedindustrialising—control and decision-making (Saunders 2015)
Summary
Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 licence. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI. Andrea S Downing1,2 , Avit Bhowmik1 , David Collste1,3 , Sarah E Cornell1 , Jonathan Donges1,4, Ingo Fetzer1,2, Tiina Häyhä1,5 , Jennifer Hinton1,3, Steven Lade1,2,6 and Wolf M Mooij7,8 Keywords: planetary boundaries, resilience, global sustainability science, human dimensions, footprints approach, life cycle analysis, safe operating space
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