Yippee - humankind is on track to address climate change, so our global environmental woes are over! Right? Not quite. We actually have a couple of other monster environmental issues to deal with, and it turns out we need to think of these in tandem with socioeconomic issues such as inequality and food security. And other stuff. It's complex.
There's a lot of us, with more on the way
More than 7.5 billion people on the planet in 2017, with a chance of hitting close to 10 billion by 2050. That worldometers is a fun site, by the way, with lots of interactive links and forecasty stuff...but I digress. The good news is that the overall quality of life for those billions of people is improving. I know that goes against popular Piketty 1% type thinking, but we're looking at this systemically. Read to the end to find out where I got the backup for saying that things are getting better for pretty much everyone; spoiler alert - it's based on 200 years of solid data, so I'm not just blowing sunshine.
Planetary Boundaries
But back to our green orb. With so many more people on the Earth, and their overall socioeconomic conditions better than those of their counterparts 200 years ago, something's gotta give. Turns out it's Earth.
Luckily there are some seriously clever scientists out there, led by the brilliant Johan Rockström of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, who have represented the tug of war between population growth and human needs and the resource constraints on our beautiful planet as a series of so-called "planetary limits":
What does that figure mean?
The Stockholm Resilience Centre has updated the nine planetary boundaries they identified in their seminal 2009 work, "Planetary boundaries: exploring the safe operating space for humanity" to take into account potential systemic global risks:
- Climate change
- Change in biosphere integrity (biodiversity loss and species extinction)
- Stratospheric ozone depletion
- Ocean acidification
- Biogeochemical flows (phosphorus and nitrogen cycles)
- Land-system change (for example deforestation)
- Freshwater use
- Atmospheric aerosol loading (microscopic particles in the atmosphere that affect climate and living organisms)
- Introduction of novel entities (e.g. organic pollutants, radioactive materials, nanomaterials, and micro-plastics).
If we're in the green areas (within the blue circle), we and the planet are "safe". Between the blue and the red circles, we're in dicey space (that's where we are on climate change and land system change now), and once we're outside the red circle, as we are for "biosphere integrity" and "biogeochemical flows" we're in the high risk zone. What does that mean? Scientists really aren't sure, but they know it's bad. They also know that we can't just aim to fix one of these problems on its own without addressing the others. And by the way, does that "novel entities" thing creep you out as much as it does me? Sounds like biological warfare stuff as well as the polysyllabic list they've already given us.
For those who like videos, Johan Rockström does an excellent TED Talk explaining the Planetary Boundaries here.
An example many of us would have seen on the news over the last few months, and likely been shocked by, is the sheer quantity of plastic waste floating around in our oceans and landing on remote beaches. Sky News' special report has dramatically raised the profile of that single issue - that plastic waste in the oceans may outweigh fish in those same oceans by 2050 - and the fact that such problems are big, wicked, complex and systemic.
How did I learn about Planetary Boundaries?
I first came across the concept of planetary boundaries when I was researching sustainability in infrastructure in 2009/10, then had a light bulb moment of synergistic connection when I learned of the Five and then Six Capitals model for representing sustainable business, which I wrote about here, here and here when I was but a wee little Steemian. Here's a picture to remind you of how the International Integrated Reporting Council sees these interacting (recall that sustainable, inclusive capitalism is supposed to be about balance in the flow between the stocks of capitals, and since we're all stardust we'd be nowhere without Natural Capital):
Source: http://integratedreporting.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/IR-Background-Paper-Capitals.pdf
Because I come from the business world, it's important to me to see that business is aware of, interested in and gearing up to do something about its role in making the world a better place. That's a topic for another day, but for those curious about the Stockholm Resilience Centre's advice to business on the Planetary Boundaries, there's a great table here which could provide every responsible corporate board out there with a framework for thinking about what they can do better.
Some thoughts on inequality, as promised
We also tend to think (and any Google search will tell us) that global inequality is worsening, so don't we have to let the previously disadvantaged have their fair kick at the global can? Interestingly, if we look at the data in perspective, it turns out we're all a heck of a lot better off (in terms of poverty, literacy, health, freedom and education) than we were two centuries ago, even if there are a lot more of us now. The extraordinary work of www.ourworldindata.org gives us fact-based analysis of key human systems to help us counter siloed, in-the-now thinking. And it does matter that most of humanity is better off than we were a couple of centuries ago, but this may come at the cost of pressure to our planetary boundaries if we don't look through our systemic lenses at our relationship with Planet Earth.
Should we throw our hands in the air in despair - if there's air to throw our hands into?
You know me well enough by now to know that I wouldn't end on a Doomsday note.
We solved the problem of the Hole in the Ozone Layer through global cooperation. Youngsters, look it up - you don't have to worry about the Hole because of an extraordinary initiative called the Montreal Protocol. And let's face it, getting 195 countries to sign the Paris Agreement on Climate Change (the US, Nicaragua and Syria notwithstanding) is also an amazing global achievement, as is the turnaround in global greenhouse gas emissions increase - thank you, China. There are groups like the Stockholm Resilience Centre and Our World in Data out there helping us to see and think more systemically. We have amazing new technologies coming online which will help us improve our waste management, food production, healthcare and a wealth of other human systems we don't manage all that well at the moment. We have the collective brainpower of an upcoming wave of (highly likely to be unemployed) youth who have the ability to plug into information the way humans have never been able to before. Okay, they live on Snapchat and watch videos of random people trying to kill themselves in stupid ways, but bear with me. They're a smart bunch regardless.
So let's learn how to think and act systemically and collectively, with our eyes focused on clear outcomes (living within the blue line on that first image). And yes, I do believe Steemit can play a catalytic role here. Imagine the power of Communities on Steemit to mobilise global creativity, funding and behaviour change.