Advancing Planetary Boundary Science

While Planetary Boundary science has advanced tremendously over the past decades, we still lack a deep understanding of the intricate, yet pivotal connections between many biological and physical functions of the Earth system. This is of grave concern, since the stability of the planet and interactions between its components are the foundation of human civilization. Moreover, as it stands, science only has the resources to measure and analyze the planet’s vital signs every 6-8 years (Rockström et al. 2009, Steffen et al. 2015, Richardson et al., 2003), and our imperfect measurement framework has some worrying blind spots.
To address these challenges, the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and its partners are launching a major scientific effort to close the knowledge gaps, both in terms of our ability to model how the Earth system evolves under the pressure of human activity, as well as our ability to measure the state of the Earth system with high temporal resolution. This will culminate in an annual Planetary Boundary (PB) Health Check, conceived and reviewed by a diverse international scientific and stakeholder community. Employing cutting-edge Earth-system and tipping-point modelling, ambitious whole-Earth monitoring, and exploring artificial-intelligence-based big-data analytics, the Health Check shall offer a comprehensive, timely, and unparalleled assessment of the planet's health. With yearly updates of PB transgressions at its core, the Health Check will further develop the boundary measures themselves and provide important context, e.g. via case studies and policy implications.  It will reveal current risks due to ongoing transgression of PBs and develop transformation pathways to guide global development back to Earth’s safe operating space. Besides peer-reviewed publications, these results will be communicated to the public using state-of-the-art visualizations and communication partnerships.

In this presentation we will give details about this new science initiative, the partners we work with, out short and long-term goals and give an overview of involvement opportunities in this rapidly growing project.

References

Rockström, J., Steffen, W., Noone, K. et al. A safe operating space for humanity. Nature 461, 472–475 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/461472a
Steffen, W. et al. ,Planetary boundaries: Guiding human development on a changing planet.Science347,1259855(2015).DOI:10.1126/science.1259855 
Richardson, K. et al., Earth beyond six of nine planetary boundaries.Sci. Adv.9,eadh2458(2023).DOI:10.1126/sciadv.adh2458