Environment

Humans Send Planetary Boundaries into "Danger Zones"

An international team of 18 researchers warns that a potent combination of human activities has pushed four of the planet’s nine ecological boundaries into “danger zones,” threatening life on Earth.

The four boundaries that have been crossed are climate change, loss of biodiversity, improvident land use and an altered nitrogen cycle due in part to fertilizer use.

“For the first time in human history, we need to relate to the risk of destabilizing the entire planet,” study author Johan Rockström of Stockholm University told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

The five other boundaries not yet pushed into the danger zone are ozone depletion, ocean acidification, freshwater use, microscopic particles in the atmosphere and chemical pollution, the study concludes in a report published in the journal Science.

The findings should be a wake-up call to policymakers that “we’re running up to and beyond the biophysical boundaries that enable human civilization as we know it to exist,” said University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher Steve Carpenter.

Just because we are not seeing a collapse today doesn’t mean we are not subjecting humanity to a process that could lead to catastrophic outcomes over the next century.