Planetary Crisis Research Articles

A Theory of Planetary Social Pedagogy

AbstractThe escalating planetary crises of human‐induced climate change, the depletion of natural resources, and declining biodiversity call for urgent actions to be taken at all levels of society and by the global community. The current political strategy for a sustainable future that emphasizes economic and technological progress is insufficient to bring about the change required; an educational approach based on identities, values, ethics, and new worldviews is also needed. In this article Arto O. Salonen and his coauthors consider the kind of pedagogy that could support a transformation of the human conception of reality into a form that both recognizes the connections and interactions between people, society, and the planet, and imparts an ethical orientation to action that strengthens the health and integrity of all entities. A theory of planetary social pedagogy (PSP) is based on traditional social pedagogy, which provides a theoretical framework for formal, nonformal, and informal education. PSP aims at building a deep holistic understanding of the relationship between the individual, society, and Earth by integrating the fragmented human conception and experience of reality by uniting the three dimensions of a social‐ecological worldview: spatial, temporal, and ethical. Moreover, PSP is a cyclical learning process that alternates between cognitive, metacognitive, and epistemic levels of learning. The ultimate goal of using PSP is to lay the foundation for a fundamental transformation of the ideals, values, and culture that shape human behavior in ways necessary for securing a sustainable future.

Planetary rural geographies

This paper proposes planetary rural geographies to counter the narrative of planetary urbanisation, which has contended that the whole planet has been urbanised and can be understood through urban theory without an outside. Whilst critics have challenged the metrophilia inherent to planetary urbanisation, advanced post-colonial critiques, and posited alternative models of ruralisation, we argue that these responses fall short of fully embracing the radical potential of a planetary perspective. We call for planetary rural geographies that examine rural places as sites of interaction between diverse more-than-human relations that extend above and below the Earth surface and contend that the configuration of human–environment interactions at the ‘rural’ end of urban–rural relations is critical to addressing planetary crises. We elaborate this argument by focusing on three geographies of planetary rurality: as a space of crisis, as a space of conflict, and as a space of hope, evidenced by examples drawn from the global rural literature.

Biosphere Defenders Leveraging the Human Right to Healthy Environment for Transformative Change

Earth’s life support systems depend on biodiversity and healthy ecosystems. Without radical transformations, staying within safe planetary boundaries becomes impossible. While the inequalities between Global North and Global South are increasingly acknowledged, the agency and rights of people often placed in the category of “vulnerable” -women, youth, indigenous peoples and local communities- are not sufficiently recognized. This article discusses the role of biosphere defenders in the context of the 2022–2030 Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and the right to a healthy environment. Through dissecting judicial cases, the article investigates promising examples of ways in which biosphere defenders use the law to trigger societal change. This article finds that biosphere defenders contribute to unleashing values of responsibility by various actors, translating biocultural values of ecosystems into evidence in judicial processes impacting bureaucratic and financial systems. Supporting the work of biosphere defenders and placing the right to a sustainable environment at the heart of biodiversity and human rights law will be vital in confronting head-on the planetary crises.

The Role of Religions, Values, Ethics, and Spiritual Responsibility in Environmental Governance and Achieving the Sustainable Development Agenda

Abstract The Sustainable Development Agenda 2030 is the only viable framework that exists today providing a plan of action to tackle the complexity of development issues we are facing. One essential element in implementing this agenda is Goal 17, related to partnerships and the role of the whole of society in achieving these goals. Sustainable development is defined as the intersection of economic, social, and environmental sustainability. However, the fourth component of culture and traditional knowledge, while presumably integrated in all goals, has not been fully integrated, presenting a missed opportunity to enhance and strengthen the implementation and achievement of the sustainable development agenda. Religious values and belief systems are considered crucial elements of this cultural approach. Faith values and practices complement the scientific and technological approaches in dealing with the unprecedented environmental challenges of our time. This is especially important due to the commonality of religious values in living in harmony with nature. If seriously considered, adopting religious values leads to a change in individual behaviors and institutional policies that are crucial to reducing our environmental footprint and tackling the triple planetary crisis.

Continuing large-scale global trade and illegal trade of highly hazardous chemicals

Pollution caused by anthropogenic chemicals contributes to interlinked planetary crises, together with climate change and biodiversity loss. One of the key treaties adopted to regulate the transboundary movements of hazardous chemicals is the Rotterdam Convention, which created a framework for countries to better handle the international trade of certain hazardous chemicals. To date, research examining the effectiveness of the Convention has been scarce. Here we analysed 66,156 trade records from the United Nations Comtrade database using a workflow that comprehensively addresses data-quality issues in the database. We found that for 46 listed chemicals, at least 64.5 megatonnes were traded in 2004–2019, and illegal trade was prevalent, reaching at least 25,324 trade records and 25.7 megatonnes. For over 70% of the listed chemicals, the Convention has played a positive role, but large-scale trade of some well-known chemicals such as tetraethyl and tetramethyl lead continues. Concerted efforts are warranted to improve how highly hazardous chemicals are traded globally, including enhancing enforcement of the Convention, addressing illegal trade and swiftly listing problematic chemicals (for example, chrysotile asbestos) in the Convention.

Life-cycle assessment to guide solutions for the triple planetary crisis

Life-cycle assessment to guide solutions for the triple planetary crisis

The climate crisis as a driver for pedagogical renewal in higher education

ABSTRACT The planetary crisis facing humanity makes essential the incorporation of learning about climate change and sustainability in the university curriculum. Yet the ooting of climate change in values, knowledge systems and societal structures means that this incorporation must be more than just addition of knowledge content into a pre-existing curricular template. This article argues that the shifts required in a deep treatment of the climate crisis serve a broader purpose in driving positive change in university teaching and learning. Even within the confines of existing disciplinary divisions and mainstream epistemologies, possibilities exist for deepening critical reflection, pushing boundaries and opening imagination. The article explores this potential through an assessment of three spheres of enquiry: the ontological, epistemological and axiological. The teaching of these areas should be underpinned by the complimentary pedagogical foundations of critical questioning and deliberation, leading to a virtuous cycle of deepening of understanding and connection.

Degrowth and Socialism

Increasingly, scholarship around degrowth and socialism are coalescing around certain shared ideas, namely, that capitalism is at the root of our planetary crisis. Güney Işıkara and Özgür Narin draw out key points of convergence among these thinkers, as well as discrepancies in the two approaches to creating a future egalitarian and sustainable society.

Planning an Ecologically Sustainable and Democratic Economy: Challenges and Tasks

As the impending planetary crisis looms ever-closer, Martin Hart-Landsberg proposes a new focus on the Second World War industrial conversion experience, in which production and consumption were guided by central planning agencies. These successes and pitfalls of this period provide many useful lessons for activists and organizers working toward planned degrowth.

On Technology and Degrowth

There is a common misconception among critics that degrowth proponents do not engage with the question of technology, instead leaving the implementation of technological solutions to the planetary crisis to green growth advocates. Jason Hickel shows that not only is this narrative false, it obscures the possibilities for technology unfettered by capitalism.

Planning Degrowth: The Necessity, History, and Challenges

Kent Klitgaard surveys degrowth thought, starting with the essential contradiction of capitalism presented by Marx, which gives rise to our current planetary crisis. Through an understanding this contradiction and degrowth literature spanning twentieth century, the author presents a plan for a sustainable and planned future socialist society.

Wixárika Practices of Medical Syncretism: An Ontological Proposal for Health in the Anthropocene

By understanding a community’s medical system, we are able to see its body ontology and how the people within it live in relation to the world, a historically constructed ideological position. Modernisation and development have restructured Indigenous communities and devalued traditional ontologies, including medical systems. This is a global pattern, where historical power relationships defined the coloniality of being and from this, organised healthcare, governance, and education in relation to patriarchal and capitalist universals. These social structures underlie the Anthropocene geological epoch and planetary crisis. Wixárika Indigenous communities live a polytheistic sociality; their medical system treats the spiritual origins of illness, attending to social cohesion in a society of humans, the supernatural, flora and fauna. This system is subalternised by dominant universals of biomedicine, which treat the body as separate from the environment and society. I refer to this epistemological inequality as the ontological Anthropocene. Wixaritari use both allopathic and traditional medical systems, following a non-hierarchical syncretic understanding of wellbeing. Giving equal importance to both systems may be a framework with implications for wellbeing beyond human health. This Research Article proposes that by centring Indigenous sociality that is more-than-human we can reconceive our planetary relationships in the broadest sense.

Promoting sustainability training in future teachers through research workshops in the University Ecological Garden

The current planetary crisis and the changes in the Spanish curriculum of Early Childhood Education require teacher training that enables future teachers to respond to these situations. This paper describes a constructivist teaching-learning sequence framed within the University Ecological Garden through an enquiry-based strategy. This educational intervention was carried out with thirdyear students of the degree in Early Childhood Education at the Universidad de Cádiz (Spain). Its outcome was a science dissemination event in which research workshops related to one or several sustainable development goals were organised. The validity of using real contexts like the garden space to achieve sustainability in the curriculum and of contributing to the scientific training of future teachers for them to be able to transfer educational interventions within the framework of sustainability was verified. Future proposals for improvement for a second implementation in the classroom were analysed.

Overcoming Plastic Pollution: Challenges Faced by Brazilian Policies and Perspectives for Stakeholder Engagement and Global Governance Opportunities

This policy position paper begins with a historical overview of the invention and uses of various plastic types, particularly polyethylene, which has become the most widely used plastic commercially. It highlights the rapid growth of our dependence on plastics and the subsequent mismanagement, which has led to their omnipresent and pervasive presence as pollutants, threatening biodiversity, climate change, ocean health, economic sustainability, and human health. The paper also provides an overview of plastic draft laws proposed by lawmakers at the Brazilian Houses of Representatives, emphasizing the importance of delivering effective policies, setting targets and priorities, and aligning with global trends to address the plastic pollution crisis and transition towards a circular economy. The section on governance opportunities examines a practical recommendation specific to Brazil, and subsequently presents ambitious pathways for global standardization and implementation of Environment and Social Governance (ESG). Additionally, a policy roadmap is suggested to incorporate existing approaches, promising strategies, UN Ocean Decade targets, and address concerns identified during the negotiations among UN Member States for a binding legal agreement by 2024 (Plastic Pollution INC1). In the last section, I present practices for adapting ocean literacy and scientific knowledge for different audiences, such as lawmakers and waste pickers, to support informed decision-making processes. Additionally, I present an overview of the benefits that transitioning to a new plastic economy can bring, ranging from global to local social justice associated with the triple planetary crisis: pollution, climate change, and biodiversity loss. Science diplomacy and stakeholder involvement are strongly recommended to find solutions to the plastic pollution problem and towards transforming the circular plastics economy.

Schooling, community of philosophical inquiry and a new sensibility

This paper seeks to reconstruct the role of schooling in a moment of accelerated social, political, economic, geo-political, climatic, indeed planetary crisis. It identifies the school as a potentially prefigurative institution, an evolutionary social frontier, capable of nurturing the democratic social character, a form of sensibility apart from which authentic political democracy is not possible. As theorized by Herbert Marcuse and Richard Hart and Antonio Negri, the “new sensibility” or “multitude” is characterized by greater psychological freedom, individuality, social creativity and self-rule, comprising a “whole of singularities” that “acts in common”. It suggests a human subject with a vital, biological drive for liberation, with a consciousness capable of breaking through the material as well as ideological veil of a society based on hierarchy and domination, and is associated politically with democracy and social-anarchism, or what Murray Bookchin called “communalism”. This paper identifies three main characteristics of an institution informed by this form of modal subjectivity, all of them based on student-teacher dialogue: an emergent, project-based curriculum, whole-school direct democratic governance on all levels of the community, and the regular practice of communal philosophical inquiry, through which we problematize the concepts we live by, in the interest of their ongoing reconstruction.

THE ROLE OF COURTS IN PLASTIC POLLUTION GOVERNANCE

AbstractPlastic pollution is a planetary crisis posing a significant threat to humans and the environment. The regulatory response to this crisis has so far been piecemeal and has not prevented the accumulation and ubiquity of plastic pollution. The growing concern over plastic pollution and the first regulatory measures directed against it soon resulted in court cases. By early 2023, cases concerning plastic pollution emerged in more than 30 countries around the world. From holding private polluters accountable to considering the constitutionality of restrictions on certain plastic products and to ordering regulatory bodies to adopt or implement such measures, courts are playing an increasingly important role in plastic pollution governance.

Charting success for the Plastics Treaty

Charting success for the Plastics Treaty

Beyond net-zero: Toward a "One Planet" health system.

Climate change has captured much attention, but it is just one part of a much larger set of massive and rapid global ecological changes. While the United Nations has taken to referring to the "triple planetary crisis" of climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution, even this does not capture the full extent of human impact upon the Earth-and thus upon human well-being. Canada's ecological footprint is equivalent to five planets worth of biocapacity, and healthcare's footprint is probably greater. So while health systems need to become low-carbon or net-zero, they need to go further. If healthcare is to stand by its ethical duty to do no harm, it must become a "One Planet" system. In addition to becoming a net-zero system, healthcare must reduce the consumption of material resources, the use of toxic substances, and production of all forms of waste, and protect and restore nature.

Transformation of legal systems as a fundamental condition for sustainable development

The emergence of civilizational challenges to the future of humankind prompted the UN to form plans to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. Numerous reasons for the degradation of civilization, which are proposed for consideration by scientists, are very heterogeneous and poorly systematized. This does not contribute to understanding the effectiveness of the world's plans to save civilization. The article substantiates the existence of two groups of root causes of the planetary crisis – the systematic adoption of erroneous decisions and the discrepancy between the traditional economic model and the modern tasks of human development. An analysis is being made of a new paradigm of economic development – the Economy of Result, which is based as much as possible on the application of the achievements of the fourth industrial revolution: technologies of the Internet of things, artificial intelligence, robotics, big data, etc. It turns out that the implementation of the provisions of the Results Economy will necessarily require large-scale social and digital transformations. In such conditions, the problem arises of the correspondence of the current state of the legal system to the legislative support for the implementation of social transformations, which should be based on the widespread use of digital technologies. The necessity is substantiated and the essence of the transformation of the system of law is explained in terms of: clarification of the mission and purpose of legal regulation, understanding the phenomenon of “virtuality”, the possibility of recognizing the subjectivity of a robot with artificial intelligence, overcoming the legal singularity, defining the new role of international law, the relevance of the convergence of law and relevance of legal research due to the implementation of a new paradigm of economic development.

Disrupting and diversifying the values, voices and governance principles that shape biodiversity science and management.

With climate, biodiversity and inequity crises squarely upon us, never has there been a more pressing time to rethink how we conceptualize, understand and manage our relationship with Earth's biodiversity. Here, we describe governance principles of 17 Indigenous Nations from the Northwest Coast of North America used to understand and steward relationships among all components of nature, including humans. We then chart the colonial origins of biodiversity science and use the complex case of sea otter recovery to illuminate how ancestral governance principles can be mobilized to characterize, manage and restore biodiversity in more inclusive, integrative and equitable ways. To enhance environmental sustainability, resilience and social justice amid today's crises, we need to broaden who benefits from and participates in the sciences of biodiversity by expanding the values and methodologies that shape such initiatives. In practice, biodiversity conservation and natural resource management need to shift from centralized, siloed approaches to those that can accommodate plurality in values, objectives, governance systems, legal traditions and ways of knowing. In doing so, developing solutions to our planetary crises becomes a shared responsibility. This article is part of the theme issue 'Detecting and attributing the causes of biodiversity change: needs, gaps and solutions'.