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Safe and just Earth system boundaries

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posted on 2025-08-01, 17:07 authored by J Rockström, J Gupta, D Qin, SJ Lade, JF Abrams, LS Andersen, DI Armstrong McKay, X Bai, G Bala, SE Bunn, D Ciobanu, F DeClerck, K Ebi, L Gifford, C Gordon, S Hasan, N Kanie, TM Lenton, S Loriani, DM Liverman, A Mohamed, N Nakicenovic, D Obura, D Ospina, K Prodani, C Rammelt, B Sakschewski, J Scholtens, B Stewart-Koster, T Tharammal, D van Vuuren, PH Verburg, R Winkelmann, C Zimm, EM Bennett, S Bringezu, W Broadgate, PA Green, L Huang, L Jacobson, C Ndehedehe, S Pedde, J Rocha, M Scheffer, L Schulte-Uebbing, W de Vries, C Xiao, C Xu, X Xu, N Zafra-Calvo, X Zhang
The stability and resilience of the Earth system and human well-being are inseparably linked1-3, yet their interdependencies are generally under-recognized; consequently, they are often treated independently4,5. Here, we use modelling and literature assessment to quantify safe and just Earth system boundaries (ESBs) for climate, the biosphere, water and nutrient cycles, and aerosols at global and subglobal scales. We propose ESBs for maintaining the resilience and stability of the Earth system (safe ESBs) and minimizing exposure to significant harm to humans from Earth system change (a necessary but not sufficient condition for justice)4. The stricter of the safe or just boundaries sets the integrated safe and just ESB. Our findings show that justice considerations constrain the integrated ESBs more than safety considerations for climate and atmospheric aerosol loading. Seven of eight globally quantified safe and just ESBs and at least two regional safe and just ESBs in over half of global land area are already exceeded. We propose that our assessment provides a quantitative foundation for safeguarding the global commons for all people now and into the future.

Funding

Stockholm University

History

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  1. 1.
    DOI - References https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5234594
  2. 2.
    DOI - References https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6395016
  3. 3.
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  4. 4.
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  6. 6.
    DOI - References https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.20079200.v2
  7. 7.
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  8. 8.
    EISSN - Is published in https://portal.issn.org/resource/ISSN/1476-4687
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Rights

© 2023, The Author(s). Creative Commons: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons CC BY license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Notes

This is the final version. Available from Nature Research via the DOI in this record. Data availability The data supporting Figs. 2 and 3 are available at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.22047263.v2 and https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.20079200.v2, respectively. We rely on other published datasets for the climate boundary16, N boundary72 (model files are at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6395016), phosphorus73,74 (scenario breakdowns are at https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:d9676f6b-abba-48fd-8d94-cc8c0dc546a2, and a summary of agricultural sustainability indicators is at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5234594), current N surpluses129,130 (the repository at https://dataportaal.pbl.nl/downloads/IMAGE/GNM) with the critical N surplus limit72 subtracted, and estimated subglobal P concentration in runoff based on estimated P load to freshwater131 and local runoff data132,133. Current functional integrity is calculated from the European Space Agency WorldCover 10-metre-resolution land cover map (https://esa-worldcover.org/en). The safe boundary and current state for groundwater are derived from the Gravity Recovery And Climate Experiment (http://www2.csr.utexas.edu/grace/RL06_mascons.html) and the Global Land Data Assimilation System (https://disc.gsfc.nasa.gov/datacollection/GLDAS_NOAH025_3H_2.1.html). More information is available in ‘Code availability’ and Supplementary Methods. Source data for Fig. 2 are provided with this paper. Code availability: The code used to produce Figs. 2 and 3 are available at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.22047263.v2 and https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.20079200.v2, respectively. The code used to make the nutrient Earth system boundary layers in Fig. 3 is available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7636716. The code used to make the surface water layer in Fig. 3 and derive the subglobal Earth system boundaries for surface water is available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7674802. The code to estimate current functional integrity is available at https://figshare.com/articles/software/integrity_analysis/22232749/2. The code to derive the groundwater layer in Fig. 3 and derive the total annual groundwater recharge is available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7710540.

External DOI

Journal

Nature

Publisher

Nature Research

Place published

England

Version

  • Version of Record

Language

en

FCD date

2023-06-22T08:15:57Z

FOA date

2023-06-22T08:19:25Z

Citation

Published online 31 May 2023

Department

  • Geography

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    University of Exeter

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    Keywords

    BiodiversityClimate and Earth system modellingElement cyclesEnvironmental impactHydrology

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    CC BY

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