A just world on a safe planet: Earth-system boundaries, translations, and transformations

The Earth Commission is an international group of social and natural scientists hosted by Future Earth, with its secretariat in Stockholm, and is the scientific arm of the Global Commons Alliance. Its work is to synthesise the science that sets limits for the global commons: clean air and water, biodiversity, oceans and a stable climate. The aim is a planet that stays stable, which the Commission calls safe, and on which life can thrive, which it calls just.

The Commission names two flagship papers. One is Safe and Just Earth System Boundaries by Rockström and colleagues in Nature, 2023. The other is this report by Gupta and colleagues in The Lancet Planetary Health, 2024, titled A just world on a safe planet.

The Safe and Just Boundaries workstream, co-led by Steven Lade, Aditi Mukherji and Peter Verburg, is refining the boundaries and extending the scheme to the oceans and to novel entities, meaning chemical pollution. Its working groups cover climate and atmosphere, land and water, novel entities, and ocean. The workstream also studies how the boundaries interact and how tipping points, thresholds past which a system shifts abruptly, connect across the Earth system.

Papers listed under the workstream include:

• Stewart-Koster and colleagues, on the safe and just boundary for blue water (Nature Sustainability, 2023). Blue water is the fresh water in rivers, lakes and aquifers.
• Mohamed and colleagues, on keeping at least 20 to 25 percent of (semi-)natural habitat in human-modified landscapes (One Earth, 2024).

At a meeting in Toronto, thirty-five experts from twenty-seven institutions agreed how to set a global boundary for chemical pollution. The Commission expects a peer-reviewed paper on the chemical boundary in 2027.

The Commission's resources include:

• the full text of the Lancet report, at the journal
• the Nature paper, as a PDF and at the journal
• explainer briefs on the boundaries and on Earth System Justice
• a glossary of terms, as a PDF
• scientific and communication graphics, including the current state of the boundaries and animations of the Earth-system boundaries

The boundaries give a list of systems, each with a limit, against which a model of a place can report its state. The entry Taxonomies for structuring World–Earth models classifies the subsystems such a model would contain.