With eight out of nine ‘planetary boundaries’ soon to be exceeded, Earth’s habitability is increasingly under threat, says study

The Earth is reaching saturation. Six “planetary boundaries” out of nine are now outdated, says the Stockholm Resilience Center, Wednesday September 13. These nine “planetary boundaries” are thresholds not to be exceeded so that ecosystems remain within a “safe operating zone”adds the Swedish center which originated this concept in its latest report. Two other indicators are approaching alert thresholds: ocean acidification and the concentration of fine polluting particles in the atmosphere.

Pollution and the exploitation of natural resources by humanity have already led to the crossing of limits such as climate change, deforestation, loss of biodiversity, the amount of synthetic chemicals, the scarcity of fresh water and the balance of the nitrogen cycle. This is twice as much as in a previous evaluation of the Stockholm Resilience Center in 2019. Only the state of the ozone layer remains below these alert thresholds, with even a certain margin.

This notion of “planetary boundaries” has become a reference, even mentioned in IPCC reports. This latest study specifies, however, that for these nine planetary boundaries, the situation can return below the alert thresholds, provided in particular that the quantity of waste released and the extraction of natural resources are limited.