Table Of ContentBIG
WORLD
ABUNDANCE WITHIN PLANETARY BOUNDARIES
SMALL
JOHAN ROCKSTRÖM AND MATTIAS KLUM
PLANET
WITH PETER MILLER
New Haven and London
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3
First published 2015 in the United States by Yale University Press
and in Europe by Max Strom.
©Bokf6rlagetMaxStrb'm2015
© Text Johan Rockstrom
© Text pages 114-115 and photo captions Mattias Klum
© All photos Mattias Klum, except photo page 3 © NASA/William
Anders, and page 51 (top left, polar bear) © Johan Rockstrom
All rights reserved.
This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including
illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections
107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for
the public press), without written permission from the publishers.
Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for
educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please
e-mail [email protected] (U.S. office) or [email protected]
(U.K. office).
Editor Peter Miller
Illustrations/Graphs Jerker Lokrantz, Azote
Design Patric Leo
Layout Patnc Leo, Petra Ahston Inkapb'ol
Prepress Monika Klum, Fredrika Stelander, and Graphicom
Printed on FSC paper by Graphicom, Italy 2015
Library of Congress Control Number: 2015940944
ISBN 978-0-300-21836-7 (cloth)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 21
CONTENTS
PREFACE 7
OUR TEN KEY MESSAGES 14
SECTION 1
THE GRAND CHALLENGE 28
1. OUR NEW PREDICAMENT 31
2. PLANETARY BOUNDARIES 59
3. BIG WHAMMIES 81
4. PEAK EVERYTHING 101
SECTION 2
THE GREAT MIND-SHIFT 114
5. NO BUSINESS ON A DEAD PLANET 117
6. UNLEASHING INNOVATION 131
SECTION 3
SUSTAINABLE SOLUTIONS 144
7. RETHINKING STEWARDSHIP 147
8. A DUAL-TRACK STRATEGY 163
9. SOLUTIONS FROM NATURE 181
AFTERWORD 194
FURTHER INFORMATION ON PHOTOGRAPHS 198
KEY SOURCES AND RECOMMENDED READING 200
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 207
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PREFACE
A PARTNERSHIP FOR CHANGE
it was a bitterly cold night in Copenhagen. The big climate summit of
2009 was over and everyone was heading home. At the cavernous Bella Center,
where delegates from 192 countries had spent two weeks in contentious negoti-
ations, no one remained but an army of workers rolling up power cords and tak-
ing down hardware. The tens of thousands of protestors who had filled the city
streets were long gone, along with the police helicopters that had hovered over-
head. President Obama and the Americans were gone. Premier Wen Jinbao and
the Chinese were gone. The diplomats, journalists, and activists who had come
here to witness policymaking history were gone, and—without anything resem-
bling success to point to—most had departed with the same word on their lips:
“failure.”
“What went wrong?” Mattias asked as we stood outside the Bella Center.
“The people I talked to had such high hopes.”
Just a few days before, at an exhibition of his photographs, Mattias had given
a short presentation to a high-powered group about the global effects of l ogging
in Borneo. Tony Blair, former prime minister of the UK, had been there, as had
HRH Crown Princess Victoria of Sweden, and Gro Harlem Brundtland, Spe-
cial Envoy on Climate Change for the United Nations (UN). Having visited
Borneo many times during his nearly three decades as a wildlife photographer
and filmmaker, Mattias had spoken from the heart when he described the ram-
pant destruction that has claimed 75 percent of the island’s lowland rainforest,
threatening both the reclusive Penan tribe and wildlife such as orangutans and
pygmy elephants.
“Everybody seemed to get it,” Mattias said.
I had a similar experience that same week, when I took part in a European
Union (EU)-sponsored side event on climate change. As panelists, we were
asked to offer scenarios for stabilizing global temperatures at no more than 2°C
(3.6°F) above pre-industrial levels—the target being widely proposed at the
conference. I had remarked to the group that a climate deal alone—as difficult
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as it might be to achieve—might not be enough to meet a 2°C goal, since the
world’s climate was intertwined with other urgent problems such as biodiver-
sity loss and ocean acidification. But other speakers were less cautious, express-
ing confidence that the goal was still reachable with existing technologies. The
general mood was quite positive.
“I’m not really sure what happened,” I replied. “But I think two factors still
haunt us. One is a deep distrust between rich and poor. And the other is that
we’re still blind, despite all the science, to the fact that wealth in the world
depends on the health of our planet.”
The Copenhagen summit was supposed to be the culmination of a long
journey. As the fifteenth session of the UN body charged with carrying out the
1992 climate treaty forged in Rio, and the fifth session of the governing body
responsible for the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, it was supposed to be the meeting
where the world finally came together to sign a new legally binding agreement
on climate change. The Kyoto Protocol was set to expire in 2012.
In anticipation of the Copenhagen meeting, the prestigious scientific journal
Nature had published an article in its September issue that I’d co-authored with
nearly two dozen international researchers. In the article, entitled “A Safe Oper-
ating Space for Humanity,” we proposed to track “planetary boundaries” for
critical natural systems such as the global climate, stratospheric ozone, biodiver-
sity, and ocean acidification. If humanity wanted to avoid triggering potentially
disastrous tipping points, such as the melting of polar ice sheets, extreme storms,
or mass extinctions of wildlife, we argued, then the world needed to know where
the boundaries for such thresholds were located, which meant measuring them
and tracking them. More positively, we wrote, by identifying these boundaries,
humanity could chart a safe path into the future for generations to come, open-
ing the door for greater prosperity, justice, and technological advancement.
What we presented, based on the latest science, was evidence that the world
needs a new paradigm for development, one that pursues alleviation of poverty
and economic growth while staying within the safe planetary boundaries that
define a stable and resilient planet.
The editors of Nature called our proposal “a grand intellectual challenge,”
saying that it could provide “badly needed information for policymakers,”
which was exactly what we were hoping for, of course. As expected, the paper
stimulated a lot of debate, including criticism of our methods and assumptions.
This was science, after all, which lives and breathes skepticism and disagree-
ment. We wanted to challenge our scientific peers.
But new research and scientific debates since publication of the paper have
verified the need for planetary boundary thinking. The most recent science
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confirms that as long as we manage, within safe boundaries, our planet’s key
systems—the climate system, the stratospheric ozone layer, ocean acidification,
the remaining forests on Earth, and secure enough freshwater in our rivers and
landscapes, safeguard biodiversity, and avoid air pollution and release of chem-
ical compounds—we stand a good chance to secure a prosperous future for the
world for many generations to come.
But that was the scientific side of the coin. We also aimed our proposal at a
broader audience, including business leaders and political leaders—like those
meeting in Copenhagen. We wanted to give the world a new framework to
redefine global development by reconnecting economies and societies to the
planet. In so doing, we wanted to create a tool providing a practical and com-
prehensive way to measure human impacts on Earth, and guide our common
endeavor toward a sustainable world development, before it was too late.
It soon became obvious, however, that the time hadn’t come yet for such ambi-
tious goals. Despite all the promising talk, world leaders failed miserably in
Copenhagen to agree on targets to stay within a safe global budget for carbon in
the atmosphere, one of the nine planetary boundaries, by reducing greenhouse
gas emissions. Negotiating sessions unraveled as groups of delegates walked out.
Unofficial meetings sprang up right and left. When President Obama and the
leaders of four other nations announced on the last day that they’d privately
reached an accord, the rest of the conference felt excluded. The media called the
summit “disappointing” and “a missed opportunity.” Andreas Carlgren, Swe-
den’s Environment Minister, went further, describing the talks as a “disaster”
and “a great failure.” Outside the Bella Center, protestors cut off their hair in
frustration. “The city of Copenhagen is a crime scene tonight, with the guilty
men and women fleeing to the airport,” reported John Sauven, executive director
of Greenpeace UK.
If one looked hard enough, of course, one could find crumbs of progress com-
ing out of Copenhagen. It clearly represented the moment, for example, when
world leaders finally recognized that climate change wasn’t just an environmen-
tal issue, but also a social and economic one. That meant that any future climate
solution would also require fundamental changes in our economies, financial
systems, how we build our cities, produce our food, and relate to one another—
which was hardly a small change in thinking. Still, there was much to be
depressed about as we stood outside the Bella Center.
TWO APPROACHES TO LIFE
As a photographer and a scientist, respectively, Mattias and I traveled in
different worlds. I always thought it was a scientist’s job to appeal to the
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