By Praveen Gupta
In my experience, it’s all too easy to feel overwhelmed by the daily onslaught of furiously evolving climate jargon and the endless analysis paralysis. Even well-intentioned climate supporters tend to freeze as the planet boils.
But here’s the thing: we can’t afford to look away. We need to face the hard truth about our addiction to endless growth on a planet with very real limits. So let’s take a closer look at what happens when our demand for more – more stuff, more services – pushes nature beyond what it can sustainably give. What does that mean for the state of our Planetary Boundaries?
The Planetary Boundaries framework was created in 2009 by a group of 28 scientists led by Dr. Johan Rockström of the Stockholm Resilience Centre. These thresholds keep life on Earth within a safe operating zone, or safe boundaries. Any transgression enhances the risk of instability, life support and nature’s capacity to absorb shocks and damage. The Planetary Boundaries framework identifies nine Earth system processes – climate change, ocean acidification, stratospheric ozone depletion, biogeochemical flows in the nitrogen cycle, excess global freshwater use, land system change, the erosion of biosphere integrity, chemical pollution, and atmospheric aerosol loading – essential for maintaining global stability, resilience and life-support functions.
It is high time we recognise and reconcile with the safe operating space. It is the range of environmental conditions in which humanity can live, grow, and prosper in the long-term.
When human activities push the Earth beyond the Planetary Boundaries we enter a ‘Zone of Increasing Risk’. Once in this zone – as we are today – the further the boundaries are exceeded, the greater the chance of serious damage, destabilisation of key Earth system processes, and the disruption of life-support functions.
When Earth enters the ‘High-Risk Zone’, there is a strong possibility of severe, irreversible damage to key planetary functions that support life. In this zone, immediate action becomes critical to prevent locking in permanent changes and moving even further away from the stable conditions of the Holocene.
7 boundaries assessed, 3 crossed 9 boundaries assessed, 7 crossed. Source: Stockholm Resilience Centre.
A scientific review, Planetary Health Check 2025, reveals that seven of nine Planetary Boundaries have already been exceeded. For the first time this also includes the boundary for ocean acidification. This means that several of Earth’s life-supporting systems risk crossing critical thresholds, with severe consequences for both ecosystems and societies. Only Ozone Depletion and Aerosol Loading remain in the safe zone… thus far.
Almost simultaneously, Kate Raworth and Andrew Fanning have shared an update on their ‘doughnut’ of social and planetary boundaries being out of balance. Although the global gross domestic product (GDP) has more than doubled, they state, “Our median results show a modest achievement in reducing human deprivation that would have to accelerate five-fold to meet the needs of all people by 2030. Meanwhile, the increase in ecological overshoot would have to stop immediately and accelerate nearly two times faster towards planetary boundaries to safeguard Earth-system stability by 2050.”
“If we make the right choices going forward, there are still ‘overshoot’ pathways that could bring temperatures back below 1.50C by the end of this century. Such a narrow escape remains possible, but it will be extremely challenging. It requires deep and rapid reduction of all greenhouse gases, involving the near complete transition – starting now – away from fossil fuels,” says Dr. Rockstrom.
“If we don’t return to the ‘safe operating space’ of the nine Planetary Boundaries that regulate Earth’s stability, including biodiversity, pollutants, land, nutrients and the ocean, a safe climate will be out of reach – irrespective of our mitigation efforts,” he warns.
Let us remember this stark warning: More than three-quarters of the Earth’s support systems are outside the safe zone. Even with a dire diagnosis, the window of cure remains open. Failure is not inevitable; it is a choice. And it is a choice we can still avoid, suggests Dr. Rockstrom.
As climate models are increasingly overwhelmed by climate events, the drivers of this inadequacy have been laid bare by a pre-eminent actuarial body, the Institute & Faculty of Actuaries (IFoA), in their recent release: Planetary Solvency – Finding our Balance with Nature.
A ‘Planetary Solvency Risk Dashboard’, developed by IFoA in collaboration with the University of Exeter, enables us to visualise and assess the risks of exceeding planetary boundaries. It includes a novel risk commentary on nature, society and economy.
It is not rocket science. Let us remember climate breakdown, pollution and biodiversity loss is what this is all about.
It can no longer be denied: Climate change is progressing unabated and is accelerating. The 1.50C limit for global warming agreed upon in Paris may already have been permanently exceeded, and the 30C limit could be exceeded as early as 2050.
Accelerated warming is a threat to life and limb: Increasingly extreme weather conditions are making predictable agriculture difficult, and in some cases impossible. There is a high risk that the limits of habitability will be exceeded in some regions of the world. This would significantly increase the likelihood that people would be forced to leave these regions.
This visual by Dr. Leon Simons, a renowned climate and energy researcher, explains what’s happening to Earth’s climate right now. It combines greenhouse gas data, aerosol impacts, and NASA satellite observations of Earth’s actual energy imbalance.
* Greenhouse gases (grey line) keep rising relentlessly. They are now adding +4.1 W/m² of extra heating compared to pre-industrial times.
* For decades, aerosols (green/yellow lines) from burning dirty fuels partly ‘masked’ this warming by reflecting sunlight and cooling the planet. But cleaner shipping fuels and reduced air pollution mean that the cooling effect is fading fast. This is good for our lungs, but it lifts the veil that was hiding the true force of greenhouse warming.
* When you combine the two, the net effect (brown line) is now about +3 W/m² – significantly higher than the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) most recent estimates.
* Satellites confirm this: Earth is now taking in +1.4 W/m² more energy than it radiates back into space (orange line). Most of that heat goes into the oceans, but it also melts ice and supercharges extreme weather.
As a matter of fact, Earth’s energy imbalance is growing faster than IPCC projections suggested. We may thereby be underestimating the speed and intensity of near-term warming.
For you and me, 30C of global warming by 2050 may be beyond our imagination. A point where much of what we can insure becomes uninsurable. However, it could happen if the non-linear warming trend of the past three decades continues, believes Leon Simons.
We tend to forget that our planet is predominantly water. The equivalent of the heat released by 400,000 Hiroshima bombs is absorbed by the Earth every day, or four bombs every second. Ninety per cent of the heat released by those bombs is going into the ocean, emphasises environmentalist Bill McKibben.
Clearly, we seem to be hell bent upon disabling the most critical climate regulator – the oceans – by injecting heat and pollutants.
Eighty per cent of the world’s wastewater is discharged with effectively zero treatment, explains marine biologist Dr. Howard Dryden. The same can be said for most atmospheric pollution. We need to eliminate pollution in all its forms, especially toxic and toxic-forever chemicals, plastic and partially combusted carbon. We need to regenerate nature and ecosystems, terrestrial and especially marine. Ocean acidification will be a challenge, but it must be reversed.
Carbon dioxide is of minor importance, says Dr. Dryden citing two recent important papers – one by Alex Borowiak and team, and the other in Frontiersin.org by Demetris Koutsoyiannis and team. We are not going to be able to stop climate change, but it should be possible to stop climate disruption and make the world a better place.
“The oceans are the planet’s life support system, but pollution and ocean acidification have destroyed more than 50 per cent of marine life since the 1970s and will destroy 99 per cent within 10 to 20 years. Carbon mitigation is important for climate change, but humanity cannot survive the loss of marine life in the oceans,” reminds Dr. Dryden.
“After almost 100 years on the planet,” reflects Sir David Attenborough, “I now understand the most important place on Earth is not on land – but at sea.”
Talking about oceans, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) is part of a single ‘conveyor belt’ of continuous water exchange that transports water throughout the world’s oceans.
It is the main ocean current in the Atlantic, including at the surface and at great depths that are driven by changes in weather, temperature and salinity.
This is just one of the many impaired Earth systems. Anthropogenic onslaught is driving this ‘great global ocean conveyor belt’ towards a tipping point.
Anthropogenic (human-driven) actions including unhindered fossil fuel burning and relentless deforestation, particularly of the Amazon rainforest and plans to deforest large chunks of the Great Nicobar Island. This will cause greenhouse gas emissions to skyrocket, thus heating the planet further, causing Arctic and Greenland ice melt, and rapidly transforming ocean water chemistry and dynamics.
A weaker AMOC would decrease the mixing and bring less warm water northwards, restricting warmth within the tropics, and cold to the polar areas. Essentially making hot areas hotter and cold areas colder. This AMOC disturbance could also affect precipitation patterns, strengthen storms and raise the sea level along the North American Atlantic coast.
The full impact of the system settling into a much weaker flow, or stopping altogether, which it could do in less than a century, is not known, but the effect would certainly be catastrophic. As a core element of the Earth’s system, its collapse would radically alter regional weather patterns, the water cycle and affect the food security of virtually every country in the world.
Climate scientists believe that a substantial weakening of AMOC might result in significant, possibly catastrophic, climate breakdown. Oceanographer and climatologist Dr. Stefan Rahmstorf of Potsdam University, a leading expert on the subject shares the urgency in his paper ‘Is the Atlantic Overturning Circulation approaching a tipping point?’
The AMOC has a major global impact on the climate system. Paleoclimatic data shows it has had an unstable past, when it led to some of the most dramatic and abrupt climate shifts known.
These instabilities are owing to two different types of tipping points, one linked to amplifying feedbacks in large-scale salt transport and the other in the convective mixing that drives the flow. These tipping points present a major risk of abrupt ocean circulation and climate shifts as we push our planet further out of the stable Holocene climate into uncharted waters.
To those who have watched cli-fi movie The Day After Tomorrow, based on the book The Coming Global Superstorm, this could be an unfolding reality, backed by rigorous science.
The Dasgupta Review is an independent, global review on the economics of biodiversity, led by Professor Sir Partha Dasgupta, Professor Emeritus, University of Cambridge.
Grounded in a deep understanding of ecosystem processes and how they are affected by economic activity, the framework presented by the Review sets out how we should address this blind spot.
* Our economy is embedded within nature, not external to it. We are dependent on nature.
*Nature is an asset to be accounted for and invested in. Failing to account for the true value of nature has led to overconsumption of natural assets.
* We are demanding more goods and services than nature is able to supply sustainably.
* Addressing this imbalance means difficult decisions: what and how we consume, how we manage our waste, family planning and reproductive health.
* Engaging sustainably with nature requires urgent action globally. Action now would be significantly less costly than delay.
“In the past century, and mostly since the 1950s, more has been learned than ever before about what makes Earth suitable for life, especially human life, in a fiercely inhospitable universe,” says Sylvia Earle, Planetary Guardian, Oceanographer, National Geographic Explorer; Founder, Mission Blue; and Founding Ocean Elder
Mars is not an option!
“When dinosaurs vanished, forests spread, rivers stabilised, and Earth’s landscapes flipped… Dinosaurs engineered landscapes for millions of years, yet in the blink of an eye, they were gone, and the world rewired itself without them,” reminds science communicator Dr. Silvia Pineda-Munoz.
We have telescoped climate risk from a long-tail class (when everything seemed too far in time) to a short-tail (when adverse climate events are manifesting here and now, and climate models are proving grossly inadequate), thanks to our aggressive and irresponsible actions. We could witness planetary boundaries tip in our lifetime.
“We’re the ecosystem engineers now. The question is what kind of rivers, forests, and records we’ll leave behind?” Silvia Pineda-Munoz poses this profound dilemma as we race against time. The dinosaurs did not know what was coming. We do!
Despite all the wise people I draw from, this is the most vital piece in climate messaging: “You’ve got to reach the heart,” as Jane Goodall puts it.
Praveen Gupta is a former insurance CEO. He believes insurers have a critical and urgent role to play in nurturing our environment. Europe-based ‘illuminem’, which has emerged as the world’s largest and premier expert network in sustainability, adjudged Praveen as “Most read in Climate Change 2024”.
