Planetary boundaries
Our planet is not in a good health. Scientists have established eight “safe earth system boundaries” (or “planetary boundaries”) that must be respected to safeguard the earth’s functions and its ability to support humans and all other living organisms. They are the outer ring of Kate Raworth’s Doughnut.
As we speak, seven of them are being transgressed already (mainly caused by overconsumption of the rich), wreaking havoc in many places. At the same time, we still have widespread poverty and people lacking access to basic amenities.
Two new layers
In a new paper in The Lancet, a big team of experts (Gupta et al., 2024) introduce two new “layers” to the planetary boundaries:
- They calculate “just earth system boundaries” that minimise the risk of significant harm to present and future generations. Some of the just boundaries are stricter than the original safe boundaries. For climate change for example, they calculate a safe boundary of 1 degree temperature rise (rather than 1.5).
- They define a “minimum access level”: this is the expected pressure on the earth system if every human being would have minimum access to food, water, energy, and infrastructure.
The outer ring is set by the safe and just boundaries, and the inner ring is the pressure on ecosystems under a minimum access scenario
This results in an alternative “Doughnut” space for human development (the authors call it a corridor). The outer ring is set by the safe and just boundaries, and the inner ring is the pressure on ecosystems under a minimum access scenario. The safe space is in between the two. Unlike in Kate Raworth’s original doughnut, the inner ring and the outer ring are defined in the same terms.
Just transformation
The authors conclude that providing minimum access to food, water, energy, and infrastructure to all people without access will further increase the pressure. This asks for just transformations that restore the balance: it’s not fair that a minority of humans use up all the space.