The paper, which is the work of an international team of 18 scientists headed by Will Steffen of the Stockholm Resilience Centre and Australian National University in Canberra, reports that four of nine “planetary boundaries” have been crossed as the result of human activity, meaning that we’re in big trouble in those areas.
The crossed boundaries include:
- Climate change
- The rate of loss of biological diversity
- Deforestation and other changes in the land system
- Alteration of the natural global nitrogen and phosphorus cycles by agriculture and industrial processes, which is threatening aquatic life and causing massive algae blooms in lakes and oceans.
In a video on the Washington Post website, Stockholm Resilience Centre executive director Johan Rockström explained that these are “critical biophysical boundaries that we need to stay within to avoid unacceptable environmental change, with serious, potentially disastrous consequences for society,”
Of the crossed boundaries, the scientists say that climate change and loss of biological diversity — also called “biosphere integrity” — are the two most critical.
The remaining boundaries that humans haven’t yet crossed include:
- Stratospheric ozone depletion
- Chemical pollution
- Ocean acidification
- Freshwater consumption and the hydrological cycle
- Human emission of atmospheric aerosols, which are tiny dust particles that affect the climate.
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