06 LECTURE - LET THE ENVIRONMENT

GUIDE OUR DEVELOPMENT

We live on a human-dominated planet, putting unprecedented pressure on the systems on
Earth. This is bad news, but perhaps surprising to you, it's also part of the good news. We're
the first generation -- thanks to science -- to be informed that we may be undermining the
stability and the ability of planet Earth to support human development as we know it. It's also
good news, because the planetary risks we're facing are so large, that business as usual is not
an option. In fact, we're in a phase where transformative change is necessary, which opens the
window for innovation, for new ideas and new paradigms. This is a scientific journey on the
challenges facing humanity in the global phase of sustainability.
On this journey, I'd like to bring, apart from yourselves, a good friend, a stakeholder, who's
always absent when we deal with the negotiations on environmental issues, a stakeholder who
refuses to compromise -- planet Earth. So I thought I'd bring her with me today on stage, to
have her as a witness of a remarkable journey, which humbly reminds us of the period of grace
we've had over the past 10,000 years. This is the living conditions on the planet over the last
100,000 years. It's a very important period -- it's roughly half the period when we've been fully
modern humans on the planet. We've had the same, roughly, abilities that developed
civilizations as we know it. This is the environmental conditions on the planet.
Here, used as a proxy, temperature variability. It was a jumpy ride. 80,000 years back in a
crisis, we leave Africa, we colonize Australia in another crisis, 60,000 years back, we leave
Asia for Europe in another crisis, 40,000 years back, and then we enter the remarkably stable
Holocene phase, the only period in the whole history of the planet, that we know of, that can
support human development. A thousand years into this period, we abandon our hunting and
gathering patterns. We go from a couple of million people to the seven billion people we are
today. The Mesopotamian culture: we invent agriculture, we domesticate animals and
plants. You have the Roman, the Greek and the story as you know it. The only phase, as we
know it that can support humanity.
The trouble is we're putting a quadruple sqeeze on this poor planet, a quadruple sqeeze,
which, as its first squeeze, has population growth of course. Now, this is not only about
numbers; this is not only about the fact that we're seven billion people committed to nine billion
people, it's an equity issue as well. The majority of the environmental impacts on the
planet have been caused by the rich minority, the 20 percent that jumped onto the industrial
bandwagon in the mid-18th century. The majority of the planet, aspiring for development,
having the right for development, are in large aspiring for an unsustainable lifestyle, a
momentous pressure.

The second pressure on the planet is, of course the climate agenda -- the big issue -- where
the policy interpretation of science is that it would be enough to stabilize greenhouse gases at
450 ppm to avoid average temperatures exceeding two degrees, to avoid the risk that we may
be destabilizing the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, holding six meters -- level rising, the risk of
destabilizing the Greenland Ice Sheet, holding another seven meters -- sea level rising. Now,
you would have wished the climate pressure to hit a strong planet, a resilient planet, but
unfortunately, the third pressure is the ecosystem decline. Never have we seen, in the past 50
years, such a sharp decline of ecosystem functions and services on the planet, one of them
being the ability to regulate climate on the long term, in our forests, land and biodiversity.
The forth pressure is surprise, the notion and the evidence that we need to abandon our old
paradigm, that ecosystems behave linearly, predictably, controllably in our -- so to say -- linear
systems, and that in fact, surprise is universal, as systems tip over very rapidly, abruptlyand
often irreversibly. This, dear friends, poses a human pressure on the planet of momentous
scale. We may, in fact, have entered a new geological era -- the Anthropocene, where humans
are the predominant driver of change at a planetary level.
Now, as a scientist, what's the evidence for this? Well, the evidence is, unfortunately,
ample. It's not only carbon dioxide that has this hockey stick pattern of accelerated
change. You can take virtually any parameter that matters for human well-being -- nitrous
oxide, methane, deforestation, overfishing land degredation, loss of species -- they all show the
same pattern over the past 200 years.Simultaneously, they branch off in the mid-50s, 10 years
after the Second World War, showing very clearly that the great acceleration of the human
enterprise starts in the mid-50s. You see, for the first time, an imprint on the global level. And I
can tell you, you enter the disciplinary research in each of these, you find something
remarkably important, the conclusion that we may have come to the point where we have to
bend the curves, that we may have entered the most challenging and exciting decade in the
history humanity on the planet, the decade when we have to bend the curves.
Now, as if this was not enough -- to just bend the curves and understanding the accelerated
pressure on the planet -- we also have to recognize the fact that systems do have multiple
stable states, separated by thresholds -- illustrated here by this ball and cup diagram,where the
depth of the cup is the resilience of the system. Now, the system may gradually -- under
pressure of climate change, erosion, biodiversity loss -- lose the depth of the cup, the
resilience, but appear to be healthy and appear to suddenly, under a threshold, be tipping over.
Upff. Sorry. Changing state and literally ending up in an undesired situation, where new
biophysical logic takes over, new species take over, and the system gets locked.
Do we have evidence of this? Yes, coral reef systems. Biodiverse, low-nutrient, hard coral
systems under multiple pressures of overfishing,unsustainable tourism, climate change. A

trigger and the system tips over, loses its resilience, soft corals take over, and we get
undesired systems that cannot support economic and social development. The Arctic -- a
beautiful system -- a regulating biome at the planetary level,taking the knock after knock on
climate change, appearing to be in a good state. No scientist could predict that in
2007, suddenly, what could be crossing a threshold. The system suddenly, very surprisingly,
loses 30 to 40 percent of its summer ice cover. And the drama is, of course, that when the
system does this, the logic may change. It may get locked in an undesired state, because it
changes color, absorbs more energy, and the system may get stuck. In my mind, the largest
red flag warning for humanity that we are in a precarious situation. As a sideline, you know that
the only red flag that popped up here was a submarine from an unnamed country that planted
a red flag at the bottom of the Arctic to be able to control the oil resources.
Now, if we have evidence, which we now have, that wetlands, forests, [unclear] monsoon
system, the rainforests, behave in this nonlinear way. 30 or so scientists around the
world gathered and asked a question for the first time, "Do we have to put the planet into the
the pot?"So we have to ask ourselves: are we threatening this extraordinarily stable Holocene
state? Are we in fact putting ourselves in a situationwhere we're coming too close to thresholds
that could lead to deleterious and very undesired, if now catastrophic, change for human
development? You know, you don't want to stand there. In fact, you're not even allowed to
stand where this gentleman is standing, at the foaming, slippery waters at the threshold. In
fact, there's a fence quite upstream of this threshold, beyond which you are in a danger
zone.And this is the new paradigm, which we gathered two, three years back, recognizing that
our old paradigm of just analyzing and pushing and predicting parameters into the
future, aiming at minimalizing environmental impacts, is of the past.
Now we to ask ourselves: which are the large environmental processes that we have to be
stewards of to keep ourselves safe in the Holocene? And could we even, thanks to major
advancements in Earth systems science, identify the thresholds, the points where we may
expect nonlinear change? And could we even define a planetary boundary, a fence, within
which we then have a safe operating space for humanity? This work, which was published in
"Nature," late 2009, after a number of years of analysis, led to the final proposition that we can
only find nine planetary boundaries with which, under active stewardship, would allow
ourselves to have a safe operating space. These include, of course, climate. It may surprise
you that it's not only climate. But it shows that we are interconnected, among many systems on
the planet, with the three big systems, climate change, stratospheric ozone depletion and
ocean acidification being the three big systems,where the scientific evidence of large-scale
thresholds in the paleo-record of the history of the planet.
But we also include, what we call, the slow variables, the systems that, under the
hood, regulate and buffer the capacity of the resilience of the planet -- the interference of the

big nitrogen and phosphorus cycles on the planet, land use change, rate of biodiversity
loss, freshwater use, functions which regulate biomass on the planet, carbon sequestration,
diversity. And then we have two parameters which we were not able to quantify -- air
pollution, including warming gases and air-polluting sulfates and nitrates, but also chemical
pollution. Together, these form an integrated whole for guiding human development in the
Anthropocene, understanding that the planet is a complex self-regulating system. In fact, most
evidence indicates that these nine may behave as three Musketeers, "One for all. All for
one." You degrade forests, you go beyond the boundary on land, you undermine the ability of
the climate system to stay stable. The drama here is, in fact, that it may show that the climate
challenge is the easy one, if you consider the whole challenge of sustainable development.
Now this is the Big Bang equivalent then of human development within the safe operating
space of the planetary boundaries. What you see here in black line is the safe operating
space, the quantified boundaries, as suggested by this analysis. The yellow dot in the middle
here is our starting point, the pre-industrial point, where we're very safely in the safe operating
space. In the '50s, we start branching out. In the '60s already, through the green revolution and
the Haber-Bosch process of fixing nitrogen from the atmosphere -- you know, human's today
take out more nitrogen from the atmosphere than the whole biosphere does naturally as a
whole. We don't transgress the climate boundary until the early '90s, actually, right after
Rio. And today, we are in a situation where we estimate that we've transgressed three
boundaries, the rate of biodiversity loss, which is the sixth extinction period in the history of
humanity -- one of them being the extinctions of the dinosaurs -- nitrogen and climate
change. But we still have some degrees of freedom on the others, but we are approaching
fast on land, water, phosphorus and oceans. But this gives a new paradigm to guide
humanity, to put the light on our, so far overpowered industrial vehicle,which operates as
if we're only on a dark, straight highway.
Now the question then is: how gloomy is this? Is then sustainable development utopia? Well,
there's no science to suggest. In fact, there is ample science to indicate that we can do this
transformative change, that we have the ability to now move into a new innovative, a
transformative gear, across scales. The drama is, of course, is that 200 countries on this
planet have to simultaneously start moving in the same direction. But it changes fundamentally
our governance and management paradigm, from the current linear, command and control
thinking, looking at efficiencies and optimization towards a much more flexible, a much more
adaptive approach, where we recognize that redundancy, both in social and environmental
systems, is key to be able to deal with a turbulent era of global change. We have to invest in
persistence, in the ability of social systems and ecological systems to withstand shocks and
still remain in that desired cup. We have to invest in transformations capability, moving from
crisis into innovation and the ability to rise after a crisis, and of course to adapt to unavoidable
change. This is a new paradigm. We're not doing that at any scale on governance.

But is it happening anywhere? Do we have any examples of success on this mind shift being
applied at the local level? Well, yes, in fact we do and the list can start becoming longer and
longer. There's good news here, for example, from Latin America, where plow-based farming
systems of the '50s and '60s led farming basically to a dead-end, with lower and lower yields,
degrading the organic matter and fundamental problems at the livelihood levels in Paraguay,
Uruguay and a number of countries, Brazil, leading to innovation and entrepreneurship among
farmers in partnership with scientists into an agricultural revolution of zero tillage
systems combined with mulch farming with locally adapted technologies, which today, for
example, in some countries, have led to a tremendous increase in area under mulch, zero till
farming which, not only produces more food, but also sequesters carbon.
The Australian Great Barrier Reef is another success story. Under the realization from tourist
operators, fishermen, the Australian Great Barrier Reef Authority and scientists that the Great
Barrier Reef is doomed under the current governance regime. Global change, beautification
rack culture, overfishing and unsustainable tourism, all together placing this system in the
realization of crisis. But the window of opportunity was innovation and new mindset, which
today has led to a completely new governance strategy to build resilience,acknowledge
redundancy and invest in the whole system as an integrated whole, and then allow for much
more redundancy in the system.
Sweden, the country I come from, has other examples, where wetlands in southern Sweden
were seen as -- as in many countries -- as flood-prone polluted nuisance in the peri-urban
regions. But again, a crisis, new partnerships, actors locally, transforming these into a key
component of sustainable urban planning. So crisis leading into opportunities.
Now, what about the future? Well, the future, of course, has one massive challenge, which is
feeding a world of nine billion people. We need nothing less than a new green revolution, and
the planet boundaries shows that agriculture has to go from a source of greenhouse gases to a
sink. It has to basically do this on current land. We cannot expand anymore, because it erodes
the planetary boundaries. We cannot continue consuming water as we do today, with 25
percent of world rivers not even reaching the ocean. And we need a transformation.Well,
interestingly, and based on my work and others in Africa, for example, we've shown that even
the most vulnerable small-scale rainfall farming systems, with innovations and supplementary
irrigation to bridge dry spells and droughts, sustainable sanitation systems to close the loop on
nutrients from toilets back to farmers' fields, and innovations in tillage systems, we can triple,
quadruple, yield levels on current land.
Elinor Ostrom, the latest Nobel laureate of economics, clearly shows empirically across the
world that we can govern the commons if we invest in trust, local, action-based
partnerships and cross-scale institutional innovations, where local actors, together, can deal

with the global commons at a large scale. But even on the hard policy area we have
innovations. We know that we have to move from our fossil dependence very quickly into a
low-carbon economy in record time. And what shall we do? Everybody talks about carbon
taxes -- it won't work -- emission schemes, but for example, one policy measure, feed-in tariffs
on the energy system, which is already applied, from China doing it on offshore wind
systems, all the way to the U.S. where you give the guaranteed price for investment in
renewable energy, but you can subsidize electricity to poor people. You get people out of
poverty. You solve the climate issue with regards to the energy sector, while at the same time,
stimulating innovation -- examples of things that can be out scaled quickly at the planetary
level.
So there is -- no doubt -- opportunity here, and we can list many, many examples of
transformative opportunities around the planet. The key though in all of these, the red thread, is
the shift in mindset, moving away from a situation where we simply are pushing ourselves into
a dark future, where we instead backcast our future, and we say, "What is the playing field on
the planet? What are the planetary boundaries within which we can safely operate?" and then
backtrack innovations within that. But of course, the drama is, it clearly shows that incremental
change is not an option.
So, there is scientific evidence. They sort of say the harsh news, that we are facing the
largest transformative development since the industrialization. In fact, what we have to do over
the next 40 years is much more dramatic and more exciting than what we did when we moved
into the situation we're in today. Now, science indicates that, yes, we can achieve a prosperous
future within the safe operating space, if we move simultaneously, collaborating on a global
level, from local to global scale, in transformative options, which build resilience on a finite
planet.
Thank you.